[eli]

Yup, I evaluated Slack and HipChat about a year ago and went with HipChat mostly because of Slack's lame Windows user experience. (IMHO, the Slack client also had too many bells and whistles. I would've like a default "simple" mode that just is an IM client with group chat.)

[sanderjd]

Yeah they should definitely fix this. I don't think it's a very useful product without a good native client.

[eli]

The funny thing is, I'm pretty sure the HipChat client is (or at least was) mostly just a shim around a web browser with some notification stuff bolted on. This doesn't need to be a huge undertaking.

[michaelmachine]

That is all the slack client is as well. You can right click to inspect all the ui elements.

[eli]

Maybe it's changed since I last looked, but they didn't have a client at all. You could download Chrome and then install an "app" through the Chrome store. Well, some of my users prefer Firefox... I don't know, it just wasn't a great onboarding experience.

In retrospect, though, I might've gone too far the other way -- hipchat is pretty bare bones.

[inthewoods]

Slack's lack of a native Windows app sunk it for our org - then the rest adopted Hipchat and I think it is too late for us. I would love to use Slack, alas.

[eli]

Yeah, HipChat definitely has its own issues. The notifications are kinda crude and the integrations aren't as good as in Slack.