> "Where can I change my status? You can't and don't need to. Flamingo automatically updates your status between Available, Idle, Away, and Offline by monitoring the idle time of your computer. And status messages? Come on, it's 2013."
...I do not like that one bit. Saying it's 2013 is very ignorant to how people use the "away" feature. I like manually setting if I'm away or busy, because I'm working and do not want to be disrupted. I think you guys should re-think your understanding of how people use Available/Away/Idle/Etc.
I'm totally ambivalent on this feature because I think it really doesn't matter. If you don't want to be disrupted, turn off notifications (if possible), or log out. If you are too busy to talk to someone then don't tempt them by showing up as logged on in their contact list. It's win/win.
Instant messaging is becoming more and more like email in that it is moving from a synchronous to an asynchronous form of communication. When I IM someone and they don't answer instantly, I assume they are busy. Just like with email. Just like when they don't answer the phone. Just like with voice mail. This is even if their status has a green bubble next to it, because that really means nothing, especially when it is user selected.
N.B.: In every enterprise chat program I've used, setting your status as "away" or "busy" does nothing to stop others from contacting you. Microsoft's offerings (OCS/lync) has a "Do Not Disturb" which does this.
Being "away" has never, at least since I started IM'ing in '97 ('98?) meant "the client blocks messages". It's always been a social signal, "I'm probably not here, don't expect a reply". And if people are "tempted" by seeing someone who's idle or away and feels compelled to send them a message, that's their issue, not the issue of the person who's marked as "away".
Perhaps, to me, the most annoying thing about this sort of "feature" is that it's a deliberate reduction in capabilities. Every client I use now is perfectly capable of automatically setting my status, and allowing me to set custom status states. Eliminating a feature like this from the users is akin to saying, "It's 2013, you shouldn't be saving your documents. We'll know when you're done because you'll have stopped editing it."
EDIT: Examples where custom setting away/present status is very useful to me, my phone and my laptop. My phone is connected to google talk all the time, most of the time it's marked as "away" (particularly during the work day or when I'm at events where the phone isn't appropriate). I mark my status as "available" when I'm actually able to chat, any automatic detection based on idleness would be wrong. It's similar with my laptop at home. It's on the entire time, and since I do my reading and writing at my kitchen table it's also usually within arms reach, playing some music. When I'm doing something that I want to discourage chats (but not prevent), "away" status is perfect. If I really want to prevent chat then I can go "invisible" or close it. Leaving it open versus closing it (in the case of "invisible") gives me the option of watching for other people that I might want to talk to.
I never set this on my chat clients, and find it very annoying that it's not always done for me. I think this one is just a matter of opinion. Perhaps a setting for it would be nice in the future, but for 1.0, I think they made a good decision.
There's a difference between cutting a feature due to resource constraints, and actively saying that the feature is a bad idea. Unless you're pulling an Apple/Microsoft and telling people they're wrong, while you hurry to do the right thing.
I agree. If I don't want to be interrupted, I close down the client. I don't really see how this is much different to manually setting my status to 'busy'.
The problem is that the networks support status at all beyond online and offline. If the other users know nothing more than the fact that your machine is reachable, that's all they need to know to contact you. Whether or not you respond is your call.
IRC has worked for years without away messages and the like as a feature. I've never once missed a status beyond knowing that my message was delivered.
I'm the developer of Flamingo. There's understandably a lot of opinions on how exactly this should work, but we believe we made the best decision in removing something that most people rarely use to realize our vision for what a modern instant messaging client should be like. It's an opinionated decision, and we realize that many will not agree with it.
That's unfortunate. I know it's just one example but I was planning on recommending this to my company of several hundred people. But it's essential for people at a company, especially one with a lot of remote workers, to specify when they're away and when they might be back.
I guess the gamble that the App Store spoiled us all in to abandoning our trials in favor of blind purchases is a bad one. In my mind, this app wants to replace Adium in my life, and while I'd like to let it try, I am also hesitant to throw $10 at a "maybe". If it were open to a trial, sure thing.
The psychology of HN's shared response is probably worthy of a blog post.
