Hi Product Hunters,
I'm Paul Betts, the lead developer of the Slack Desktop application. We're very excited to launch our new Mac application - it's faster, has a great new frameless look, and has a lot of under-the-hood improvements that, put together, make for a better experience with Slack
From the technical side, this now brings together Slack on all three platforms - our Mac, Windows, and Linux application are now one great Electron application, built with the latest technologies such as React and RxJS v5. We've written a bit more about how the Slack app works over at https://slack.engineering/buildi....
We'll be around all day answering questions about the app or about Slack, we'd love to hear what you think!
@cutlerdave@ourielohayon Nope! Everyone on the beta is seamlessly migrated to the latest version, no need for a separate download (we actually shipped the final bits to beta users on last Friday)
I think at least half the Product Hunt community uses Slack.
Slack is built for single teams, yet people are using it with their friends, family, and small communities. Switching teams is still a major pain. Any plans to make this easier, @paulcbetts?
@rrhoover Hey Ryan,
Is switching teams painful because of performance? Or because you have to log in to more than one of them?
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@paulcbetts@rrhoover at least for me its logging in seperately (at least the ones without SAML/GApps). I have a school team, club teams and as a freelancer a lot of client teams. For me simply logging in once would be much easier.
@paulcbetts@rrhoover In my opinion, it is very hard because you need to log in all the time with the same username (email) for each team and I don't understand why I need to log in again on the desktop when I'm already log in on my mobile.
I would love to know more about the team's experience with Electron for this release. I know Slack has been listed on the Electron Apps list for a long time (since the beginning?) - you mention that all the apps are now *one* Electron app. Curious to know the backstory to that, and what the differences are now.
@bitandbang We write about this a bit on our blog over at slack.engineering - basically at the time the original Slack app for Mac was written, Electron didn't exist! Slack was actually the first production app outside of Atom to use Electron (in fact, the very first internal releases of Slack for Windows were called "atom.exe" because you couldn't rename the executable without breaking it).
Node modules make it fairly easy to load per-platform code, so we're able to integrate with the platform, imho this is the thing that makes Electron different from other platforms like Phonegap - if you hit the edges of what Phonegap provides, you're stuck - with Electron, you've always got an escape hatch if you're willing to write enough C++ :)
@joeydsmith I liked it that way too, but lots of people were upset about the extra horizontal space used when they were only in one team - if you sign into more than one team, the window chrome will go away
Excited to see new developments as Slack becomes the way lots of people communicate. If you are, like me, signed into 11+ teams, there seems to be no way to navigate to all of them. The "quick switcher" only allows to switch to different channels within the team, and there's no way to scroll down to teams that aren't visible in the desktop app.
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