11 ms·

HipChat releases native app for Mac

209 points by jawns 14y ago

lucaspiller 14y ago
We switched from Campfire to HipChat about 6 months ago and it's been awesome - apart from the Adobe Air client crashes whenever someone posts a GIF. Hopefully this'll fix it :D
- dubfan 14y ago
  A quick test by one of my coworkers confirms that it does fix the GIF crash.
  - powdahound 14y ago
    The gif issue was an Adobe AIR bug, so it's definitely gone now. It was incredibly frustrating having them break functionality that many of our users love, especially because it wasn't possible for us to work around the issue. Sorry about that!
    - krebby 14y ago
      awesome. this has been a huge thorn for a while now. so good to see it's gone. Now if only we had custom sounds support!
- stock_toaster 14y ago
  What prompted you to change, and what has been better about it?
  - lucaspiller 14y ago
    We hired someone new, so had to upgrade from Campfire's free plan. HipChat would have been the same price, so we decided to give it a try, and never turned back. Things I like that I think made us stick: - @ messaging people - private messaging - 1st party desktop app
- sleepyhead 14y ago
  Adobe Air???
destraynor 14y ago
This is waaay better than an Air App. #ThingsThatDidntNeedSaying
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Agreed. The air app was great, but had a lot of limitations. The mac beta doesn't have quite all the features the air app does yet, but its fast and supports retina so I'm happy.
tuxracer 14y ago
FYI native spell check, notification center ( http://www.fngtps.com/2012/how-to-add-notification-center-notifications-to-your-web-app/ http://www.fngtps.com/2012/how-to-add-notification-center-no... ) and "crystal clear Retina support" are all supported from web.
davidcelis 14y ago
> enjoy crystal clear display with Retina support. I'd enjoy it a lot more if it were true. Still no Retina support for any of their icons or images. Sure, the text finally looks right, but doesn't Cocoa handle that for you?
- powdahound 14y ago
  Hey - Garret from HipChat here. We're still working on retina assets for some of the app icons, and haven't started on retina versions of the emoticons quite yet. Hang tight!
  - coreyw 14y ago
    Garret are there any plans to offer a self-hosted HipChat solution similar to how Jira and Confluence have self-hosted pricing? My company is limited to our chat products due to HIPAA compliance and we would love to use this product for company chat but host it on our own infrastructure.
    - adamauckland 14y ago
      Seconded. We can't use public services for internal messaging, but we do have JIRA + Stash inside the firewall. Hipchat server would be good, or is it XMPP compatible?
      - ajtaylor 14y ago
        It's definitely XMPP compatible. We have an outside dev firm that does some work for us and they connected their own chat system via XMPP. It works fine for them as far as I can tell. Their help docs [1] [2] have all the details you need. [1] http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-jabber-support-details http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-ja... [2] http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64436-how-to-connect-using-adium http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64436-how-to-... (I love Adium!)
    - powdahound 14y ago
Hilyin 14y ago
Its cool and all, but I don't think I could convince my company (and probably any other) that its worth $2/user. I think maybe there should be plans that can be hosted on the company servers. Maybe a 1 time fee to license the software and then support plans or 1 time support costs?
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Its worth $2/user not to have to set stuff up on my company servers. We're a small company though (6 people now) so maybe the economics are different where you are.
- gdix 14y ago
  You can't convince your company (who is paying you thousands of dollars a month in salary) to spend an extra $2 a month on something that will make you more efficient? What kind of company do you work for?
- rajivm 14y ago
  If it improves your productivity more than $2 a month, then its more than worth it. For us, it was a no-brainer after we started using it. Giving everyone access to everyone both asynchronously and real-time is so powerful. We used IRC and Campfire before, and neither gained as broad adoption internally.
orta 14y ago
Hrm, we've just moved to Flowdock, which is pretty nice. But has just got bought up by a large company. This makes me wish I'd gone with HipChat.
- guywithabike 14y ago
  You do realize that HipChat is owned by... a large company, right?
  - orta 14y ago
    I do now. I thought Atlassian had built it in-house. My worry with these is that acquisitions change the product priorities. For example I was sceptical of the recent Crashlytics acquisition by twitter but they've already gone and improved the experience for everyone by offering enterprise features for free. Its hard to tell who's going to be absorbed and fade out in these kinda things.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - powdahound 14y ago
      We've been with Atlassian for almost a year now. I hope big initiatives like this Mac app show that we're still working hard on the core product. We've got some great stuff in the works, too.
- mnicole 14y ago
  Flowdock has its own issues, but it was still a better overall experience than what I had on [the previous] Hipchat.
jug6ernaut 14y ago
Maybe I am being naive(going to assume I am), and i admittedly have never used HipChat. But could someone explain to me what this offers over say setting up your own XMPP or IRC server and using that?
- johns 14y ago
  Among other things, not having to set up your own XMPP or IRC server.
  - dreamdu5t 14y ago
    If you can't setup an IRC or XMPP server, then I don't think you should call yourself a software engineer. If you're a scrappy startup, you sure as hell better be able to setup an IRC server. And no... it doesn't take more than an hour to spin up an EC2 instance and setup inspircd as a private server.
