
Flamingo for Mac: A Modern Messaging App - danpalmer
http://flamingo.im
======
bluetidepro
From the FAQs:

> _" Where can I change my status? You can't and don't need to. Flamingo
> automatically updates your status between Available, Idle, Away, and Offline
> by monitoring the idle time of your computer. And status messages? Come on,
> it's 2013."_

...I do not like that one bit. Saying it's 2013 is very ignorant to how people
use the "away" feature. I like manually setting if I'm away or busy, because
I'm working and do not want to be disrupted. I think you guys should re-think
your understanding of how people use Available/Away/Idle/Etc.

~~~
danpalmer
I _never_ set this on my chat clients, and find it very annoying that it's not
always done for me. I think this one is just a matter of opinion. Perhaps a
setting for it would be nice in the future, but for 1.0, I think they made a
good decision.

~~~
MichaelGG
There's a difference between cutting a feature due to resource constraints,
and actively saying that the feature is a bad idea. Unless you're pulling an
Apple/Microsoft and telling people they're wrong, while you hurry to do the
right thing.

------
eddieroger
I guess the gamble that the App Store spoiled us all in to abandoning our
trials in favor of blind purchases is a bad one. In my mind, this app wants to
replace Adium in my life, and while I'd like to let it try, I am also hesitant
to throw $10 at a "maybe". If it were open to a trial, sure thing.

The psychology of HN's shared response is probably worthy of a blog post.

~~~
indragie
We're gauging the demand for a trial version at the moment and may decide to
offer one if we find that many users are surprised by things not working as
expected after purchasing the app (e.g. certain accounts not working, things
that were unclear in the marketing, etc.)

~~~
ubercore
To add a data point, I'm not going to give a chat app (a small utility, but an
important one that I'd be willing to pay for) a second thought at $10 without
a trial.

------
chm
Good looking, but it isn't immediately obvious why I should pay 10$ for it
when software like Adium already does this perfectly well? I might have missed
some crucial functionality.

~~~
danpalmer
I just bought it, and I must say it is a very nice, slick, modern Mac app. I
prefer it to chatting in Adium so far.

That said, I would like it much more if it supported more services than just
XMPP. Supporting the Adium service plugin API would actually be a really nice
way of doing this (from a user's perspective), but if not, a new API would do
well also.

~~~
indragie
Hi there, I'm the developer of Flamingo. This is something that I considered
during the development process but with the Mac App Store, sandboxing, and the
overall difficulty of designing a good plugin API, this didn't make the cut
for 1.0. Once things stabilize a bit I'll have more time to experiment with
things like this. It's only 1.0 :)

~~~
danpalmer
Hi, thanks for the response!

When I first read the features, I assumed the Facebook/Hangouts and XMPP were
essentially 3 different modules, which would probably make extending it to
third party plugins fairly easy. But I realised that all of the services are
XMPP at the moment, and therefore I suppose this would mean adding lots more
abstraction to internal APIs and stuff.

I've heard about issues with sandboxing and plugins before, but as far as I
can tell they are mostly for when plugins need access to the filesystem, as
they have a different bundle ID and therefore don't get permissions from the
main application? I might be completely wrong there though. As long as the
plugins for Flamingo don't need filesystem access, or other privileged access,
I would have thought it would be fine. RapidWeaver, for example, has a large
plugin community, but is distributed on the App Store.

------
serkanyersen
Looks very good and promising. However, I wouldn't pay $10 without at-least
seeing the app in action. A trial app would be nice.

~~~
danpalmer
I would usually agree, but I happened to have some App Store credit so took
the plunge and bought it anyway. Fairly impressed so far, but Adium is much
more of a power-user's tool, so this isn't necessarily the best replacement
for it.

------
monkey_slap
I'm assuming you can't use iMessage with this? Looks incredibly, but iMessage
is a vital part of my workflow throughout the day.

I also agree with others that $10 is a steep price without any form of a
trial.

------
dewey
"Flamingo does not support group chats in Facebook or Hangouts/Gtalk, and MUC
(Multi User Chat) for XMPP is not supported." Unfortunately that'd be my main
use case. I was looking forward to replacing the ugly Hangouts Chrome Plugin.

