

Google Hangouts - Coxa
https://hangouts.google.com/

======
joshstrange
Wow.... I got excited for finally a single place to go for hangouts (I was
always confused at the best "launch point") and a better interface (chat on
gmail hasn't changed in what feels like a decade) and lo and behold... It's a
pretty launch interface but the SAME CRAPPY CHAT WINDOWS... I've always felt
like hangouts was a horribly mismanaged product (starting and joining a
hangout has always been a longer and more difficult process than it should)
and this just confirms it.

There is SO MUCH potential and they've thrown it all away and not even for
some gain. It'd be one thing if the interface sucked because of ads or
something like that but no, it just sucks to suck. I continually have high
hopes for hangouts and google does their best to dash them every time (Oh look
they finally 'got it'... Nevermind, they fell flat on their faces again).

~~~
gomox
Here's how to do a hangout quickly:

1) Put
[https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/](https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/) on
your web browser bookmark bar

2) Upon need, click on that, wait for URL to change, and then send resulting
URL over $IM_SYSTEM_OF_CHOICE

Best UI I've found so far to what I think is a pretty stellar video/voice
communication product. Now if they would only fix hardware acceleration on
Mac...

~~~
gkop
Sadly, that doesn't let you create a Hangout on Air. Hangouts on Air would be
an absolutely _killer_ feature if only it worked reliably :(

~~~
gomox
What would you want to use it for? It seems like HOA sessions for most of the
use cases that spring to mind would be scheduled ahead of time, and therefore
not suffer as much from the bad-contact-list issue.

~~~
calinet6
There are all kinds of gaps even then. For example, you can't invite a google
organization (company) to the event directly in any smooth fashion. The
solution is to copy the link and e-mail it to your list. After that, there's
no way to restrict viewing of the recording to an organization.

This is just one example of a poor integration between two Google products,
but those few little gaps in permissions and utility made it a product that
didn't work for my needs at least.

------
sssilver
Google's UX/design now reminds of MSN/Hotmail/Yahoo of 10 years ago. All the
pointless image-heavy neutral visual noise. Why on earth are you showing me
that waterfall background? I don't want your watered down elevator music.

Google needs to remember why Gmail, Reader, etc ended up destroying the
aforementioned products in terms of UX, and change the direction it's headed
at.

~~~
rsuelzer
Gmail has by far the work UX out of any of the popular applications I use.
It's an eye sore.

~~~
gomox
I don't think GMail is pretty, but it's _very_ functional. Good UX != visual
beauty.

As a result of a fairly recent job change, I have been forced into desktop
IMAP clients again. I have to admit I have discovered a whole new level of
appreciation for GMail.

Just the fact that it actually runs filters server-side and it has a
(conceptually speaking) equivalent application for mobile devices trumps
everything else. You can actually get it do to what you want.

The company I work for has a very heterogeneous systems landscape and I can
say without much hesitation that GMail + Gcal's only serious alternative is
Outlook. Everything else seems to me like a digital version of pen and paper.

~~~
pyre
I think that IMAP-serverside filtering is possible:
[https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter](https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter) I
haven't really looked into exactly what it's doing though (and I'm no expert
on the IMAP spec).

~~~
gomox
Seems like that is just a command-line version of an e-mail client filter: it
connects to the server, runs a query, and moves stuff to folders. Based on my
experience with the average IMAP server search performance, I wouldn't let my
users use this if I was in control of the server.

------
barosl
I've always wondered why there is no dedicated Hangouts website. I always had
to choose between Gmail and Google Plus to send a message. This may have been
a way to encourage the uses of their other services? Anyways, finally they
made a reasonable choice.

The chat window looks still elementary, though. I expected it to expand to fit
the browser window. But it is still the tiny one that can be seen in Gmail and
Google Plus, which is a bit annoying to use.

------
rp1229
I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but that is a considerable amount of
wasted space (Hi, rp1229! Get started by calling or messaging a friend below).
I thought my messages would show up there, but nope, they just show up on the
bottom similar to other Google sites.

------
joenathan
Is it just me or do the three dots on the lower left do the same thing as the
hamburger menu at the top?

~~~
linkydinkandyou
It looks exactly the same for me, too.

