I love that it has collaborator mouse cursor pointing as well as cursor insertion point indicators. That will be great for talking about the code and pointing "here"
HN user
mdcatlin
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/micahcatlin; my proof: https://keybase.io/micahcatlin/sigs/ryEplk1eXrFuTydSxoTt_Sr3ozUdWMcdilXizoSlMV4 ]
The article doesn't say anything about the internal (to Google) disposition of the team or thechnology -- only that the previous public product roadmap is cancelled. I'm unimpressed.
I see your explanation in https://gitter.im/login/explain and it suggests a business solution that doesn't require me to believe the promises of someone I don't yet trust.
"In order to create a good first-time user experience that allows people to create and join chat rooms for public repositories and organisations... [the rest of the technical explanation]".
Stop doing this.
Make this feature optional. I don't even want a public chat room for my company's private repo.
I don't want to sound like a parrot here, but I'm VERY excited about the feature set of your product but I'm not going to try it with the current permissions model.
Do you have any communication channel into Github through which you can let them know that their permissions model stands to kill your business?
I'm a software engineer and have worked on bringing some consumer products to market which have cellular radios. Even though the GSM standard is "Global", there are different frequency assignments in different nations. So getting the software to work on multiple carriers, and getting the antenna-array tuned to work on multiple frequencies are two unrelated tasks.
Usually the trade-off is device thickness. If you add another element to the antenna array you can make it work on both 700Mhz and 750Mhz. But if you try to tune for 725Mhz you'll get crap performance in all countries.
How can this be used for an in-person merchant transaction without NFC? Does the merchant also use a smartphone application to receive money?