Quite good, needs some serious improvements

Slack has replaced Skype as our internal chat app and we ambition it to replace Basecamp as a project platform.

The pros: the ability to easily create « channels », the versatility of exchanges, the emojis (never used much before, but now…), and the team behind the app.

Now the cons: the windows ‘app’ is mostly useless, Chrome notifications are hard to see, the app doesn’t glow in the taskbar when there is a message, which means that our Windows users here often don’t see when there is a message incoming.
The mac app itself would need to be more of a native app and less of a web app. The difference between posts and the chat channel is just a mess, very hard to follow the posts. The three-panel interface mostly doesn’t work (and on the windows app, you can’t visually make the difference between the panels), because we are used to e-mail (the 1st panel allows to swith content in the 2nd panel, which allows to switch content in the third panel…). Just seeing a pdf is too difficult (where should I click if I just want to open it?).

All of this makes it more a « chit-chat app » for us right now than any email killer. But we stick with it because we think it has a great potential.

tom_12345 about Slack for Desktop, v1.0.2