
Holla - An open source Campfire - maccman
http://alexmaccaw.co.uk/posts/2010/10/24/holla.html
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sliverstorm
No offense, but that custom scroll bar on the right is incredibly annoying.
It's way to skinny to grab with the mouse without paying an inordinate amount
of attention to my pointer.

~~~
henning
Making a custom scroll bar that is a beautiful and unique snowflake is
probably a recipe for failure. See, e.g.,
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050711.html>

~~~
yatsyk
Google Wave... it so obvious now :)

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tablatom
Very nice. Another nitpick - I really like what Apple have been trying to do
to in creating a UI affordance that says "this is a search box" - i.e. a text
entry with round ends. I hope all the devs out there can join in and not use
that appearance for regular text fields.

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PStamatiou
Oh boy.. remember when Google App Engine launched with a demo (and free) app
resembling Campfire? 37signals cried foul until Google took it offline. Let's
hope 37s doesn't hear about this one..

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karterk
To their defense, that demo did look very much like a clone of Campfire.

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AlfaWolph
It was a freaking chat room!

~~~
tptacek
It was a note for note cover of the 37Signals UI that was clearly designed to
evoke Campfire, done by Google. What's the web chat room designed _prior_ to
Campfire that looks virtually identical to Campfire?

~~~
points
Every chatroom looks the same. It's like moaning that email clients steal UI
from each other. Of course they do.

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Qz
The screenshot doesn't fit in my normal browser window and I don't get a
horizontal scrollbar to pan to the right. Could just be Firefox 4 being buggy
though.

~~~
rev087
Same on Chrome, but since there was no horizontal scrollbar, my initial
thought was that this was intentional for some reason. (aesthetic?)

~~~
Qz
Showed fine when I maximized it, site seems designed for 1680x1050 to the
detriment of anything smaller.

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grumpycanuck
I must be an old curmudgeon because whenever I see Campfire I think "it's like
IRC but with a better client" and wonder what the big deal is.

Sure, it's in a browser but is it really that big a deal? I just can't seem to
get properly excited about Campfire and it's ilk.

~~~
look_lookatme
The ability to have context on room join is the deal maker where I work. IRC
doesn't work that way.

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psadauskas
The only thing I dislike about Campfire is that it doesn't support some other
protocol, like XMPP or IRC, so that I can use it in a normal chat client, with
normal chat client features, like desktop notifications.

This one doesn't seem to, either.

~~~
smiler
If you use OS X, try <http://propaneapp.com/>

~~~
psadauskas
I did, when I was on OSX... but now I've switched back to Linux, and kinda
miss it. It would be great if I could just connect to Campfire with Pidgin, or
any libpurple chat client.

~~~
jacksonh
There is Butane for Linux: <http://github.com/ricktessner/butane>

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WA
Github links to the demo here: <http://getholla.com>

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bjonathan
great product! I love it. We currently use Jaconda.im at my office. Holla
seems as good !

Only one little bug in the demo, when I click on "XMPP/Jabber" I'm redirect to
<http://getholla.com/$%7BgetXMPP%28%29%7D> with an error (The page you were
looking for doesn't exist)

~~~
maccman
Ah yes, I'm planning on adding xmpp support soon - it shouldn't have been
exposed on getholla (it's stripped out of the Github version)

~~~
nowarninglabel
Please do. I'm being willing to pay for such an app with XMPP support.

Have tried Campfire, Ignite/sparkweb, all the versions of jabber I can find,
and various IRC servers. So far I have not found a single one that I can
successfully install on a RHEL server that will do __both __a web interface
and an XMPP/Jabber backend so that my team can communicate effectively.

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twidlit
I felt so stupid for about 10 minutes repeatedly trying to find the demo
username/password in this thread and the github docs. until i realized that
there was a signup button...

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ashitvora
Couple of suggestions. 1\. It would make more sense to have Textbox at the
bottom instead of top. When you enter something, you see your message right
above your textbox.

2\. Instead of having separate area for dropping files, why not allow users to
drop files in the same textbox where you type your message.

3\. Bubbles doesn't look nice. I mean, it looks good as a demo but not when
you use the product. It is sort of a distraction. I would rather like to see
zebra stripes(may be #ffffff and #f1f1f1).

4\. I like to see list of users on the sidebar instead of on chat area.

~~~
kloncks
Potentially stupid question, but what are zebra stripes in web design?

~~~
ashitvora
give different colors to alternate rows to differentiate the messages.

like <http://www.alistapart.com/d/stripedtables/itunes.png>

Here they use white and light blue.

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fdeth
Good start but it's a bit single rainbow right now.

It will take a looong time to become as useful as Campfire because all of the
hooks/apps for it that already exist. Opensource is nice but Holla needs some
kind of passion-creating feature/vision that would attract a decent community
of contributors.

~~~
fdeth
Oh, and I have to add that I'm a 'product guy'. I do see that the tech behind
it is both cutting edge and solid but I tend to drift towards the market fit
thoughts whenever I see new apps.

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moeffju
It looks neat, but it doesn't seem to work - I joined a room, invited a
coworker, and we couldn't see each others messages. Upon reload, the old
messages showed up, but e.g. picture previews didn't. Is this a load problem?

~~~
maccman
Node went down unfortunately, give it another go.

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alttab
The 'browse' button for finding an avatar picture on the signup page is over-
flow cut-off'd in the form's container. Firefox.

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swanson
I had never heard about Juggernaut -- is it any different than Socket.IO? A
cursory glance indicates they are very similar.

~~~
maccman
Juggernaut uses Socket.IO. I guess it's basically an abstraction on Socket.IO,
adding channel support.

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randall
My helpful alternative:

<http://partychapp.appspot.com/>

It's a chatroom for Google Talk.

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growt
I really like the design. Is it made for holla or for another OS project
(diaspora?)?

~~~
maccman
I made it for Holla - from the jQuery Mobile mockups
<http://jquerymobile.com/designs>

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Kilimanjaro
* ignore post, typing problems, my dog ate my keyboard.

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hariscusto
Nice, but demo would be great :)

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hariscusto
Ok, i Found it :) it's on: <http://getholla.com>

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christopherslee
looks great!

