Slack to fend off the collaboration competition with... a new logo Hipster laptop lids are in for a scraping as messaging-for-millennials platform, Slack, has taken a beating with the rebranding stick. And it's going as well as you might expect. A blog posting on the company's site insisted that this isn't just "change for the sake of change" but was instead an evolution that would do the …
> Last time I ran an IRC server it took about 5 minutes to get up and running, never touched i again in three years
OK, so it takes you 5 minutes to set up an IRC server. But it sounds like you'd done it before, it would take someone who hadn't done it much longer. Also: Did it enforce usernames/passwords to prevent impersonation? Did it either integrate with Active Directory to authenticate those usernames/passwords, or have a simple way for new users to create their own account and reset lost passwords? Did it have documentation so that non-technical users can use it? Did you choose a preferred Windows IRC client and recommend it to users? Did you figure out how users outside the office are going to access it from laptops and phones? Remember that we have secretaries and managers in the office, not just engineers. All the above are important to our users. Slack provides easy solutions to all the above issues, that would take hours or days with IRC.
> Client woes are usually psychological.
That attitude is why open-source has such a problem getting to mainstream usage.
IRC clients are usually complicated and often hard to use. There are all these arcane slash commands, and/or arcane menu choices. For someone who's used to them, that's fine - there is a lot of power and flexibility there. But put a secretary or even a just-graduated programmer in front of it and they're likely to get confused and just not use it. You can claim that other people are the problem, it works for you, but in a business environment that doesn't wash. You have to provide a solution that is easy enough to use.
Slack (and its competitors such as MS Teams) provide a cut-down, secure, easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy IRC equivalent, which non-technical people can easily use, and which provides enough features to get the business benefits that IRC would give.
Who needs file transfers for a chat - just drop a link to your local ftp server.
VoIP can be replaced by talking with people, or any other VoIP solution. Not every tool needs to do everything.
You just sent them a note with the room in it... how hard can it be?
And no inline images make for a much cleaner chat... in slack mine are generally unexpanded (and the chat is better for it).
And the article doesn't even have the best (or rather worst) part - on mobile they decided that a background in a shade of bruise purple would be just the thing to top everything off.
So basically they've taken a logo that they were worried about people cocking up the implementation of, and more or less pre-cocked it up for them.
Absolutely awful. You've had your fun, now can we have the old logo back please?
Given that I'm not the one paying for it, the product isn't bad, better than Teams because it's truly cross-platform. As for the logo, I'll refer people to Dogbert's Brown Ring of Quality. https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-11
Wow, over 22 years ago.
I'm not saying that the old one was outstanding, but it was simple and effective and I kind of liked the overlapping colours effect and skewed angle- which, of course, are the parts they took out.
The new logo manages to be more complicated, yet much blander. It's not even *interestingly* boring.
Of course, there's only one true logo for slack anyway.
The greatest demonstration of patriotism at work is the assumption on a site, read the world round, that anyone would care what is happening in your country... and take sides.
The curious thing is that the good Netizens of the world actually do. And make US or UK politics out to be more important than corruption like in good old RSA.
I'm British. I have strong views on the subject of whether/how we should leave the EU.
I have even stronger views on people who think it is necessary to post political bollocks in a non-politics thread. People who think that, I know, people will really appreciate a Brexit/Trump joke on this thread. Bastards, every man Jack of them.
"Octothorpe" was apparently invented by engineers at Bell Labs during the 1960s.
Despite its quasi-technical sound, I don't see any evidence for wide acceptance of that as its name outwith that context- let alone common agreement that this is the "correct" or "technical" term for the symbol. I bet 99% of people have never even *heard* of it!
(Or did I just miss the joke going whoosh loudly overhead...?!)
Do you remember when Lloyd Grossman used to host "Through the Keyhole"? About that time I was working for a large electrical company (which may or may not have been called GEC), when we were taken over by the french company Alsthom. Some time later they reinvented themselves as ALSTOM, but the O was replaced with a weird spiral symbol (https://seeklogo.com/vector-logo/300509/alstom), which rapidly became referred to as "Down the Plughole". This turned out to be a very accurate prediction of what was to come, the Rugby site is now an out-of-town shopping experience and a residential housing estate. I can hardly recognise the old place now. Incidentally, the logo was in four bitmaps, AL, ST, "Plughole", and M. By rearranging the bitmaps in 1-4-3-2 order, it spelt ALMOST.
... (the podcast) did an excellent episode about logo design - https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-design-michael-bierut/
Lots of good stuff in there, including the inviolable rule that you should never, under any circumstances, design a logo that at any distance looks even a little bit like a swastika.
Slack are a sponsor of 99% Invisible.
Ehhh... in traditional unix-land it's called a Crunch.
Still have a sharp and amusing memory of the admin snapping at me at my first ever shell script on my first day of ever seeing unix, "NOT bang twiddle crunch : crunch bang twiddle! [for GOD's sake!...]"
.
(#!~ , which unix hands will recognise as (ugly but useful sh hackery) beginning of first line (last char only under unusual circs))
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