------
angularly
Paid for is to replace messages because I hate how messages separates friends
and message window.

But I feel like I've been cheated out of 10$ because it says its compatible
with Messages, but after I bought it I find out I can't add my Apple account
and talk with all my friends who have ios devices, so exactly how he can claim
its compatible with Messages is beyond me.

~~~
indragie
We claimed that Flamingo supports backward compatible _file transfer_ with
Messages and Adium users, not that we supported Apple accounts.

------
jd007
Does it actually integrate with Google Hangout? I stopped using Adium and
switched to the Google Hangout Chrome plugin because Adium did not fully
integrate with Hangout (messages I read on Adium do not get marked as read on
the Hangout app on my phone). Chrome Hangout plugin works but I'd like
something native.

~~~
danpalmer
Not that I can tell. I am fairly sure that it only supports Hangouts as far as
the XMPP interface to it that Adium uses.

~~~
jd007
Yeah given that the new Hangouts is a proprietary closed protocol (as far as I
know) I don't think it's possible for third party to fully integrate. Their
site has the Hangout logo and says Hangout on the feature list which gave me a
bit of hope. But if you scroll down it actually says it supports Google Talk
instead of Hangout.

~~~
danpalmer
Yep, it is a closed API. A bit annoying, but I much prefer desktop clients
over web applications or browser plugins, that's just personal preference
though.

~~~
jd007
Yeah I do prefer desktop clients over web apps and browser plugins. But I do
do not want to have to mark messages as read twice, once on my computer and
again on my phone which is why I tolerate the Chrome Hangout plugin.

------
tptacek
Does it support OTR? Is it built on libpurple?

~~~
danpalmer
Another commenter said there is no OTR, however I can't find anything that
says this specifically. It could be doing it entirely transparently. It
doesn't appear to be using libpurple, it contains XMPPFramework
([https://github.com/robbiehanson/XMPPFramework](https://github.com/robbiehanson/XMPPFramework))
instead.

------
tjosten
You have to offer a trial at least. The app looks nice, and I would be willing
to pay 10 bucks for it, but not before I tested it. So, your turn.

~~~
imgs
+1

------
benjaminwootton
Has instant messaging declined in popularity from it's heyday of ICQ, AIM, MSN
messenger etc?

I spent hours chatting on those things, but nowadays seem to get by just fine
without.

I'm guessing that Facebook Messaging meets the need for most people, but
putting IM on the web as a feature within a walled garden is a step backwards
for something that was, and still could be, as ubiquitous as email.

I think there's still a gap for someone to innovate in real time messaging. It
hasn't really moved on in the last decade as a concept, but I have yet to come
across any other platform that replicates the immediacy and connectedness that
you used to feel on those long ICQ and MSN chats.

~~~
sprobertson
Ubiquitous mobile messaging might be what happened.

------
andyfleming
Looks nice, but AIM, and esepcially Bonjour chat are essential day-to-day for
me. Skipping on this app for now.

------
patrickod
Installed it and while it looks very nice it's been beachballing almost
constantly with only 2 accounts connected (facebook and hangout)

Search is very slow and causes ~500ms input lag.

Needs a lot of polish still.

~~~
indragie
We're aware of performance issues with larger buddy lists (which tends to
happen when Facebook accounts are connected) and an update will be submitted
to the MAS soon that fixes this.

------
tobr
Nice looking app, but why are those "Learn More"-links made out of fuzzy,
poorly compressed jpegs? Doesn't exactly communicate attention to detail.

~~~
indragie
We mass converted the PNGs to improve loading time and forgot about the text
images. Those have been fixed now.

------
tannerc
Looks slick, as others have pointed out. However, if your primary value
proposition is "a modern messaging app," you've lost a great opportunity to
capture new customers. We already have modern messaging apps, plenty of them
to boot.

Why not change that up a bit to be customizable messaging, or the most
elegantly powerful messaging on your Mac, or something more than just "modern"
messaging?

Looks neat, regardless.

------
egypturnash
Looks cute. Another vote for a trial of some kind.

Not that I'm likely to switch from Adium to be honest; most of my friends are
still on AIM.