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      If you're a scrappy startup, you better not have engineers wasting time setting up servers when there are great hosted products out there.
      - __david__ 14y ago
        I hear what you're saying, but, come on! apt-get install ejabberd 5 minutes of conf file tweaking and you're done. Seriously that's it! I did this about 8 years ago and haven't touched my setup since. There's pretty much zero maintenance to do with an XMPP server.
        pilif 14y ago
        Do you get file sharing, easy group chat, @mentions across rooms, public temporary invites to customers into internal channels, very easy github and zendesk integration and, the killer feature for me, a searchable archive over all conversations? I'm sure you can do all of these with ejabberd and some additional external tools, but setting all these components up goes way beyond just apt-get'ing the software. Now, you might not need some (or all) of the additional features, so ejabberd is the perfect solution for you, but you can't jump to the conclusion that because you don't need a feature, nobody does. I'm a quite new HipChat customer - we were using skype before, but the indexed archive is a total killer feature for me and already helped me and my coworkers a lot as it helps us to learn from conversations between other people, thus reducing the amount of stuff that has to be asked multiple times. For me, that's totally worth the $2 per user per month.
n9com 14y ago
I know people are happy as the infamous GIF bug is fixed, but seriously this is one of the worst 'beta' apps I have tried. This mac app has been in development for ages, then been in closed beta and now finally it's available to everyone to try. Our team just switched to the beta native app, and already found several critical bugs with the app within minutes. Sorry guys, this is really poorly put together and the number of obvious bugs makes me think that you don't even use your own product!
- dljsjr 14y ago
  Philosophical question: Is it really a bad "beta", or has your preconceived notion on what a "beta" should be been radically altered by the sheer number of startups that throw the word around now? Gmail was in "beta" for about a million years, and was incredibly stable for most of that. I think it has become the allegorical metric these days. But I remember back in the late 90's and early 2000's when making the choice to use beta software was a decision not to be taken lightly because you probably would find tons of very easily reproducible, obvious, critical bugs. Don't forget that before "beta" was widely used as an adjective, it was a noun and it was immediately followed by the word "test".
  - billymeltdown 14y ago
    Agreed, that's some serious melodrama thrown at people who are just looking for help testing their app that's not ready for general release. Big deal.
  - aptwebapps 14y ago
    I'd agree in principle, but did the email announcement might have been a bit more toned down if that was what they were thinking. I'm pretty sure they wanted some buzz.
- shizcakes 14y ago
  I agree - I feel like the time would have been better spent implementing Adium/Pidgin plugins first.
amirhhz 14y ago
Immediately noticed one short coming: I can't resize the font any more. In the AIR version Cmd/Ctrl+Plus/Minus just worked (perhaps as a result of the AIR implementation, not a product decision), but in this native version it doesn't and there are no preferences for it, either. If the HipChat guys see this, please consider it as feature for an update soon?
- amirhhz 14y ago
  I posted a feature request here, if you also care about this, please vote it up: http://help.hipchat.com/forums/190031-mac-beta-client/suggestions/3652624-can-t-resize-font-in-rooms-anymore http://help.hipchat.com/forums/190031-mac-beta-client/sugges...
Jemaclus 14y ago
Way, way better than the Adobe Air version. So satisfying to uninstall Adobe Air... Sure, it's got some bugs, but hey, it's beta! Love it so far.
ninjastar99 14y ago
Hipchat is incredible. Simple, but for our company - it basically is the MAIN form of communication internally. It keeps our team connected in real time, around the world, in the office and on the go. It's a rare day when I get an email from anyone on our team because we're in constant communication via Hipchat all day, every day. Very excited about this native version - much faster.
lobster_johnson 14y ago
Apologies for hijacking the thread, but I'm wondering: We're using Campfire right now, with the Propane mac client, and we have a dedicated room for notifications (currently exceptions from Errbit, monitoring alerts from Nagios, CI build failures on Jenkins, app deployments from our own custom tools). It works pretty well, but we're a team working on a whole bunch of unrelated but overlapping apps, and having everything in a single room is getting to be very messy, and at times the Propane icon is bouncing almost continuously. And Propane doesn't support controlling when to notify me when there are new unread messages, so I have no way of filtering out the noise. Splitting out into multiple rooms is not a workable solution as the "spheres of interest" are not mutually exclusive. I'm curious if anyone is using Campfire or some other tool in a similar way, or if HipChat could solve the problem (on first glance it looks fairly simplistic). Email doesn't cut it and direct IM through some bot is not really an option. A dedicated notification app/gateway seems like a better fit, but I haven't found one since Notifio folded.
- pbiggar 14y ago
  We send all these messages into hipchat. I have it set so I don't get notified for messages, only for messages directed to me (using "@pbiggar")
  - lobster_johnson 14y ago