~~~
gomox
It's just the UX guys at Google acknowledging this article from a week ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036061)

Namely, Joe-the-user can't see the hamburger menu at the top and looks for
more tools where they are supposed to be: after the first few tools. So the UX
guys at Google put an affordance there for him [0].

I've seen this quite a few times, especially for interactions where the search
box is within the hamburger-driven overlay. Some sites/systems add a dummy,
redundant search box on the main UI that just opens the hamburger menu and
focuses on the newly-displayed search box.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance)

~~~
calinet6
Sure it's important that people grok that there's more stuff, but for pete's
sake, pick one affordance.

That just looks as clunky and indecisive as a drawer with both a knob and a
handle.

------
bfrog
Am I the only one that longs for what used to be the awesomeness that is
gchat?

Gchat with what hangouts has for calls/voice/video would've basically been the
win. Instead it constantly feels like this buggy/gimped browser app that
maybe/maybe doesn't work.

------
niuzeta
I'm confused. Shouldn't the large space on right _be_ where the IM window was
supposed to pop in? Is it just a launch interface for already-available
hangout app?

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kethinov
Two things:

1\. Bundle this into an NW.js app and we've finally got a Hangouts desktop app
at long last!

2\. Those tiny chat windows are a usability disaster. Come on. Take a cue from
messenger.com!

------
geofft
This might actually be _slower_ than my current solution for hangouts, which
is to open an empty circle in Google+. (If I open the Google+ home page, I see
lots of social feed activity that a) I don't care about and b) takes a while
to load.)

I'm often behind a slow public-wifi network and restricted on battery, so the
amount of bandwidth and CPU used just to get me to text chat is actively a
problem. I miss the XMPP days.

~~~
AceJohnny2
> I mean the XMPP days.

oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus
battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?

I was an XMPP enthusiast. Sadly, it never made the jump to mobile properly. I
wish they had amended the standard to to add a session manager that would work
well with mobile. Instead, last I check, everyone implemented their own hack.
Google first, with Android GTalk. They used ProtoBufs [1]

Hey, did you know WhatsApp was based on XMPP? Yeah, good luck using that with
an open client: their terms of service allows them to kick you off for using
an unofficial client.

[1] I've come to think ProtoBufs would make a perfectly good transport for a
hypothetical XMPP2. It's better packed, can be better framed, and as far as
I've glanced allows the same extensibility as XML gave XMPP.

~~~
geofft
> oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus
> battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?

I ran my XMPP client on a UNIX server, to which I connect using mosh. As it
happens, I tend to have this mosh connection open all the time to do actual
work, so there's no additional overhead from running an XMPP client remotely.

(Still, there's no particular reason that a persistent though quiet TCP
connection needs to drain battery any more than any approach; a TCP connection
can stay open indefinitely without traffic if nothing in between the
applications decides to time it out.

There might be complications on actual mobile platforms like phones, if your
platform's push notification system does abstraction-crossing magic with the
cell networks, such that you can shut down your data connection entirely until
it needs to be woken up. But my use case is a laptop, so a constant IP
connection is assumed.)

~~~
AceJohnny2
I'm a geek too, but I think a time comes when we have to recognize that these
kind of roundabout solutions, while fun and a testament to the flexibility of
our systems, won't cut it if you want your protocol to take over the world
(which the XMPP community was tongue-in-cheekily aiming for in the mid-00's).

And besides, I was trying to focus the discussion specifically on mobile,
which is the major platform today.

I'm really disappointed with the new babel that has emerged in the mobile chat
world.

~~~
geofft
Yes, that's absolutely fair. As a more general solution, you _could_ build a
very lightweight mobile app or website that used a server as a relay, and
whose interface involved only minimal JS (enough to long-poll or similar) --
but only if you could implement the client part of the relay. XMPP would have
been an obvious way to do that, but even a documented web protocol would work
fine.

------
zhuxuefeng1994
The UI design is terrible. There are two sets of buttons to perform exactly
same action.

~~~
gomox
That's not necessarily bad. It just means someone thought that it was more
important for the interface to be easy to discover than it was to keep it
clean.