I'd bet that I'm a lot more cautious buying apps from the Mac App Store than I am from Google's Play Store, simply because Google's got that safety net of "Eh, this app isn't as good as it looked in the screenshots. I'll just return it." Trial periods also usually go a long way in convincing me to spend money on an app, especially things more costly than a dollar or two. A few months ago, I found myself debating between Totalfinder and Pathfinder- luckily, they both had a few weeks of free trials and I was able to determine that while pathfinder looked like it had more features, Totalfinder just felt a lot more seamless in day-to-day use. If I hadn't had the ability to sit down and get a feel for the apps, I'd probably have just said "fuck it, I don't need tabs and split panes that much anyways."
We're gauging the demand for a trial version at the moment and may decide to offer one if we find that many users are surprised by things not working as expected after purchasing the app (e.g. certain accounts not working, things that were unclear in the marketing, etc.)
To add a data point, I'm not going to give a chat app (a small utility, but an important one that I'd be willing to pay for) a second thought at $10 without a trial.
Echoing a third time - for any consideration on my machine, I'm going to need to take it for a test drive. $10 is non-trivial, and Adium is still more functional and already on my machine (oh, and free). I really do want to take your app for a drive, though. Please, please release a trial. Make it as short as three days - I'll use it enough to know if it's worth the money by then.
Good looking, but it isn't immediately obvious why I should pay 10$ for it when software like Adium already does this perfectly well? I might have missed some crucial functionality.
I just bought it, and I must say it is a very nice, slick, modern Mac app. I prefer it to chatting in Adium so far.
That said, I would like it much more if it supported more services than just XMPP. Supporting the Adium service plugin API would actually be a really nice way of doing this (from a user's perspective), but if not, a new API would do well also.
Hi there, I'm the developer of Flamingo. This is something that I considered during the development process but with the Mac App Store, sandboxing, and the overall difficulty of designing a good plugin API, this didn't make the cut for 1.0. Once things stabilize a bit I'll have more time to experiment with things like this. It's only 1.0 :)
When I first read the features, I assumed the Facebook/Hangouts and XMPP were essentially 3 different modules, which would probably make extending it to third party plugins fairly easy. But I realised that all of the services are XMPP at the moment, and therefore I suppose this would mean adding lots more abstraction to internal APIs and stuff.
I've heard about issues with sandboxing and plugins before, but as far as I can tell they are mostly for when plugins need access to the filesystem, as they have a different bundle ID and therefore don't get permissions from the main application? I might be completely wrong there though. As long as the plugins for Flamingo don't need filesystem access, or other privileged access, I would have thought it would be fine. RapidWeaver, for example, has a large plugin community, but is distributed on the App Store.
I would usually agree, but I happened to have some App Store credit so took the plunge and bought it anyway. Fairly impressed so far, but Adium is much more of a power-user's tool, so this isn't necessarily the best replacement for it.
"Flamingo does not support group chats in Facebook or Hangouts/Gtalk, and MUC (Multi User Chat) for XMPP is not supported."
Unfortunately that'd be my main use case. I was looking forward to replacing the ugly Hangouts Chrome Plugin.
Paid for is to replace messages because I hate how messages separates friends and message window.
But I feel like I've been cheated out of 10$ because it says its compatible with Messages, but after I bought it I find out I can't add my Apple account and talk with all my friends who have ios devices, so exactly how he can claim its compatible with Messages is beyond me.
Does it actually integrate with Google Hangout? I stopped using Adium and switched to the Google Hangout Chrome plugin because Adium did not fully integrate with Hangout (messages I read on Adium do not get marked as read on the Hangout app on my phone). Chrome Hangout plugin works but I'd like something native.
Yeah given that the new Hangouts is a proprietary closed protocol (as far as I know) I don't think it's possible for third party to fully integrate. Their site has the Hangout logo and says Hangout on the feature list which gave me a bit of hope. But if you scroll down it actually says it supports Google Talk instead of Hangout.
Yep, it is a closed API. A bit annoying, but I much prefer desktop clients over web applications or browser plugins, that's just personal preference though.
Yeah I do prefer desktop clients over web apps and browser plugins. But I do do not want to have to mark messages as read twice, once on my computer and again on my phone which is why I tolerate the Chrome Hangout plugin.
Another commenter said there is no OTR, however I can't find anything that says this specifically. It could be doing it entirely transparently. It doesn't appear to be using libpurple, it contains XMPPFramework (https://github.com/robbiehanson/XMPPFramework) instead.
Has instant messaging declined in popularity from it's heyday of ICQ, AIM, MSN messenger etc?