    And so you have set up Nagios and whatever to always include the appropriate recipients in the messages? Where do you centralize the information about who should be @-mentioned? Edit: Seems like a lot of noise if there are a lot of recipients (some of our apps or libs have 8+ people).
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      We dont do that at all, though I'm 90% sure the hipchat API supports that. What I meant was, when a team member wants to contact me personally, they put @pbiggar in front, and Hipchat will give me a notification for that, but not all the other messages.
thejerz 14y ago
All I can surmise from this video is the that old HipChat must have really sucked. I have no idea what this product is or why I should care, because the video and webpage don't explain any of this. Maybe someone can explain what HipChat even is...??
- jsimons 14y ago
  This video does a better job of explaining the product (http://youtu.be/PXYWIBlvP9w http://youtu.be/PXYWIBlvP9w)
questionfaith 14y ago
Who the fuck pays for anything anymore.
danzajdband 14y ago
Worst app ever. Please QA before launch (even it's a beta).
spotman 14y ago
Can anyone comment on the battery life for the iOS client in comparison to skype? I am a heavy skype user, and it doesn't seem like hipchat has a lot to offer than skype does not. Not to mention the inertia that skype has. however, I would totally consider it, if i could keep it on my phone all day and not have 10% battery by 2pm. also, curious, does it do group video chat, ala skype?
nvr219 14y ago
Why is hipchat comparing to Office Communicator rather than Lync? Lync has Android and iOS apps.
- sosuke 14y ago
  Lync iOS app hasn't ever worked really well for me, it works in emergencies but I don't use it when I can avoid it.
  - eddieroger 14y ago
    It really is crappy. I fall offline all the time, with no explanation. At least I know I'm off, though - the guy who sits next to me continues to appear available on his machine, but is offline to the rest of us. It's a nightmare.
sepeth 14y ago
We use Flowdock, they are very helpful to startups. Their OSX client (based on MacGap) also has great integration with the OS.
skwp 14y ago
And the fonts are tiny. :/
dchuk 14y ago
Already seen a major issue pop up a few times where I type in a few different messages, minimize the app, come back to it, and none of my messages are there. My team is offline right now so not sure if they're getting the messages or not but damn is that annoying so far. Seems like a big deal if the core use of the app is flakey.
drudru11 14y ago
Awesome - i have been using hipchat for years and haven't needed anything else. Most of my company is mac so this is a no brainer. Great work Hipchat team!
fcoury 14y ago
First thing I noticed: no search? This was bad at the old version, where it would fallback to the Web UI, but not having it at all is even worst :(
plg 14y ago
pay a monthly fee for group chat; happens on someone else'e servers; for the love of all that is holy, this exists already doesn't it?? and for free?? It seems "web 3.0" is all about making tarted up existing free software with hipster interfaces, selling it for $$$, and putting it "on the cloud" (i.e. on someone else's machines). I know this is the way the world seems to be moving (backwards, back to the 1970s if you ask me, to mainframes and dumb terminals (chrome book anyone?)) ... but I for one would rather see a world where local users controlled their own machines, their own data, their own encryption, and a peer-to-peer system for communicating maybe someone can invent a standard. TCP/IP anyone? -grumpy old man
- plg 14y ago
  PS I wholly reject the argument that setting up your own systems and maintaining your own machines, and being responsible for your own data is "too technical" for the average person. If we are intelligent enough to raise babies, drive cars, operate propane barbecues, SHOOT GUNS for f*ck's sake (in the USA anyway), then come on people, it's time to man up.
- Hates_ 14y ago
  And what about teams that aren't technical? Are you saying there still isn't a need for this type of software? Besides, HipChat gives you a lot of nice features that you'd have to spend a lot of time trying to do yourself. Paying a small amount of money a month so that my whole team can chat far outweighs the pain of rolling my own solution and making sure everyone can use it.
- fishtoaster 14y ago
  Hipchat for 20 users is $40/month. If a single programmer on that team making $40/hr or more spends an hour setting up a "free" solution (an irc server, for example), that team loses money. Getting a free solution set up with all of hipchat's niceties across multiple platforms (and a web interface) will usually take longer than that.
macjp 14y ago
Really wish they provided a hook for Linkinus (mac IRC app). Too bad grove.io didn't work out. That was a pretty solid service.
ajtaylor 14y ago
One thing I just noticed is that the native app uses a LOT less memory than the AIR client: 43 MB native vs 100-150 MB air. It definitely feels snappier too, from startup time to normal usage. Even with the limitations (no local Find functionality?!) I'm still very happy with this beta. I'm sure they will continue to improve.
stouset 14y ago
Guys, seriously. Cmd+W should close a window, not a tab. Your app is the only app on my entire system that acts like this, and it it annoying as hell.
- dljsjr 14y ago
  Seriously? Every tabbed app I have responds this way. Safari, Chrome, MacVim, TextMate, iTerm 2, all off the top of my head.
- Serplat 14y ago
  I haven't used this app, but in every other app I use Cmd+W closes a tab, while Cmd+Shift+W closes a window.
jonniekang 14y ago
Do any devs here use hubot with hipchat? if so what are your experiences?
bearwithclaws 14y ago
Crashed upon opening on my Snow Leopard. It doesn't say which OS X version it's built for?
smagch 14y ago
I've been using HipChat for a distributed development project. I like this app. Incumbent Adobe Air app is nice enough for me though animations such as scrolling is not quite sophisticated.
suyash 14y ago
How is it better then iChat?