------
streeter
I'd really like to see a way to integrate the history for services like
Facebook Chat and Google Hangouts when not using the app. With Google Chat,
the app could use IMAP to get the chat history for non-Flamingo chats, but
with the switch to Hangouts, that method is no longer possible. It seems
Takeout is the only way to get the Hangout message history
([https://code.google.com/p/google-plus-
platform/issues/detail...](https://code.google.com/p/google-plus-
platform/issues/detail?id=68)).

IMO, the lack of true global history is the biggest limitation of a native app
for using many IM services.

------
kozikow
The biggest problem I have with Adium is bad facebook chat history support.
E.g. if I accidentally talk with someone on android phone or on web site I
can't see this in Adium's history. Do you know if Flamingo fixes it?

------
joshuahornby
Very nice looking app. Although a feature I really think a lot of people need
is a nice icon in the status bar. How else are we meant to know we have a
message whilst glancing at our screens?

------
TheMakeA
Awesome. I've been looking for something like this to replace Adium. While
Adium is great, it feels nothing like an OS X app.

------
inovica
This looks nice but what I really still like about Adium is the size of the
text entry and the contacts. It can sit unobtrusively at the corner of my
screen and I can send/respond to messages without it affecting my work.
Personal opinion obviously but one of the reasons I don't like Skype on the
Mac now is the size of the text entry

------
olssonm
Looks really awesome – however, as some other people have already said –
please make a build for a trial .dmg that you can download directly from your
webside (Coda, Versions and other does this) – just so that we can try if it
fits into our workflow without puting out $10 up front.

The price seems alright, if it works like intended though.

------
antr
It looks really good, and I really like the media embedding feature. However,
$10 for a desktop app with no trial option, no phone app (cross-platform), for
me it is tough to click the buy button. Would love to see a "launch" blog post
to see how CTR/funnel looks like after launching on HN. Best of luck!

------
YooLi
Very nice looking application. Congratulations.

Is there a buddy list or menu bar applet, or do you have to have the full app
window open to see who is online? Also, I didn't see it mentioned in the list
of supported services, but does this work with Apple iMessages?

~~~
TheMakeA
Looks like just Facebook/Google Hangouts/XMPP is supported. You can undock
chats from the main window and it acts sort of like a buddy list.

------
wuster
UI is very nicely done, but to echo some other sentiments here, I'm not sure
it's $10 better than Adium. At $5, I'd just buy it to support great OS X
developers, as I want to encourage this type of effort.

------
daenney
It looks really nice but unfortunately without MUC support it's fairly useless
to me. We have a lot of conference rooms / MUC's for projects, teams etc. etc.
that I would lose access to.

------
prezjordan
Been on the alpha for this for a few months, absolutely _in love_ with it.
Good-looking chat clients are hard to come by.

Also, does all software require a free trial or something? I never got that
memo.

~~~
akmiller
"Also, does all software require a free trial or something? I never got that
memo."

Obviously no, but it's hard to convince people to move from software that
works (such as Adium) to your software if you can't at least provide a great
overview of how it works via video demonstration or better yet allowing the
user to try it out.

------
joeblau
The app looks really clean and very well designed but for $10 I'll need to see
a video tutorial or something. I would definitely get on board with this if I
could get rid of Messages.

------
icco
So, I tried it out. I have two google hangouts accounts, and this just hangs
trying to log into them both. I want this to be awesome, but crashing on load
makes it completely useless.

------
kbar13
looks a lot like [http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/), is that a
standard osx design philosophy or something?

------
ateevchopra
I really loved the design. Can you please send me the promo code so i can try
it ?

------
wereHamster
No IRC?

~~~
Kudos
I for one don't feel the need for an all-in-one communication app. I'm happy
to use an app like Textual for IRC and Flamingo for IM.

~~~
imjoshdean
Understandable, some people do, some people don't.

I'm one of those people who do. For $10, if this thing included IRC, I would
switch over in a heart beat. If it also included SKYPE? Oh man, the things I
would do to the developer who made it...that would be heaven.

Less apps open usually means less memory consumption, and overall less clutter
on my desktop.

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dmazin
No AIM? Is this a joke?

------
nayefc
No Jabber?

~~~
tjosten
Not sure if troll, but.. XMPP is Jabber.

