What drives me nuts is that there are so many of these things.
I know groups that (for business or pleasure) use Slack, Discord, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc.
All of these clients are a bit more obstrusive than they need to be in terms of pop-up notifications, software updates, cpu, memory, transfer, etc. They all screw up enough that there's always a little apprehension that something will go wrong when you get a number of people together for a meeting.
It is one thing to deal with one of these things, but when you have to install ten to get your work done you have a problem. I have a high performance computer and I want to keep it that way.
>It is one thing to deal with one of these things, but when you have to install ten to get
The modern office large office is pretty bad in this respect. Really not uncommon to see things like
• Need to have Slack open
• Need to keep an eye on Basecamp/pm software
• Need to have Outlook open / check in on for email and calendar invites
• Need Skype open because not everyone uses Slack
• GitLab is open in another tab
I've started counting the minutes that I use in a day just logging in to things with our SSO, because it has started to actually add up, haha. It has gotten silly.
> I've started counting the minutes that I use in a day just logging in to things with our SSO, because it has started to actually add up, haha. It has gotten silly.
If you need to log in more than once, can you really call it SSO? =)
If it's anything like my experience, the trip from clicking on the button to open the app and wait for the myriad of redirects, before clicking through to the page you actually want to monitor is non-trivial (and sometimes doesn't occur if the tab isn't in the foreground).
I don't have that many open, and it still takes me around 5 minutes every day to open them back up.
At least you have SSO! Imagine what if you had different credentials to each of these services (even logins)! There are big companies that operate like that...
Having different credentials would actually be faster. One key chord to ask 1Password to fill in my password and log in, and I'd be done. Instead, with SSO, every time I need to log in, I need to type in my email address, go through a bazillion redirects to Google where it asks me which of my accounts I want to use (even though I already typed in my email, and even though I only ever use one of those accounts for SSO), click it, often have to then enter my Google password and/or OTP code, then go through a bazillion more redirects back to the app.
There are also lots big companies that have "SSO" but it is half-baked or incomplete with regards to which services and you end up with MSSO - multiple single sign on.
I don't even bother logging out, ever. I just have them open in different tabs.
Imagine having about 7 tabs open. By the time I'm finished with the last tab, something new has come up on the first tab I checked. Huge waste of time. I'm trying to wean myself from all these services, but it's not easy.
This or that project is on GitHub, but join the developers on Slack. And I hate Slack.
I turned all of my notifications off and use Pomodoro timers.
If it really can't wait <25 minutes, they can call me or come to my desk. It's amazing how many things aren't "immediate" if you create a slight cost with requesting attention.
This is exactly what I do! I find it very simple and effective. I set mine for 60 minutes. It really helps focus. 60 minutes is about as long as I can focus without a break anyway.
As a freelancer, I have EXACTLY this problem, so I started hacking away on my own solution. Don't want to shamelessly promote myself here, but if you're interested, link is in my profile.
Your users and their clients are still going to be using Slack and email, but it seems like you're giving me one more thing to log into. You write:
> Schedule your time spent and group distracting reminders and notifications in one place
If this "one place" is a separate silo from Slack, Outlook, Basecamp, Skype, SMS, Discord, Hipchat, IRC, and Github...it's not the one place I'll need to check. It's the n+1th place.
Now, if I can put my credentials into Calmbird (securely would be nice, but you can have the plaintext if you can make this insanity stop) and have it do the API connection to - or, if necessary, the nasty DOM-manipulation, Windows message hacking, and client-impersonating - to put all these services and their notifications in one place, that would be a solution to the proliferation problem.
Also:
> schedule automatic emails to your clients with updates
My clients don't want automatic emails, especially from templates/digests. They want me to hand-craft them as if it was the most important thing in my life. And while they can understand a curt update message or a missed daily status notification, the real point of these updates are to confirm that I'm still on the project. If a message accidentally went out with a placeholder like "I'm still working on {todo-insert-task-here}", and I didn't know about it, that would be...bad.
- Your users and their clients are still going to be using Slack and email, but it seems like you're giving me one more thing to log into
That is not the aim, the real goal here is exactly what you state next i.e you'll be able to (securely via OAuth, so you can also revoke access anytime) log into your Slack, Basecamp etc. and Calmbird will be the one 'dashboard' where you log into, kind of like having a social network client that supports Twitter, Facebook etc.
> My clients don't want automatic emails, especially from templates/digests. They want me to hand-craft them as if it was the most important thing in my life.