209 points by jawns 14y ago

We switched from Campfire to HipChat about 6 months ago and it's been awesome - apart from the Adobe Air client crashes whenever someone posts a GIF. Hopefully this'll fix it :D

dubfan 14y ago
A quick test by one of my coworkers confirms that it does fix the GIF crash.
- powdahound 14y ago
  The gif issue was an Adobe AIR bug, so it's definitely gone now. It was incredibly frustrating having them break functionality that many of our users love, especially because it wasn't possible for us to work around the issue. Sorry about that!
  - krebby 14y ago
    awesome. this has been a huge thorn for a while now. so good to see it's gone. Now if only we had custom sounds support!
stock_toaster 14y ago
What prompted you to change, and what has been better about it?
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  We hired someone new, so had to upgrade from Campfire's free plan. HipChat would have been the same price, so we decided to give it a try, and never turned back. Things I like that I think made us stick: - @ messaging people - private messaging - 1st party desktop app
sleepyhead 14y ago
Adobe Air???

destraynor 14y ago

This is waaay better than an Air App. #ThingsThatDidntNeedSaying

pbiggar 14y ago
Agreed. The air app was great, but had a lot of limitations. The mac beta doesn't have quite all the features the air app does yet, but its fast and supports retina so I'm happy.

tuxracer 14y ago

FYI native spell check, notification center ( http://www.fngtps.com/2012/how-to-add-notification-center-notifications-to-your-web-app/ http://www.fngtps.com/2012/how-to-add-notification-center-no... ) and "crystal clear Retina support" are all supported from web.

davidcelis 14y ago

> enjoy crystal clear display with Retina support. I'd enjoy it a lot more if it were true. Still no Retina support for any of their icons or images. Sure, the text finally looks right, but doesn't Cocoa handle that for you?