I spent hours chatting on those things, but nowadays seem to get by just fine without.
I'm guessing that Facebook Messaging meets the need for most people, but putting IM on the web as a feature within a walled garden is a step backwards for something that was, and still could be, as ubiquitous as email.
I think there's still a gap for someone to innovate in real time messaging. It hasn't really moved on in the last decade as a concept, but I have yet to come across any other platform that replicates the immediacy and connectedness that you used to feel on those long ICQ and MSN chats.
We're aware of performance issues with larger buddy lists (which tends to happen when Facebook accounts are connected) and an update will be submitted to the MAS soon that fixes this.
Looks slick, as others have pointed out. However, if your primary value proposition is "a modern messaging app," you've lost a great opportunity to capture new customers. We already have modern messaging apps, plenty of them to boot.
Why not change that up a bit to be customizable messaging, or the most elegantly powerful messaging on your Mac, or something more than just "modern" messaging?
I'd really like to see a way to integrate the history for services like Facebook Chat and Google Hangouts when not using the app. With Google Chat, the app could use IMAP to get the chat history for non-Flamingo chats, but with the switch to Hangouts, that method is no longer possible. It seems Takeout is the only way to get the Hangout message history (https://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail...).
IMO, the lack of true global history is the biggest limitation of a native app for using many IM services.
The biggest problem I have with Adium is bad facebook chat history support. E.g. if I accidentally talk with someone on android phone or on web site I can't see this in Adium's history. Do you know if Flamingo fixes it?
Very nice looking app. Although a feature I really think a lot of people need is a nice icon in the status bar. How else are we meant to know we have a message whilst glancing at our screens?
This looks nice but what I really still like about Adium is the size of the text entry and the contacts. It can sit unobtrusively at the corner of my screen and I can send/respond to messages without it affecting my work. Personal opinion obviously but one of the reasons I don't like Skype on the Mac now is the size of the text entry
Looks really awesome – however, as some other people have already said – please make a build for a trial .dmg that you can download directly from your webside (Coda, Versions and other does this) – just so that we can try if it fits into our workflow without puting out $10 up front.
The price seems alright, if it works like intended though.
It looks really good, and I really like the media embedding feature. However, $10 for a desktop app with no trial option, no phone app (cross-platform), for me it is tough to click the buy button. Would love to see a "launch" blog post to see how CTR/funnel looks like after launching on HN. Best of luck!
Is there a buddy list or menu bar applet, or do you have to have the full app window open to see who is online? Also, I didn't see it mentioned in the list of supported services, but does this work with Apple iMessages?
UI is very nicely done, but to echo some other sentiments here, I'm not sure it's $10 better than Adium. At $5, I'd just buy it to support great OS X developers, as I want to encourage this type of effort.
It looks really nice but unfortunately without MUC support it's fairly useless to me. We have a lot of conference rooms / MUC's for projects, teams etc. etc. that I would lose access to.
"Also, does all software require a free trial or something? I never got that memo."
Obviously no, but it's hard to convince people to move from software that works (such as Adium) to your software if you can't at least provide a great overview of how it works via video demonstration or better yet allowing the user to try it out.
I think that you would agree that there are a number of features not present that many are used to, according to comments in this thread. Fewer sales due to a trial is far better than a one and two star reviews, which could conceivably sink a product before it could get off the ground.
The app looks really clean and very well designed but for $10 I'll need to see a video tutorial or something. I would definitely get on board with this if I could get rid of Messages.
So, I tried it out. I have two google hangouts accounts, and this just hangs trying to log into them both. I want this to be awesome, but crashing on load makes it completely useless.
Understandable, some people do, some people don't.
I'm one of those people who do. For $10, if this thing included IRC, I would switch over in a heart beat. If it also included SKYPE? Oh man, the things I would do to the developer who made it...that would be heaven.
Less apps open usually means less memory consumption, and overall less clutter on my desktop.
> "Where can I change my status? You can't and don't need to. Flamingo automatically updates your status between Available, Idle, Away, and Offline by monitoring the idle time of your computer. And status messages? Come on, it's 2013."
...I do not like that one bit. Saying it's 2013 is very ignorant to how people use the "away" feature. I like manually setting if I'm away or busy, because I'm working and do not want to be disrupted. I think you guys should re-think your understanding of how people use Available/Away/Idle/Etc.