Ask HN: What team chat tool do you recommend? Hipchat, Flowdock, Hall, Campfire? Hey guys - What team chat tools are you guys using? Having a strong mobile component is necessary since we all travel a lot! Hipchat is rated quite low/buggy on the App Store... Any others I'm overlooking/missing? Why do you use what you use, and how big is your team? Thanks! R |
One main advantage that Skype had going for it was a little known feature on the Mac Skype 5 and 6 clients: ChatStyles [1]
The Mac Skype client used a copy of webkit to render the conversations and at one point provided instructions to let you hook into that and style the conversations the way you like with HTML templates, css and javascript.
We took advantage of this feature it to add communication short cuts, the main example being that if someone typed #1234 in a chat and the person receiving the message was using our ChatStyle #1234 would become a clickable link to the appropriate bug in our issue tracking system.
Skype silently killed this feature in an update a few weeks ago, so our thought is to go with IRC and and use an IRC bot that can provide these kinds of shortcuts.
If there is another chat system that allows you to customize these kinds of things, I'd love to hear about it.
[1] http://joemiller.me/2011/05/24/alternative-skins-for-skype-5...
I've looked into a few others but if I'm going to go through the trouble of switching I'd like to find something HIPPA compliant so we can use it for more than general basic conversation...