powdahound 14y ago
Hey - Garret from HipChat here. We're still working on retina assets for some of the app icons, and haven't started on retina versions of the emoticons quite yet. Hang tight!
- coreyw 14y ago
  Garret are there any plans to offer a self-hosted HipChat solution similar to how Jira and Confluence have self-hosted pricing? My company is limited to our chat products due to HIPAA compliance and we would love to use this product for company chat but host it on our own infrastructure.
  - adamauckland 14y ago
    Seconded. We can't use public services for internal messaging, but we do have JIRA + Stash inside the firewall. Hipchat server would be good, or is it XMPP compatible?
    - ajtaylor 14y ago
      It's definitely XMPP compatible. We have an outside dev firm that does some work for us and they connected their own chat system via XMPP. It works fine for them as far as I can tell. Their help docs [1] [2] have all the details you need. [1] http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-jabber-support-details http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-ja... [2] http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64436-how-to-connect-using-adium http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64436-how-to-... (I love Adium!)
  - powdahound 14y ago

Hilyin 14y ago

Its cool and all, but I don't think I could convince my company (and probably any other) that its worth $2/user. I think maybe there should be plans that can be hosted on the company servers. Maybe a 1 time fee to license the software and then support plans or 1 time support costs?

pbiggar 14y ago
Its worth $2/user not to have to set stuff up on my company servers. We're a small company though (6 people now) so maybe the economics are different where you are.
gdix 14y ago
You can't convince your company (who is paying you thousands of dollars a month in salary) to spend an extra $2 a month on something that will make you more efficient? What kind of company do you work for?
rajivm 14y ago
If it improves your productivity more than $2 a month, then its more than worth it. For us, it was a no-brainer after we started using it. Giving everyone access to everyone both asynchronously and real-time is so powerful. We used IRC and Campfire before, and neither gained as broad adoption internally.

orta 14y ago

Hrm, we've just moved to Flowdock, which is pretty nice. But has just got bought up by a large company. This makes me wish I'd gone with HipChat.

guywithabike 14y ago
You do realize that HipChat is owned by... a large company, right?
- orta 14y ago
  I do now. I thought Atlassian had built it in-house. My worry with these is that acquisitions change the product priorities. For example I was sceptical of the recent Crashlytics acquisition by twitter but they've already gone and improved the experience for everyone by offering enterprise features for free. Its hard to tell who's going to be absorbed and fade out in these kinda things.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - powdahound 14y ago
    We've been with Atlassian for almost a year now. I hope big initiatives like this Mac app show that we're still working hard on the core product. We've got some great stuff in the works, too.
mnicole 14y ago
Flowdock has its own issues, but it was still a better overall experience than what I had on [the previous] Hipchat.

jug6ernaut 14y ago

Maybe I am being naive(going to assume I am), and i admittedly have never used HipChat. But could someone explain to me what this offers over say setting up your own XMPP or IRC server and using that?

johns 14y ago
Among other things, not having to set up your own XMPP or IRC server.
- dreamdu5t 14y ago
  If you can't setup an IRC or XMPP server, then I don't think you should call yourself a software engineer. If you're a scrappy startup, you sure as hell better be able to setup an IRC server. And no... it doesn't take more than an hour to spin up an EC2 instance and setup inspircd as a private server.
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    If you're a scrappy startup, you better not have engineers wasting time setting up servers when there are great hosted products out there.
    - __david__ 14y ago
      I hear what you're saying, but, come on! apt-get install ejabberd 5 minutes of conf file tweaking and you're done. Seriously that's it! I did this about 8 years ago and haven't touched my setup since. There's pretty much zero maintenance to do with an XMPP server.
      - pilif 14y ago
        Do you get file sharing, easy group chat, @mentions across rooms, public temporary invites to customers into internal channels, very easy github and zendesk integration and, the killer feature for me, a searchable archive over all conversations? I'm sure you can do all of these with ejabberd and some additional external tools, but setting all these components up goes way beyond just apt-get'ing the software. Now, you might not need some (or all) of the additional features, so ejabberd is the perfect solution for you, but you can't jump to the conclusion that because you don't need a feature, nobody does. I'm a quite new HipChat customer - we were using skype before, but the indexed archive is a total killer feature for me and already helped me and my coworkers a lot as it helps us to learn from conversations between other people, thus reducing the amount of stuff that has to be asked multiple times. For me, that's totally worth the $2 per user per month.

n9com 14y ago

I know people are happy as the infamous GIF bug is fixed, but seriously this is one of the worst 'beta' apps I have tried. This mac app has been in development for ages, then been in closed beta and now finally it's available to everyone to try. Our team just switched to the beta native app, and already found several critical bugs with the app within minutes. Sorry guys, this is really poorly put together and the number of obvious bugs makes me think that you don't even use your own product!

