| We switched from Hipchat (buggy in the beginning, smooth and ideal at the end) to Hall (a buggy, slow, awful mess) to Slack (also slow, but not buggy, and awful UX). Hipchat gets notifications right. Slack and Hall seem to have (in)sane defaults, and not quite right customizations. The web-view of Slack is slow and stupid. It's picky, but I loved the vim/sed style substitutions in Hipchat. Slack FTL. But the biggest annoyance by far: In Hipchat you could reorder your chats however you felt like. In Slack they're fixed. And team chats are arbitrarily (feeling) broken up into groups and channels. Which is a completely useless distinction for most I think. Hipchat had @all and @here. Which seem pretty self explanatory. Slack has @group, @channel, and... I guess that's it. No version of @here AFAICT, and depending on what sort of "room" you're in, the @all equivalent changes. The iOS app also makes something that looks like a room picker and instead makes it some other menu I forget. And notifications will happily occur on my laptop, computer, iPhone and iPad all at once if I don't catch it at my desk in time. Here's a hint: If you decide to notify my phone, don't notify anything else at that point. No cat picture or CI build notification deserves Def-Con 5 treatment. But it has themes? And useless giphy integrations? Honestly I don't get the love at all. Form over function at it's worst. I really dislike it. :-p |
This seems to come about because any HipChat message to a room you are in notifies & alerts the whole room on OS X. Because of this, most communication happens in private person to person rooms which defeats the purpose of having public rooms for transparency. I haven't been able to get any of the rooms feature to stick and so what commonly happens is two people discuss things on chat, then repeat those conversations to everyone who should have been on it in meatspace.
All of this because HipChat still doesn't let you set per-room notifications.