HipChat releases native app for Mac

https://www.hipchat.com/mac

by jawns • 13 years ago

209 122 13 years ago

lucaspiller2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

A quick test by one of my coworkers confirms that it does fix the GIF crash.

powdahound6• 13 years 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!

stock_toaster• 13 years ago

What prompted you to change, and what has been better about it?

lucaspiller2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Adobe Air???

destraynor• 13 years ago

This is waaay better than an Air App. #ThingsThatDidntNeedSaying

pbiggar8• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

davidcelis• 13 years 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?

powdahound6• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

Hilyin• 13 years 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?

pbiggar8• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

rajivm3• 13 years 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.

orta2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

You do realize that HipChat is owned by... a large company, right?

orta2• 13 years 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.

mnicole• 13 years ago

Flowdock has its own issues, but it was still a better overall experience than what I had on [the previous] Hipchat.

jug6ernaut• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Among other things, not having to set up your own XMPP or IRC server.

dreamdu5t4• 13 years 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.

dreamdu5t4• 13 years ago

It makes everyone feel they're a hip startup. I mean, my IRC client has been doing drag and drop file sharing and image URL inline thumbnailing for... 10 years. The HipChat client is nice, but let's be real, it's just a nice client for a handicapped implementation of XMPP. I'm forced to use HipChat at work and use Adium to connect. I've even got the emoticon set, and message styles to match.

They can't even program a mobile app that reconnects me automatically (unless that's changed recently).

lmm• 13 years ago

Not having to maintain your own server. Slightly better integration with other things (e.g. messages sent when you're offline can be emailed to you) - nothing you couldn't do with a bunch of client plugins, but it's there and set up for you already. A very nicely polished in-browser client, nicer even than irccloud, which makes it much easier for non-technical folks to use.

mcantelon• 13 years ago

There are lots of open IRC servers on which you can create password protected rooms. That plus Google Docs /Drive works great for small companies. For larger companies, however, I can see why something like Hipchat could be useful.

powdahound6• 13 years ago

The cost to setting up and maintaining your own server and emulating many of the more modern HipChat features (drag+drop file sharing, archived/searchable history, mobile push notifications) is not trivial. Most companies find it far cheaper to spend money on a service than roll their own in house (see also: GitHub, UserVoice, hosted WordPress, etc).

Also, nontechnical people are often not very comfortable using IRC/XMPP.

dreamdu5t4• 13 years ago

The account manager at my company takes offense to this. Sorry, but even "nontechnical" people have setup mIRC when they were 14.

anthemcg• 13 years ago

Its fairly stable, desktop and web clients, accessible for non-tech members of the company, decent UI, various API hooks and hubot access, easier and faster to get up and running/ maintain then a home rolled XMPP/IRC. If you just need a functional company chat client, its solid.

pbiggar8• 13 years ago

One major difference is that it maintains persistent state - so when I log back in I see all the history and conversations from when I was logged out.

subpixel2• 13 years ago

I've never really had a thorough introduction to IRC. Is it correct to assume that it's 100% ephemeral, that all conversations, questions, answers are gone when you log out?

If that's the case, I'm puzzled as to why it would maintain so much traction when the record of communication can be so valuable (e.g. people searching the log vs asking a question that has been answered many times... )

davidp• 13 years ago

The killer feature is that nontechnical Mac and Windows users can click a link emailed from anyone on their team who is already using the app, and get seamless group chat across platforms, without calling the IT department to set up a server and/or open firewall ports, or committing someone on the team to managing anything XMPP-related. It just works.

Even Linux folks can participate with additional work (e.g. dozens of packages to install if you're running Ubuntu 64, since Adobe AIR is 32-bit only; annoying).

That said, I agree that the barrier to entry is pretty low.

n9com2• 13 years 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!

shizcakes• 13 years ago

I agree - I feel like the time would have been better spent implementing Adium/Pidgin plugins first.

lazerwalker• 13 years ago

HipChat uses XMPP, so you can already use it with Adium/Pidgin without much trouble. The only things that are really missing by default are the syntactic sugar for @-mentioning people, HipChat's custom emoticons, and inlining of image/link previews (many of which you can fix with already-existing plugins).

spencerfry• 13 years ago

What kind of bugs have you found?

n9com2• 13 years ago

There's a difference between a new beta and an app that has been in closed beta for months already and only today has been made available to the public. Just because it's 'beta' doesn't mean there should be obvious trivial bugs present.

Just to run off a few issues we found within literally minutes of using the app:

1. Resizing window to a small size then making it large again causes the entire chat view to become very narrow.

2. Messages sent by one user, often get displayed next to another person's username (so it looks like someone else wrote the message).

3. Notification popups appears even when the app is actively being viewed.

4. If you go away from keyboard, the app sets you as idle, but when you return, the idle indicator doesn't get removed

I could go on and on...

dljsjr2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

javery2• 13 years ago

Been using it for an hour or so and haven't run into any issues - what have you found? Just saying critical bugs is pretty unhelpful to everyone.

gshaw• 13 years ago

Slow, crashed within minutes of using it. It's not very pretty either. I'll stick with Adium/Jabber hooks but was really hoping for something good here.

jedberg• 13 years ago

I used it for five minutes and found: There is no way to search for a person in the Lobby and you can't reorder the tabs. These are two things I do a lot.

jordaninternets• 13 years ago

The app actually crashes each time I try to open it. You're very right, this is a terrible beta version.

tosh• 13 years ago

I've switched from using HipChat on the web (because I didn't like the AIR version's scrolling behaviour) to the native Mac client beta and I'm really happy with it so far.

I'm on the most recent OSX version in case this might make a difference. No bugs or crashes for me so far.

amirhhz2• 13 years 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?

amirhhz2• 13 years 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/sugges...

Jemaclus• 13 years 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• 13 years 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_johnson8• 13 years 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.

pbiggar8• 13 years 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_johnson8• 13 years 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).

holman2• 13 years ago

We pipe everything into Campfire, scoped into the relevant room (last time I checked we had about 80 separate rooms).

The topical bit is important- a particular app's notifications get dumped into that app's room, for example. That means I only get notified if I'm in that room. Conversely, that means I don't get excessive notifications if I'm not in the room, for apps I'm not interested in.

"Spheres of interest", as you mention them, become less important as you grow the company. We've found it important to not get too sucked into every little aspect of the company- it's too broad. If someone thinks you should know something that's happening in a room you're not in, they can just ping you and you can hop in and stay up-to-date. That's been a really good solution for us.

lobster_johnson8• 13 years ago

80 rooms? Ouch. I work on about 8 projects I need notifications for while I'm at work. I can't have 8 rooms open. That's just too much.

thejerz• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

danzajdband• 13 years ago

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

spotman• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

sosuke• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

skwp• 13 years ago

And the fonts are tiny. :/

dchuk• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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 :(

plg2• 13 years 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

plg2• 13 years 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_• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

ajtaylor2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

dljsjr2• 13 years ago

Seriously? Every tabbed app I have responds this way. Safari, Chrome, MacVim, TextMate, iTerm 2, all off the top of my head.

Serplat• 13 years 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.

bearwithclaws• 13 years ago

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

smagch• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

How is it better then iChat?

HipChat releases native app for Mac

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