dljsjr 14y ago
Philosophical question: Is it really a bad "beta", or has your preconceived notion on what a "beta" should be been radically altered by the sheer number of startups that throw the word around now? Gmail was in "beta" for about a million years, and was incredibly stable for most of that. I think it has become the allegorical metric these days. But I remember back in the late 90's and early 2000's when making the choice to use beta software was a decision not to be taken lightly because you probably would find tons of very easily reproducible, obvious, critical bugs. Don't forget that before "beta" was widely used as an adjective, it was a noun and it was immediately followed by the word "test".
- billymeltdown 14y ago
  Agreed, that's some serious melodrama thrown at people who are just looking for help testing their app that's not ready for general release. Big deal.
- aptwebapps 14y ago
  I'd agree in principle, but did the email announcement might have been a bit more toned down if that was what they were thinking. I'm pretty sure they wanted some buzz.
shizcakes 14y ago
I agree - I feel like the time would have been better spent implementing Adium/Pidgin plugins first.

amirhhz 14y ago

Immediately noticed one short coming: I can't resize the font any more. In the AIR version Cmd/Ctrl+Plus/Minus just worked (perhaps as a result of the AIR implementation, not a product decision), but in this native version it doesn't and there are no preferences for it, either. If the HipChat guys see this, please consider it as feature for an update soon?

amirhhz 14y ago
I posted a feature request here, if you also care about this, please vote it up: http://help.hipchat.com/forums/190031-mac-beta-client/suggestions/3652624-can-t-resize-font-in-rooms-anymore http://help.hipchat.com/forums/190031-mac-beta-client/sugges...

Jemaclus 14y ago

Way, way better than the Adobe Air version. So satisfying to uninstall Adobe Air... Sure, it's got some bugs, but hey, it's beta! Love it so far.

ninjastar99 14y ago

Hipchat is incredible. Simple, but for our company - it basically is the MAIN form of communication internally. It keeps our team connected in real time, around the world, in the office and on the go. It's a rare day when I get an email from anyone on our team because we're in constant communication via Hipchat all day, every day. Very excited about this native version - much faster.

lobster_johnson 14y ago

Apologies for hijacking the thread, but I'm wondering: We're using Campfire right now, with the Propane mac client, and we have a dedicated room for notifications (currently exceptions from Errbit, monitoring alerts from Nagios, CI build failures on Jenkins, app deployments from our own custom tools). It works pretty well, but we're a team working on a whole bunch of unrelated but overlapping apps, and having everything in a single room is getting to be very messy, and at times the Propane icon is bouncing almost continuously. And Propane doesn't support controlling when to notify me when there are new unread messages, so I have no way of filtering out the noise. Splitting out into multiple rooms is not a workable solution as the "spheres of interest" are not mutually exclusive. I'm curious if anyone is using Campfire or some other tool in a similar way, or if HipChat could solve the problem (on first glance it looks fairly simplistic). Email doesn't cut it and direct IM through some bot is not really an option. A dedicated notification app/gateway seems like a better fit, but I haven't found one since Notifio folded.

pbiggar 14y ago
We send all these messages into hipchat. I have it set so I don't get notified for messages, only for messages directed to me (using "@pbiggar")
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  And so you have set up Nagios and whatever to always include the appropriate recipients in the messages? Where do you centralize the information about who should be @-mentioned? Edit: Seems like a lot of noise if there are a lot of recipients (some of our apps or libs have 8+ people).
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    We dont do that at all, though I'm 90% sure the hipchat API supports that. What I meant was, when a team member wants to contact me personally, they put @pbiggar in front, and Hipchat will give me a notification for that, but not all the other messages.

thejerz 14y ago

All I can surmise from this video is the that old HipChat must have really sucked. I have no idea what this product is or why I should care, because the video and webpage don't explain any of this. Maybe someone can explain what HipChat even is...??

jsimons 14y ago
This video does a better job of explaining the product (http://youtu.be/PXYWIBlvP9w http://youtu.be/PXYWIBlvP9w)

questionfaith 14y ago

Who the fuck pays for anything anymore.

danzajdband 14y ago

Worst app ever. Please QA before launch (even it's a beta).

