> If you take more than a few minutes to think out how it works (I know, not popular for the typical HN poster)
Such a condescending remark. This kind of thing is not good PR for your company, product or workplace. Would I want to work with colleagues who publicly disparage a whole community like that? If you communicate like that publicly, how can I expect your internal work atmosphere to be?
I know you're probably an engineer at Slack and not in the PR department, but you may want to re-think your communication strategy. I know that my employer would have been unhappy with me for such a comment, and rightfully so.
Judging by other comments in this thread, folks have apparently thought out how it could work for "more than a few minutes", so not just the style but even the content of your message are clearly off. You are getting community feedback here and competent people are giving suggestions -- for free. Embrace that.
> There is nothing about Electron that constrains it to a single window, what a weird idea.
"Native" means both using the right UI toolkit and being a good citizen by supporting features that are table stakes for apps on the platform. Slack happens to do neither. Look, I understand that UI design is hard, but there's a lot of options that are better than "let's not do it at all". Shrugs has picked one and I think it's all the better for it.
From a UX perspective, it could be useful to have different windows with different recurrent/common conversations. I always interact with the same people and channels, and I find myself constantly Cmd-K to those convos. If I could have several chat windows, I'd just arrange them on my second monitor and have the top-3 laying out there, so I just rotate my head, focus on the right convo, type and submit.
Same as for reading, sometimes I just receive a quick message (like: "changes deployed"). I have to Cmd-K, losing focus of my current conversation just to switch to the other window and see that.
The UI would be the same except the tab would be fixed a specific conversation. Perhaps worth an experiment. I know the purist UX view would want to adapt it to then make the new tabs seamless and so on but I would expect most users just really want to have tabs per conversation or chat or thread and be able to cycle tabs instead of cycling conversations using shortcuts. You are discounting how much comfort the brain gets from a mental model you are used to, and the most common app for people to use is the web browser, which works with tabs for conceptual separation of topics, which is a great analog to different conversations or threads.
The commenter said they worked at Slack in the Desktop app team. He quoted the app page where it says that Shrugs.app supports multiple windows because it's a native app and said that nothing prevented Electron (or the official Slack app) to have multiple windows. It was just that they decided not to do it because of UX reasons.
