HipChat 3.0 – Wow! Not a Good Update
This morning I saw that HipChat 3.0 for the Mac was out, and I updated. Why not? Well... the changes in this version are really worthy of the 3.0 designation. The UI is almost completely redone, and it's not a really nice facelift. Interestingly, I'm not the only one that thinks this.
The title bar is huge! What were they thinking? The whitespace around each line... and the whitespace to the left in the names column... it's just too much. In these days when people work primarily on laptops, I'm just plain shocked to see a design that so wasteful of space.
Then there's the baseline for the text.
In the larger picture, it looks like the baseline for the text of the name is lower than the baseline for the text. But when you zoom in and draw a line, it looks as though it's just an artifact of the anti-aliased text - even on a Retina display!
HipChat, as a service, is a pretty good service. It's solid, reliable, searchable, and it just works. But the designers they have had on the Mac OS X products just didn't understand that most people want to customize their experience. Why not allow CSS to stylize the display? Or at least offer a toolkit to make themes? Either of these would allow teams to personalize their view so that it'd work best for them.
Propane - the Campfire Mac OS X client - did this. I was able to completely customize the UI. Very cool. This just seems to be something trying to chase the iOS 7 style guidelines... and missing... badly. So much wasted space.