Slack will soon start testing voice and video chat

Indeed, the React community moved from Slack to Discord. Slack has made it clear they are a tool for small teams. I don't necessarily see this announcement as a change from that.

It hasn't stopped it from becoming widely popular in the gaming community though. All gaming-related projects I follow are on Discord. This includes streamers and guilds.

Yeah, that might be the best option.

Yay for weird fusions. The internet is just a big collaboration machine and existing tools are calcified clichés.

When me and my brother worked on a project, we set up our browser home pages to show a CGI gadget that grepped (well, ag'd) the source code, and commit log, for @-mentions and XXX comments. This way we could talk asynchronously inside the coding process, e.g.

    // @dbrock do you know a better way to do this?

That was ridiculously simple to build but very effective. So I'm a fan of this linking between code and communication, and encourage you to keep experimenting!

What is wrong with just creating a subreddit for a repo?

My philosophy on this is "don't be afraid." It's all 1s and 0s to the machine when you're digital, so it's OK to dump 10 paragraphs into certain text boxes. If you want to do something, you can usually do it! A lot of programs let you paste images in directly nowadays.

If you're OK with having links to chats instead of the chat text itself, you can click the timestamps in a Slack chat to get a permalink . Sometimes I just copy the entire chat and paste it into Trello.

Which leads to "where". Most things I end up with are small tasks like bugfixes. Actionable tasks for the immediate. As much of that goes into Trello as possible. I'm not afraid of making multi-paragraph cards that copy the chat verbatim either (it's all 1s and 0s, right).

I also do the whole "screenshot" thing too. Take a screenshot and also paste it right into Trello.

Some stuff is important in the immediate but I'll throw away later. Temporary notes for things like user support. I use OS X's Notes app, which is basically notepad with tabs (I would likely use Notepad++ on Windows to accomplish this). It's all temporary notes, but still nice because it doesn't scroll up as other people start talking.

If I have something like a long-term reference, I try really hard to find a good place for it on a case-by-case basis. Usually that involves writing a text file (markdown) and putting it into Dropbox. On OS X I use LightPaper (a great little app), on Android I use Draft[1] (iOS has a thing called Drafts). Both apps are set up to point to the same folder, so I have these references on my phone too.

I also use text files for journaling what I'm trying to accomplish. For example, at work I'm working with a system that will physically mail documents back to me, so I wrote down exactly my operations so that when the docs get back to me I know what I did:

    Sent two pdfs (located in Documents) on invoice `weFFEA123231`. One is Letter size instead of A4, another is A3 size. 

    Also sending Invoice `weFFEA123232` with just the letter-size page(`2015.pdf`).

    A "user space unit" in PDF is 1/72nd of an inch.

Sometimes this log dead-ends, most recent entry:

    For compressor and source maps, thing that's likely needed is to rewrite the JS compressor.

    An easy solution would be 

    -----

I also use my calendar! I'll also just paste random stuff into my calendar for information I'll need at a certain event (for example reservation confirmation numbers).

This veered slightly off topic but tl;dr is: Trello for tasks, Notes for temp notes, LightPaper for reference+journaling, Calendar for time-sensitive information.

[1]: http://www.mvilla.it/draft/

Which likely means they'll start favoring their apps which will be the end of many people using slack. I don't want to see that.

Threaded discussion support is a major feature their competition touts, so arguably by adding it Slack would be crushing their competitors and serving their customers at the same time.

I do know about Skype, Google Hangouts, and videoconferencing tools like Webex, GotoMeeting, etc. And have used enterprise videoconferencing tools in companies where I worked earlier, and Skype and Google Hangouts. But there are issues with both of the latter at times (e.g the recent thread about Skype issues on Linux), hence my question, which was more about other (new) ones, and only for voice and video chat, not screen sharing or text chat (which work fine with many providers), really.

But thanks for the answer. I've tried out a few of the new WebRTC sites like appear.in and some others, but they seem to be alpha level. Not tried them a lot though.

Has anyone tried Firefox Hello, which was mentioned in the recent thread about Skype issues on Linux? Is it alive? Going to try it with someone soon, if it is alive, but interested in hearing others' experiences.

It's much harder to innovate than it is to copy someone's innovation.

Now that Slack has pioneered good UX in the space, it's easy to rip off.

I only meant its an obvious next step, and until they close that loop the door is wide open for competitors. Once they do close that loop, the door becomes tiny. The only easy part would be doing a basic webrtc implementation (as they are using Chrome via Electron, and hence get the vast majority of that implementation for free). For reference, my last job was working on a web based webrtc video conferencing app in a lead role at one of the major video conferencing companies.

He didn't mean it would be simple to implement. He meant the reasons for why Slack should include it are so numerous that it is easy and "simple" to make a case that Slack should implement it right away.

Agreed. I actually hope it provides the screen sharing capability with the possibility of video also. There are tons of non-developers that I always feel like I wish I could just Screenhero them and show them something, but having a random person take over your computer can be a little jarring.

Too soon to tell yet in my case, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the rapid rate of improvements, so I'd say probably yes.

Skype and Hangouts are still a little better in terms of quality and overall experience, but a standard WebRTC app is definitely "good enough", and with some tweaking, it can be great (see Appear.in).

And WebRTC brings some very important advantages over Skype, Hangouts, etc (mainly reduced friction, not having to login, better embeddability, and overall control of the experience)

I've yet to test the new VP9 codec, which should bring huge gains. And there are other tools being added to the ecosystem which will enable lots of neat use cases.

The reason for the move to dedicated servers (AFAIK) was because without it, they couldn't really do offline messages. Once WhatsApp etc started doing this, the Skype team realised that their greatest strength (no paying for bandwidth or servers etc) was actually their greatest weakness, since they couldn't deliver the features that people had begun to expect from chat apps. There was a great article on this .. but I can't find it.