spotman 14y ago

Can anyone comment on the battery life for the iOS client in comparison to skype? I am a heavy skype user, and it doesn't seem like hipchat has a lot to offer than skype does not. Not to mention the inertia that skype has. however, I would totally consider it, if i could keep it on my phone all day and not have 10% battery by 2pm. also, curious, does it do group video chat, ala skype?

nvr219 14y ago

Why is hipchat comparing to Office Communicator rather than Lync? Lync has Android and iOS apps.

sosuke 14y ago
Lync iOS app hasn't ever worked really well for me, it works in emergencies but I don't use it when I can avoid it.
- eddieroger 14y ago
  It really is crappy. I fall offline all the time, with no explanation. At least I know I'm off, though - the guy who sits next to me continues to appear available on his machine, but is offline to the rest of us. It's a nightmare.

sepeth 14y ago

We use Flowdock, they are very helpful to startups. Their OSX client (based on MacGap) also has great integration with the OS.

skwp 14y ago

And the fonts are tiny. :/

dchuk 14y ago

Already seen a major issue pop up a few times where I type in a few different messages, minimize the app, come back to it, and none of my messages are there. My team is offline right now so not sure if they're getting the messages or not but damn is that annoying so far. Seems like a big deal if the core use of the app is flakey.

drudru11 14y ago

Awesome - i have been using hipchat for years and haven't needed anything else. Most of my company is mac so this is a no brainer. Great work Hipchat team!

fcoury 14y ago

First thing I noticed: no search? This was bad at the old version, where it would fallback to the Web UI, but not having it at all is even worst :(

plg 14y ago

pay a monthly fee for group chat; happens on someone else'e servers; for the love of all that is holy, this exists already doesn't it?? and for free?? It seems "web 3.0" is all about making tarted up existing free software with hipster interfaces, selling it for $$$, and putting it "on the cloud" (i.e. on someone else's machines). I know this is the way the world seems to be moving (backwards, back to the 1970s if you ask me, to mainframes and dumb terminals (chrome book anyone?)) ... but I for one would rather see a world where local users controlled their own machines, their own data, their own encryption, and a peer-to-peer system for communicating maybe someone can invent a standard. TCP/IP anyone? -grumpy old man

plg 14y ago
PS I wholly reject the argument that setting up your own systems and maintaining your own machines, and being responsible for your own data is "too technical" for the average person. If we are intelligent enough to raise babies, drive cars, operate propane barbecues, SHOOT GUNS for f*ck's sake (in the USA anyway), then come on people, it's time to man up.
Hates_ 14y ago
And what about teams that aren't technical? Are you saying there still isn't a need for this type of software? Besides, HipChat gives you a lot of nice features that you'd have to spend a lot of time trying to do yourself. Paying a small amount of money a month so that my whole team can chat far outweighs the pain of rolling my own solution and making sure everyone can use it.
fishtoaster 14y ago
Hipchat for 20 users is $40/month. If a single programmer on that team making $40/hr or more spends an hour setting up a "free" solution (an irc server, for example), that team loses money. Getting a free solution set up with all of hipchat's niceties across multiple platforms (and a web interface) will usually take longer than that.

macjp 14y ago

Really wish they provided a hook for Linkinus (mac IRC app). Too bad grove.io didn't work out. That was a pretty solid service.

ajtaylor 14y ago

One thing I just noticed is that the native app uses a LOT less memory than the AIR client: 43 MB native vs 100-150 MB air. It definitely feels snappier too, from startup time to normal usage. Even with the limitations (no local Find functionality?!) I'm still very happy with this beta. I'm sure they will continue to improve.

stouset 14y ago

Guys, seriously. Cmd+W should close a window, not a tab. Your app is the only app on my entire system that acts like this, and it it annoying as hell.

dljsjr 14y ago
Seriously? Every tabbed app I have responds this way. Safari, Chrome, MacVim, TextMate, iTerm 2, all off the top of my head.
Serplat 14y ago
I haven't used this app, but in every other app I use Cmd+W closes a tab, while Cmd+Shift+W closes a window.

jonniekang 14y ago

Do any devs here use hubot with hipchat? if so what are your experiences?

bearwithclaws 14y ago

Crashed upon opening on my Snow Leopard. It doesn't say which OS X version it's built for?

smagch 14y ago

I've been using HipChat for a distributed development project. I like this app. Incumbent Adobe Air app is nice enough for me though animations such as scrolling is not quite sophisticated.

suyash 14y ago

How is it better then iChat?