Subscribe
Sign in
Slack for Mac — A new, improved Slack desktop app for Mac
113
Replies
Josh Puetz
I just love Slack so much ❤️
Share
Will you sync accounts on the iOS app and the Mac app? I have all my accounts in the Mac app, but I only have 1 in iOS because it is annoying to sign in.
@joshdance We think about doing things like this, but the UX gets complicated - people often want to have separate "work" and "friend" sets of logged-in teams, so we'd need a way to let people still do that, as well as the obvious security implications we'd have to review
@paulcbetts Love the look, don't love the missing menu bar. How do I move the window around? The profile menu pops up when I grab it above that area, and the text gets selected when I move it above the chat area. Is there a better way to move the Slack window around? Problem -> 
I love slack BUT...Merging teams is a big missing feature at the moment. Export/import "workaround" simply does not meet the needs. Also - video/screen sharing features from Screenhero - it's been well over a year and a half since the acquisition and it's not even in Beta yet?
Fantastic platform. Have noticed badges still don't update accurately across applications on different operating systems. Constantly move between endpoints(iPhone, MacBook Pro, and iMac) during a day. Important for me to have badges accurate and updating in real time.
@jaredhusch This is sadly a tricky problem across all of our applications, we need to do better at it
Hey @paulcbetts, I love Slack! I used it at work for BuySellAds and with friends for daily banter and entertainment.
Question: have y'all thought about building a way for streaming live video in Slack channels? This could come in handy for presentations, demos, or just watching Monday Night Football with friends? Cheers!
@natesmoyer Cool idea! I think YouTube Live Video _should_ work, but it's definitely an interesting concept
So fast! Great work! One thing that seems to not work on this version is translating text using mac's dictionary. Up until now I used to be able to find definition for words using macs dictionary and triggering it by hovering over a word with the cursor and then clicking with 3 fingers on the trackpad. This works on all of my other webapps except for the new Slack version. It could be great if you could fix this!
This is so great, but as voiced previously I really believe Slack deserves a fully native Mac app. Electron has many use cases and I can totally see the advantage, but those all come at a price of performance. I guess this puts the nail in the coffin for something macOS native?
@runsammrun While our current app has a long way to go before it will be a good example in this department (and believe me, it is a *huge* priority for us!), it is absolutely possible to write Electron apps that have the same performance profile as apps written in AppKit (at least to the level that users don't notice). Apps like WebTorrent and VS Code start _immediately_ and everything is instantaneous - it can be done!
That being said, I personally think though that there's room in the ecosystem for more than one Slack client, similar to how Campfire had both Propane and Flint - one was fully featured and HTML, and one was stripped down and native. I'd love to see a 3rd party write a great macOS native app that does just the basics, the motorcycle to Slack.app's four-door sedan :)
@paulcbetts Thanks so much for hanging out on here and replying to us. Those are good points; I haven't personally used either of those. My personal experience with Electron has always felt it was a second class experience compared to something more native. In sing the beta so far though, it has come a long way!
Also, I love the idea of a 3rd party contribution. You may be interested to know of Taut — it was a super ambitious project to rewrite Slack with AppKit. Sadly it never kicked off, and I think a large sticking point was that the developer couldn't get reassurance from Slack that he wouldn't be violating the ToS: https://www.kickstarter.com/proj...
This is certainly beyond the scope of the original discussion and I don't want to detract from your launch today, but just wanted to share in case you hadn't seen that! Again, congrats :)
@runsammrun We have no interest in banning 3rd party Slack clients as long as they follow the ToS rules (i.e. don't permasave messages, don't restore messages that users delete, etc), and while we can't commit to Zero Breaking Changes Ever, we'll try our best to give you a platform you can rely on to build your app.
One limitation that 3rd party apps have is that they are an Integration, which means that you might have problems with teams whose admins have disabled them, but we have a nice story around admins being able to whitelist these now as well
Random question for @paulcbetts, do you guys have any plans for a native team signup page I can send to people with a link to join a slack channel? (Rather than an email invite)
(Assuming this doesn't exist yet and i overlooked it) It would be most helpful for growing niche slack communities.)
@yo I'm not sure about this, but I think that a lot of people use slackin for this
Love the speed of this new one -- been on the beta for a little and it's been awesome. One idea I wish you guys would implement - automatically sign in to all my teams across all my devices. E.g. have one master account and then when I log into a new team on desktop, mirror that change on mobile so I can hit the ground running. I don't like having to "join" teams on every device. Excellent work and i'm excited for the future. Oh, and add video calls asap, please :)
@nadomars We definitely hear the feedback we're getting around logging into >1 team with the same identity. This gets a little more tricky when you think about the edge cases though - for example, which of the N team admins gets to set things like password policy or requiring 2FA for your single identity? Anyways, we definitely sympathize with The Problem and we'll do our best to come up with a good solution
@paulcbetts @nadomars You guys should go the route of a slack specific username login. Each team could still have company specific email logins, but it can be tied to the slack username. I may be off because I'm lying in bed and I don't dev anything..
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
Having to login to each team individually while I only have one email address associated with them all is the biggest pain point. That and the ballooning 2GB+ that I see while being logged in to 6 teams..
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!
@paulcbetts i have been tested a beta version of slack lately which was already faster. is that any different?
@ourielohayon The Beta app you've been testing is in preparation for this release - folks on the beta will be updated automatically to 2.3.0
@paulcbetts @ourielohayon I had the same question as Ouriel. Should we remain on the beta for future updates, or revert back to the normal app?
@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)
@cutlerdave @paulcbetts @ourielohayon Hi! You can stay on the beta. You'll automatically receive new builds of the Slack app before they become public.
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?
@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.
@paulcbetts separate logins for different teams is so wonky and clunky (technically speaking). would be cleaner to have one account that is given access to the different teams.