Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mark the life of Slack for Windows Phone Users of the Windows Phone incarnation of the popular collaborative messaging platform Slack have been advised to look elsewhere. The latest update of the application arrived last week, with a message warning that this was it. There would be no further tweaks. Slack's support site agreed. Though it'll remain available in …
I fail to see how attention grabbing as a service is in any way desirable. We now have letters and e-mail, we can now communicate with eachother in non-synchronous ways. One can ask a question while the other one can react at any time they choose. This is one of the greatest improvement in human communication.
Slack on the other hand is just a bad copy of IRC with disadvantages mimicking the telephone network.
Perhaps when it was called Windows CE.
Trying to give desktop & Mobile the same branding and UI was madness.
The tablet ARM vs x86 versions even crazier. The only compelling reason for Windows is x86 legacy application compatibility. Also applications like Sage at one end and Adobe Creative stuff at the other end.
Or full fat Outlook for meetings etc (stupid for eMail only) with corporate Exchange server.
It was the application in the microsoft store--I.E. it was running on windows 10 mobile (maybe windows phone 8.1 too, but I haven't checked). Frequently, windows 10 mobile is still called windows phone, both because microsoft has been known to do it and the fact that windows 10 mobile sounds weird. Windows mobile was a thing, but it is nothing like windows 10 mobile. Meanwhile, windows 10 mobile and windows 10 are alike only in that they require too much background junk and have cortana on them. Windows 10 mobile and windows phone run on similar devices, in some case the same devices, made by Nokia two to four years ago (they are still making them, right? I haven't really heard anything about it). Hence, windows phone can refer quite clearly to the latest windows thing that runs on phones.
By porting Microsoft apps to iOS and Android, Microsoft had already given up on phones. I still remember the days when Steve Ballmer was boasting how Windows Phone OS was so much better for enterprise and productivity stuff, become only it has the Office apps.
Microsoft is pimping its Surface notebook/tablets and an occasional overpriced desktop computer, to lure potential customers away from Apple Mac OSX offerings and Windows computers made by OEMs such as Lenovo, Dell, HP etc.
Yeah, really.
Their app offerings are total garbage anyway. (Which is not entirely surprising for a company that exists purely to increase the noise to signal ratio for employees and other sad, unfortunate types who have to deal with their shit.)
I use the Slack desktop app (mainly in an effort to reduce the browser tabs I have open) and if you get sent a message over a certain (pretty fucking small) size it tells you to open it in a web browser to view the whole thing.
I've lost count of the number of times I've told it to *not* start when I log in too.
In fact, fuck it... It's getting uninstalled right now. Piece of shit that it is.
The desktop app is really appalling with memory usage through the roof. I am, for my consulting sins, on 7 slacks at the moment, and if I tried to log into all of them on desktop I wouldn't be looking at change for 1.5gb of memory. Given the toolkit used you effectively do still have a browser tab open for each Slack, and another browser instance to boot.
By contrast the Android app is pretty reasonable - they seem to be able to unload conversations you aren't looking at and then load them up quickly when you switch to view them. There isn't even a loading screen full of stupid quotes from your team or the slack team anywhere to be seen.
"It may be time for Windows Phone holdouts to finally face the inevitable and make the sad shuffle to a platform from the likes of Google or Apple."
I was already starting the sad shuffle last year... but the iPhone X is the only worthy successor (in my mind), and is priced at least 4x higher than my Windows Phone originally cost. :/
And by fickle, I mean:
• The alarm goes off whenever it feels like it... 3:00 am... no prob!
• When I launch Outlook, it bounces right back to the home screen in about 1 of 3 attempts.
• When someone calls, it might ring... or it might not. (OK... could be the carrier).
• It typically freezes at least once per week, which then requires removal of the battery. (At least the battery is removable and replaceable by me...no such luck with an iPhone).
I wish I had not bought into Steve Ballmer's wild claim about superior snogging within the Windows environment.
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