@yoavanaki thanks Yoav!! Slack, and HipChat, are awesome products - especially if you're a tech company and use lots of other tech services. We're not competing with them though - people that sign up for Pie are using WhatsApp, WeChat or LINE for work. A bit like using Hotmail for work...
We try to deliver the same ease-of-use, speed, and fun, as the best consumer apps, and layer on useful, yet simple, features -like in-line links, files and stunningly large images- that make you more productive at work.
Pie - deliciously simple chat for work - for Android turns 1.0! ^_^ This latest version has lots of new stuff and improvements.
Quick replies let you send messages with a single tap or swipe, swipe down to see your latest chats (we call it the ‘WhatsApp view’), send important messages to reduce noise, ultra-fast loading & syncing + lots of tasty Duarte-inspired Material design.
Curious to hear what you think!
Hi - I'm Thijs - I worked on the design for this. Ask Me Anything...
For Android, we went all in on Material Design - I, for one, am really excited about Google's evolved design thinking for Android. It's fresh, clean and possibly a tiny bit 'Scandinavian'. Material Design, compared to iOS, really requires a shift in mindset for designers, with a strong preference for white-space, top-heavy navigation, smaller thinner icons, large tappable areas and, physical-like, layers (like the FAB and shadows on the UI elements). After working with Material Design, it's impossible to unsee the invisible 72dp line that runs through each and every Material Design inspired app - probably the easiest way to spot Material Design.
What surprised me though, is that going with Material Design also presents a larger shift in UX thinking. Modals perform rather poorly on Android - the large amount of padding, shadows, and supersized font-/line-sizes make modals feel very different from iOS, and perhaps a bit crude. On iOS, we've been using a compact modal design as a way to quickly add coworkers to a chat, but on Android, this just doesn't work and we ended up going with full-screen views. Overall, it feels like Material Design in general prefers large full-screen feedback, whereas on iOS there's a more natural divide between navigation and content.
FYI. If you want to get started with Material Design - Google's resources are simply awesome: http://www.google.com/design/
Yala Bella
Pie
Yolk.fm
Instant - Website Time Tracker
Pie
Pie