5 ms·

I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software back in the days of Talk. Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram

by criley2 12y ago

I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software back in the days of Talk. Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open. When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it 5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter eggs or w/e)

AceJohnny2 12y ago
I've come to understand where Hangout's come from, and to appreciate its features. I say this as a longtime Jabber fan (yes, despite the XML-bloatishness that people complain about). Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime, whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read. My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor performance of that app... Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments. As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be... I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse-engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol for a long time. I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with. In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  It feels heartwarming and at the same time depressing to read this, which is point-perfect what I've been feeling ever since the release of Hangouts. I too cross my fingers for the protocol to one day be opened up and properly specced up. I... I don't have much hope for it. I don't know. Google is usually pretty good on that front, but the hangouts team seems to be in its own bubble (please anyone prove me wrong for the love of entropy). Jabber is perfect until it's not. I feel really bad about that. Maybe I let some things affect me too much, but the state of jabber today is something that truly haunts me. Messaging, communication, those things are some of the best and most important (at the scale of humanity) benefits the internet has brought us. And they are being closed down :(
- kalleboo 12y ago
  > Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read. SMS (1993), iMessage and Facebook Messenger all show what messages someone has read or not, even if the UI may be different.
makomk 12y ago
You know what's really hilarious? I still use Second Life sometimes, which at the time received a certain amount of mockery because people were in effect using a huge, bloated 3D application for text chat. Thanks to the wonders of modern web technology, everyone's caught up in the bloat department so that Second Life's not actually much more RAM and CPU hungry than alternative options for text chat. Even though it's streaming and rendering a whole 3D virtual environment in real time.
jbigelow76 12y ago
I still miss native software Give it a few more years and I think you might get your wish, at least if you use Apple or Microsoft OSes. The 90s marked the slow demise of native non-Internet connected applications. The 2000s saw the rise of web apps. The early 2010s marked the rise of mobile first/only native apps. The late 2010s will see the rise of highly optimized singular platforms (MacOS/iOS, Win8/WinPhone, Android/ChromeOS?) designed to lock the user into the platform via tight inter app orchestration (native obviously) via cloud backed APIs.
- perrylaj 12y ago
  The only way I see native making a comeback is if this Net Neutrality issue gets in the way. Even in 'native' software, the web is becoming increasingly present.
  - jbigelow76 12y ago
    Web apps became attractive for three reasons: 1. No deployment/client maintenance cost. The browser was already on every PC by the end of the 90s. 2. Connectivity. Web apps became the new thin clients with most UI coming from server side rendering and as well as data coming from the same servers. 3. Ubiquitous UI. Without getting cynical HTML/CSS is more or less the same on all browsers. Native apps mitigate the first two advantages and cast the third point as extremely suspect or at least irrelevant. 1. Apple introduced the Mac App Store and wrote brick and mortar software retailers like Best Buy out the equation. Microsoft is scrambling to keep up by moving things that were traditionally licensed via complex enterprise bundles into a la carte offerings like Office 365. 2. Connectivity. As somebody that considers themselves a web dev I really want to see a Net Neutral web win. But with almost all relevant web app activity being powered on the back end by a JSON/XML API the UI is no longer tightly coupled to server side HTML. Which brings us to point 3, the ubiquitous HTML UI... Decision makers don't care If you are a consumer or executive type you want your apps to look like all your other iOS apps. If you are a call center employee working on a web app you have no input into the app you work with anyway. Us web developers aren't doing HTML/CSS any favors by adopting frameworks that attempt to blur the lines between web and native apps like Angular, Ember, or Ionic. Disclaimer: I would prefer perrylaj is right and I am wrong. I just don't think that will be the case.
abhinavk 12y ago
> Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open. No surprise since they haven't updated the Talk client since ages.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
> I still miss native software. The lack of native client for Google Music is the main reason why I'm still using Spotify. A native client for music is a must have, an HTML5 tab just can't compete for a bunch of reasons: - Painful to locate the window among 50+ browser tabs - No native key support (pause/play/next) which I use all day long whenever I need to talk to a coworker or to step away from the computer - Ease of use because of full integration with the OS
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  Radiant Player for OS X solves most of those problems, and it's free. Works well for me. (I have have no connection with them.)
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I'm with you. Although I get around it by streaming from my phone to my computer via bluetooth.

