
HipChat releases native app for Mac - jawns
https://www.hipchat.com/mac
======
n9com
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!

~~~
dljsjr
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
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.

------
jug6ernaut
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?

~~~
powdahound
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.

~~~
dreamdu5t
The account manager at my company takes offense to this. Sorry, but even
"nontechnical" people have setup mIRC when they were 14.

~~~
potatolicious
HipChat is more than an IRC server - it's a fully searchable web-based chat
archival system, as well as a file transmission and sharing app backed by S3.
It's also fully mobile-compatible and will do proper message routing to
multiple devices owned by the same user, as well as temporary message
caching/retry if your device is unreachable when a message is sent. etc etc.
The list goes on.

None of it impossible to replicate in-house, but I dare a non-technical person
to replicate HipChat's stack.

~~~
easytiger
at that point you might as well get google apps for business.

~~~
potatolicious
Google doesn't exactly have an "IRC on crack" product though? Also, I find
GTalk's routing to be spotty when it comes to multiple devices - it's quite
common for me to receive messages from coworkers at night and have them route
to my work machine instead of one that's active on the GTalk account at home.

Nowadays we use GroupMe for things that must be read in a timely manner. It'd
be nice if we could use GTalk for it (this is a Google Apps GTalk account, not
a public one).

~~~
Legion
Google Wave was supposed to be that "IRC on crack" product.

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

~~~
powdahound
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!

~~~
krebby
awesome. this has been a huge thorn for a while now. so good to see it's gone.
Now if only we had custom sounds support!

------
davidcelis
> 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?

~~~
powdahound
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
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.

~~~
adamauckland
Seconded. We can't use public services for internal messaging, but we do have
JIRA + Stash inside the firewall. Hipchat server would be good, or is it XMPP
compatible?

~~~
ajtaylor
It's definitely XMPP compatible. We have an outside dev firm that does some
work for us and they connected their own chat system via XMPP. It works fine
for them as far as I can tell. Their help docs [1] [2] have all the details
you need.

[1] [http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-
ja...](http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-jabber-
support-details) [2]
[http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64436-how-
to-...](http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64436-how-to-connect-
using-adium) (I love Adium!)

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

------
lobster_johnson
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.

~~~
holman
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_johnson
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.

~~~
holman
Of those 80, I regularly only keep about five open, and of those there's only
three or four that I watch closely. Opt-in to your activity.

------
ninjastar99
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.

------
amirhhz
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?

~~~
amirhhz
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...](http://help.hipchat.com/forums/190031-mac-beta-
client/suggestions/3652624-can-t-resize-font-in-rooms-anymore)

------
plg
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

~~~
fishtoaster
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.

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

------
Hilyin
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?

~~~
gdix
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?

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

------
spotman
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?

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

------
dchuk
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.

------
ajtaylor
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.

------
smagch
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.

------
destraynor
This is waaay better than an Air App. #ThingsThatDidntNeedSaying

~~~
pbiggar
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.

------
drudru11
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
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 :(

------
Jemaclus
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.

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

~~~
orta
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.

~~~
powdahound
We've been with Atlassian for almost a year now. I hope big initiatives like
this Mac app show that we're still working hard on the core product. We've got
some great stuff in the works, too.

------
macjp
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.

------
nvr219
Why is hipchat comparing to Office Communicator rather than Lync? Lync has
Android and iOS apps.

~~~
sosuke
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
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.

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

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skwp
And the fonts are tiny. :/

------
stouset
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.

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

------
suyash
How is it better then iChat?