That is very true from personal experience, this is a feature where you'll craft a sort of an 'emergency' email yourself in advance and when you indicate in calmbird that you're working, it'll send if off to your client if there's an email from them, optionally with the latest updates. It's not a 'machine-generated' email in the traditional sense and this feature is in my current version entirely optional, which is how it will stay at launch, (if it stays at all, I'll certainly be thinking a lot about how can this be improved, there's no point if it's not going to be useful.)
Well, perhaps but I am more trying to develop a service to avoid the Slacks and Basecamps of the world, while still being aware of what's going on, rather than just being a multi-network client.
>or, if necessary, the nasty DOM-manipulation, Windows message hacking, and client-impersonating - to put all these services and their notifications in one place, that would be a solution to the proliferation problem.
This isn't possible for web services due to the state of U.S. law. Speaking to a server without the consent of the server's owner is both a crime and a tort under the CFAA. There is also liability for copyright infringement, among other things.
If you publicly advertise your service I can probably assume your consent to speak to it. I don't have to wear a funny hat while doing so just because some hidden legalese on your website says so.
At least in Europe, news organizations pushed this kind of argument in their campaign against adblockers and failed in front of the courts. US law may differ, of course.
>If you publicly advertise your service I can probably assume your consent to speak to it.
The implied access and license is probably valid as long as you're abiding the ToS. If you're violating the ToS after agreeing to it ("agreeing" means that proper notice is given to make the ToS binding, etc.), the implied license would probably not work. If you've been specifically asked to stop, either directly or indirectly (e.g., through an IP ban), any implied license or access privileges would almost definitely be revoked at that point.
>At least in Europe, news organizations pushed this kind of argument in their campaign against adblockers and failed in front of the courts. US law may differ, of course.
Ad blockers differ because they alter the payload after receiving it under legitimate terms (though this could still probably be considered copyright infringement under the argument that the license is for viewing only, not alteration). The CFAA would not be applicable because when the adblocker comes into play, you're not accessing someone's network (which is what the the CFAA addresses).
If a site clearly disallowed AdBlock users in their ToS and adequate notice was given to users that they were to be bound by these terms, it would be "unauthorized access" to the server, which is not allowed under the CFAA.
As an aside out of curiosity, is the client/freelancer graphic representative? Are you really in the Kimberleys with a client in Western Sahara? Just struck me as odd as there are few places on earth that are less-densely populated (while still being populated) :)
I don't have a need for the product myself, but I do like the name for it.
> I've started counting the minutes that I use in a day just logging in to things with our SSO, because it has started to actually add up, haha. It has gotten silly.
I have a similar setup, and I don't waste any time logging into all of them because I simply always have them running. Why would you need to login every day? Are you shutting them down at the end of every day... if so, why?
In the good old days of ICQ and Jabber you could install a client that would integrate several protocols into a single lightweight UI (e.g. Miranda IM). Unfortunately the new wave of messengers is much more successful at guarding their protocols against such integrations.
That said, I wonder what's Discord's official stance on such things. Their bread and butter is voice chat, and they seem to be fairly open minded. Maybe they will eventually provide a public API for basic text messages.
If I can't use my own client (pidgin/finch), then I'm just not going to use the chat-service. I don't mind being logged into $chat_client_of_the_week, I mind logging into all of the $chat_clients_of_last_week though.
I feel the same way. Standardization is a feature, but it also comes with its costs (difficulty of extending features). In many places lack of standardization is okay, but I feel like for most chat purposes (especially about programming), plain text over IRC works just fine.
I don't mind Gitter though, because it has a useful feature (code snippets) and it is available through a web app as opposed to a separate install.
What if software engineering as a skillset hit its peak within the last 5 years and now it is just going downhill in general? The quality of "companies" isn't going down - companies are made of people, and some of those people are in charge of creating and testing its technology...
It appears to be just a wrapper around web interfaces. Electron or some such nonsense. Truckloads of megabytes - binary size as well as memory consumption.
I think one of the strengths of matrix (in addition to federation) is first-class bridging. I already communicate to several IRC networks, gitter and slack via matrix. I only have to use one matrix client and it enables me to communicate with people on several different networks/services. No monstrous electron apps that load the web UIs of several services in different tabs. The server-side in matrix handles the bridging and I can use any matrix client I like.
I know groups that (for business or pleasure) use Slack, Discord, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc.
All of these clients are a bit more obstrusive than they need to be in terms of pop-up notifications, software updates, cpu, memory, transfer, etc. They all screw up enough that there's always a little apprehension that something will go wrong when you get a number of people together for a meeting.
It is one thing to deal with one of these things, but when you have to install ten to get your work done you have a problem. I have a high performance computer and I want to keep it that way.