In my opinion a good IM system needs to be both easy (as it targets a
mainstream audience that needs to voluntarily adopt it, a trouble that MS's
offerings never had) and powerful (as it quickly becomes a big part of your
day to day). Not the easiest tradeoff to design to.

The clear upper hand granted to the former in this product release is pretty
telling of Google's conundrum: they need to gain adoption over everything
else.

------
jesalg
On a side note, I don't get why Hangouts Dialer has to be a separate app from
Hangouts in Android

~~~
fluidcruft
So that carriers can blacklist it.

------
rekoros
Ha. We just added the Hangouts interop gateway to Sameroom
([https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-
hango...](https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hangouts/))

------
fwn
It is perfect.

The most annoying problem with Hangouts is that I have to load the whole Gmail
tab for answering a single message on my laptop. This tool is a lot faster. I
zoomed to 125%, adblocked the bing background image & the now cropped giant
greeting.

------
taf2
Anyone else getting a 500 error?

All I see when I visit is

500\. That’s an error.

There was an error. Please try again later. That’s all we know.

~~~
saurik
That is also all that I am getting.

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xfr
Sweet, now I don't have to keep Chrome around for Hangouts on OS X.

~~~
scott_karana
Are you being sarcastic?

This is the same, rudimentary "interface" that has always worked in all the
browsers. :/

~~~
xfr
I used to use the Hangouts Chrome app but I will be using this now instead.

~~~
scott_karana
You know that this interface was available in GMail and G+ since Hangouts
first launched, minus the "pretty background", right?

------
bgentry
Nicer interface, but have they done anything about power consumption? Would
like to be able to run a 30 minute hangout without completely draining the
battery on my Macbook Pro.

~~~
gomox
I gave you an issue-tracker-spirited upvote for this. Pretty much the only
reason I still put up with Skype.

------
TD-Linux
It still requires a proprietary NPAPI plugin on Firefox, sadly.

------
AustinG08
Just wanted to chime in that I strongly dislike the new facelift to hangouts
for Android. Loading images in the chat cause it to stutter pretty hard on my
Nexus 5.

------
sheepdestroyer
still no way to sort online, away and offline contacts like the old tried and
proved chat interface. Pass

------
sbuttgereit
On Windows 10, still fails to respect both Hangout's own sound settings for
speaker/mic as well as the Windows configured default communication device. So
while I like this interface better, any number of other services I use (e.g.
Zoom, Skype) just work better with my devices. Those other services can switch
to using my bluetooth headset on calls and similar.

Google really is a technology company, not a products company. They have some
really very clever ideas and implement them with great mediocrity more often
than they should. And even when they get something solid, you can never really
tell for how long the product will last or if they'll start screwing with it.

For me, the only things that really come to mind as solid are maps and search.
Google Now, great... if you don't have a Google Apps account. Inbox, great...
if you don't need a bit slightly sophisticated formatting or image support.
etc.

~~~
mmmpie
Are you using chrome? I ran into the same issue (wouldn't respect audio
settings) plus it burned 100% cup on all four cores and the audio kept
breaking up. It turns out that IE 10 is good for something! Not only do the
hangout plugin audio settings work but the sound itself works (no more
disrupted streams) and cpu hangs out around 50% across 4 cores. Much better!

~~~
sbuttgereit
Yep. Using Chrome. I don't see the high CPU or the audio issues aside from
respecting the settings though. Maybe I should give the other browsers a try!
Thx!

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intsunny
With gchat I can see who is on an android device, and who is idle (even both).
Can't with hangouts, why is that? Why give end users even less information?

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lechevalierd3on
It does not compete well with messenger.com

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jtchang
Does anyone else have video hangouts cause Mac OS X to completely go jet
turbine 100% cpu usage?

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thekevan
I have the browser extension Disconnect enabled, and it stops that page from
functioning.

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dauoalagio
Sure, it looks fine. Would love SMS integration though

~~~
ljk
and picture messaging too

------
lists
Is that the Gmail UI re-themed?

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linkydinkandyou
Ok, I'm game! Join me:

[https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/g7qn5tqae6r63h7curf...](https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/g7qn5tqae6r63h7curf5wujyiua)

I've always wondered why it was so friggin' hard to start a hangout.

