Month: March 2015

HipChat releases the new web interface to the world

HipChat – the greatest team communication tool since IRC – released its updated web interface to the world.

hipchat

 

I’ve seen it before, as I opted into the beta testing, and I’m glad they’ve finally pushed it out to all users.  It’s awesome, slick, and completely out of the way.

And if you haven’t tried HipChat for your team yet, I urge you to do so.  Here are some of the awesome things about it:

  • Unlimited rooms.  You can have rooms by subject, by project, by group, and so on.
  • Direct messaging.  You can do groups on one-on-ones.
  • Integrations!  This is one of the major reasons to use it.  We have it integration with GitHub and Nagios currently.  And a gadzillion of other services are available in just a few clicks.  Super awesome!
  • History.  HipChat preserves history of conversations, so introducing new members into a team is so much easier – they can read, scroll through, or search the previous room messages.
  • Clients for any operating system, including Linux, smartphones, and just web.
  • Flexible notifications.  You can configure when, if at all, you want to be notified of the new messages.  You even have an option to alert you with SMS, if you are offline.  Which is especially handy if you are using Nagios integration or similar.
  • Files, links, previews, emoticons, and a tonne of other goodies.
  • Free!  Yes, that’s right.  HipChat is free.  You only pay for premium features, which include video chat and screen sharing.  And even then it’s only $2 per user per month, which still qualifies as free.

This tool is truly indispensable!

Microsoft doubles MSIE web pain with Spartan

The Verge reports that Microsoft is killing its Internet Explorer brand.  Don’t confuse it with the browser though.

Internet Explorer will still exist in some versions of Windows 10 mainly for enterprise compatibility, but the new Project Spartan will be named separately and will be the primary way for Windows 10 users to access the web.

There is no realistic way for Microsoft to kill the MSIE browser.  Even if they will completely remove it from all the new installations, there is still a gadzillion computers with it already installed.   It doesn’t matter if they “end of life” it or even actively push people to upgrade.  It’ll just be dragged around for a few more years.

MSIE

And what does Microsoft do to help?  They introduce yet another browser – Spartan – into the mix.  Like we don’t have enough good browsers already.  So now web developers will be suffering the pain of not one, but two Microsoft web browsers.  And the fun part will be supporting all the old ones, and figuring out all the quirks of the new one.

Thank you very much, dear Microsoft.  You’re fun as always.

P.S.: A better solution would be of course to drop their own web browser completely and use one of the existing applications – Firefox, Chromium, Google Chrome, Opera, or anything else.  All these options are free, well tested, solid, fast, and secure.   Most even have huge communities with extension developers, theme designers, and support forums.