"I find iMessage to generally be as good if not better than Slack in terms of design team collaboration."

...let's not worry about this guys opinion.

Sigh. Right or wrong, the bitching just seems unproductive and self-serving.

Full disclosure—I like Slack.

The Slack desktop app uses Safari's built-in engine to essentially load the Slack site inside an app container. On top of that, they add all the expected native features that desktop apps should have: keyboard shortcuts, desktop notifications, icon badges. Other than those elements, the app is the site and the site is the app.

It might not be the perfect solution, but it's clear to me that it's not a question of whether they "know how to design a desktop app" but rather that they made a cost/benefit analysis of natively coding the entire app (and splitting their web and desktop codebases) and decided that the web app was perfectly suitable for being used as a desktop application.

I think that was the right choice. For what I (and others) need it to do, it works well. And by having the same codebase, they can focus on the functionality of their service rather than porting every new feature to every OS for which they've written a native app.

Step 1: Say some outlandish/bizarre shit on Twitter.

Step 2: Get a lot of attention from aforementioned tweet.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit?

If he wrote a blog post with his reasoning and linked to it, that'd be an interesting discussion. Like the guy who left Dribbble, I don't see the point of this (that guy wrote a blog post though). One guy has a problem with something and poo poos all over it, instead of providing possible solutions.

YAWN

The Slack Mac app is proof that effectively zero startups know how to design desktop apps these days.

Is it just me or does this not make any sense?

If Slack for Mac is a disaster Skype for Mac is a humanitarian crisis.

As a remote developer, I've been using it all day every day for months. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it is definitely functional. Maybe he could provide some constructive criticism? I don't know definitively what his issues are.

I really like it instead.

It's a reasonable MVP. The desktop app is far from HIG compliant, and feels far from native. Not that it's immediate consumers have reason to care; functionality outweighs the lack of nativity.

Tl;dr: everyone's right.

Rather than bitching publicly on Twitter, why not email the company and offer advice on how to improve?

Who is honestly upvoting this? This is a prime example of feeding trolls.

The only disaster here is that good designers are spreading hyperbolic trash talk about a new product that could legitimately use some real critiques. This is the stuff that gives designers a bad name.

It’s becoming oddly fashionable in certain developer circles to fixate on the “frames per second“ of an app and predict that anything which isn’t “native” will fail.

I don’t think the average user even notices the difference.

The only (minor) gripe is have is how long it takes to initialise. But everything else is great.

I don't agree that twitter is the wrong place for this, discussion is always good but "disaster" is a pretty strong (read: provocative) word.

I also like slack, but it sure does have a lot of menus which don't seem to like each other

I really enjoy using it.

It would be a disaster if it was completely unusable. It's far, far, far from that. It's a well-built, performant, functional web app wrapped in a native container that allows it to provide some of the basic native features you would expect.

I came away from reading that Twitter thread without having any idea what their complaints are. Robert went on to imply it's an example of the "death of tasteful desktop app design".

Are we using the same app?

This "discussion" is like the guy who left Dribbble. I use slack everyday all day and im very happy with it.

Please grow up guys or maybe you're just jealous of they 120M http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-raises-120-million-2014-10

I've personally never had any issues with the Slack desktop app. The interactions and layouts can be a little wonky, granted, but its reasonably fast and reliable. I don't know if I'm doing it wrong (according to this guy), but for my uses—group/private messaging and file sharing—it works extremely well.

I'd be interested to hear if he has the same sentiments towards the web app. Saying that it's, "[...] proof that effectively zero startups know how to design desktop apps these days" seems like a pretty stupid thing to say considering that the desktop app is actually a webview; the two aren't really mutually exclusive.

I want to know what he thinks of Skype…

I think Flowdock is actually great in concept as opposed to other chat apps. Being able to thread conversations is amazing. The UI of flowdock is a bit confusing, though.

That said, I love Slack. I don't have too many complaints. I just can't wait until we get some Screenhero action.

Eh... I think it performs terribly, but is a very much capable app. Just... I wish it wasn't the slowest app I'm running at any given time.

For such a high-profile designer to make such a statement, very unproductive. Sure the app is not perfect in a "native" way, but how many companies out there who have a perfect "native" mac app AND also worth billions…

The trade-off was speed of execution to bring important and consistent experience to multiple platforms at the same time, and that exact decision (imo) has contributed directly to their success in a short amount of time.

So get your "iMessage for design team collaboration" and "web-view" babel out of here. For all we know, not many Slack users are using the desktop mac app.

ps: if you're using Slack to "organize" files, you're using it wrong. It's NOT for collaborative file management.

This is innovative!

Negative Marketing is Still good marketing.

So many debating, lot peoples, much visibility, Wow product.

I love Slack.

I use it daily on multiple teams.

One thing that is extremely annoying in the Slack Mac app is managing teams.

When you have to add a new team member or do any team administration, you are kicked to the web version.

Super annoying.

I don't see anything wrong with a web app/wrapper. I use Trello as a web app/wrapper, and it works great. The only downside is that all webviews on OS X have shared cookies with Safari.

They need a native app. A web wrapper is a great MVP but they're a billion dollar company now. It's painfully slow for me. Also sending images is so slow.

The biggest part of the UX that needs to be fixed is search. Make it more like Gmail search. Right now I avoid using the search all-together.

What? I'd say they're doing better things than any other consumer/small enterprise chat application in the market. However, interested to heat counter-theories.

didn't even realize Slack had a desktop app. does it offer anything beyond the web app? seems like a direct port.

Use it every day and have for a long time, no complaints. So what if it's just a wrapper?

This might sound really dumb but...what's the difference between a "desktop app" and a web app you'd use in your desktop browser? Obviously aside from one being in a browser. What is a user's tangible, felt difference between the two? I understand the technical differences can be quite vast. But a user isn't going to know that or care.

I mean this really confuses me:

The Slack Mac app is proof that effectively zero startups know how to design desktop apps these days. What a disaster.

isn't it just a web view?

Probably. Kind of proves the point!

Ok, so the designer in question seems to believe that "native" and "web" are completely different. So much so that simply embedding a web page in an app in and of itself invalidates the product design. I do not understand this and I feel like I'm a martian. Is this a common viewpoint?