by criley2 12y ago

AceJohnny2 12y ago

I've come to understand where Hangout's come from, and to appreciate its features. I say this as a longtime Jabber fan (yes, despite the XML-bloatishness that people complain about). Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime, whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read. My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor performance of that app... Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments. As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be... I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse-engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol for a long time. I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with. In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.

scrollaway 12y ago
It feels heartwarming and at the same time depressing to read this, which is point-perfect what I've been feeling ever since the release of Hangouts. I too cross my fingers for the protocol to one day be opened up and properly specced up. I... I don't have much hope for it. I don't know. Google is usually pretty good on that front, but the hangouts team seems to be in its own bubble (please anyone prove me wrong for the love of entropy). Jabber is perfect until it's not. I feel really bad about that. Maybe I let some things affect me too much, but the state of jabber today is something that truly haunts me. Messaging, communication, those things are some of the best and most important (at the scale of humanity) benefits the internet has brought us. And they are being closed down :(
kalleboo 12y ago
> Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read. SMS (1993), iMessage and Facebook Messenger all show what messages someone has read or not, even if the UI may be different.

makomk 12y ago

You know what's really hilarious? I still use Second Life sometimes, which at the time received a certain amount of mockery because people were in effect using a huge, bloated 3D application for text chat. Thanks to the wonders of modern web technology, everyone's caught up in the bloat department so that Second Life's not actually much more RAM and CPU hungry than alternative options for text chat. Even though it's streaming and rendering a whole 3D virtual environment in real time.

jbigelow76 12y ago

I still miss native software Give it a few more years and I think you might get your wish, at least if you use Apple or Microsoft OSes. The 90s marked the slow demise of native non-Internet connected applications. The 2000s saw the rise of web apps. The early 2010s marked the rise of mobile first/only native apps. The late 2010s will see the rise of highly optimized singular platforms (MacOS/iOS, Win8/WinPhone, Android/ChromeOS?) designed to lock the user into the platform via tight inter app orchestration (native obviously) via cloud backed APIs.

perrylaj 12y ago
The only way I see native making a comeback is if this Net Neutrality issue gets in the way. Even in 'native' software, the web is becoming increasingly present.
- jbigelow76 12y ago
  Web apps became attractive for three reasons: 1. No deployment/client maintenance cost. The browser was already on every PC by the end of the 90s. 2. Connectivity. Web apps became the new thin clients with most UI coming from server side rendering and as well as data coming from the same servers. 3. Ubiquitous UI. Without getting cynical HTML/CSS is more or less the same on all browsers. Native apps mitigate the first two advantages and cast the third point as extremely suspect or at least irrelevant. 1. Apple introduced the Mac App Store and wrote brick and mortar software retailers like Best Buy out the equation. Microsoft is scrambling to keep up by moving things that were traditionally licensed via complex enterprise bundles into a la carte offerings like Office 365. 2. Connectivity. As somebody that considers themselves a web dev I really want to see a Net Neutral web win. But with almost all relevant web app activity being powered on the back end by a JSON/XML API the UI is no longer tightly coupled to server side HTML. Which brings us to point 3, the ubiquitous HTML UI... Decision makers don't care If you are a consumer or executive type you want your apps to look like all your other iOS apps. If you are a call center employee working on a web app you have no input into the app you work with anyway. Us web developers aren't doing HTML/CSS any favors by adopting frameworks that attempt to blur the lines between web and native apps like Angular, Ember, or Ionic. Disclaimer: I would prefer perrylaj is right and I am wrong. I just don't think that will be the case.

abhinavk 12y ago

> Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open. No surprise since they haven't updated the Talk client since ages.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

> I still miss native software. The lack of native client for Google Music is the main reason why I'm still using Spotify. A native client for music is a must have, an HTML5 tab just can't compete for a bunch of reasons: - Painful to locate the window among 50+ browser tabs - No native key support (pause/play/next) which I use all day long whenever I need to talk to a coworker or to step away from the computer - Ease of use because of full integration with the OS

robotresearcher 12y ago
Radiant Player for OS X solves most of those problems, and it's free. Works well for me. (I have have no connection with them.)
sliverstorm 12y ago
I'm with you. Although I get around it by streaming from my phone to my computer via bluetooth.