>I eventually turned off Slack notifications entirely, after experimenting with many different variations. @here is an abomination; notifications in each "other Slack instance" need to be set separately; it spams your @#$!! phone with every single message anyone types, even while you're on your PC. Forget it, notification privileges revoked, and I've been much happier since.<p>Eh, I've found Slack to be highly competent at presence management, when it's working correctly, which is most of the time. It's usually smart enough to know I've walked away from my computer, and to start pushing the notifications to my phone instead, and then stop again. And I'm pretty sure it dismisses its own mobile notifications once I've cleared them on desktop, too.<p>> Third, it's highly integrated, not to say bundled, with Calendar, to the point where it obnoxiously auto-schedules a Hangouts meeting id even for your team lunch.<p>This is a setting in your GSuite Admin panel.<p>Also, I feel like Hangouts Meet (the evolution of Hangouts itself) is a much better product in general, and the Hangouts Meet Hardware is surprisingly decent, if expensive. Hangouts even has auto-captioning, which is kind of cool!<p>Surprised the author didn't call out Slack video calls. They're... also decent! And baked right into Slack! (So no incremental cost!) But they only work for meetings with people in your Slack workspace, so that's a bit auto-limiting.
Missing from the list of videoconferencing tools: Google Meet. Hands-down the best and most reliable tool we've used because it "just works", and is already included in GSuite so there's no extra subscription to deal with. Probably spend at least one hour per day using it and can't remember having any trouble with it, ever.<p>The app works even in unrealiable network conditions and somehow doesn't skip a beat when switching between wifi and mobile network.<p>The only annoyance is not being able to share a single screen on Linux, but that's a Chrome limitation.
"Airpods (when connected to iPhones or iPads) have very low latency, not detectable by humans. " "Linux bluetooth is hahahahaha sorry I forgot what I was going to say."<p>Makes me seriously doubt any other latency measurement done by him.<p>The AirPods (even when connected to an iPhone) are said to have a latency of around 250ms [1] with the Pros having around half of that, 120ms. This makes both of them terrible as far as wireless headsets go. Even within Bluetooth headsets, the original AirPods are absolutely terrible, with the Pro now being in a much better position, but still nowhere near "low latency".<p>No surprises, since AAC is nowhere near a low-latency codec (this is not AAC-LD, it is plain old AAC-LC). The latency actually _improves_ when connected to BlueZ [my experience], likely because SBC is actually a much better codec when properly configured, something that few Bluetooth stacks do [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/22/airpods-latency-test/" rel="nofollow">https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/22/airpods-latency-test/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://habr.com/en/post/456182/" rel="nofollow">https://habr.com/en/post/456182/</a> <a href="https://habr.com/en/post/456476/" rel="nofollow">https://habr.com/en/post/456476/</a><p>On another topic 150-200ms of latency is definitely human noticeable, even for me, that I don't have very good hearing nor reflexes. Still I would say most likely not noticeable in a meeting room environment, except for one-person videoconference.
I don't think Keybase is getting a fair shake in this post. The author is using the ChromeOS Android app. This seems like a fairly unusual setup, but maybe Chromebooks are more popular than I think? Plus the low amount of memory in Chromebooks guarantees that this is probably not going to turn out well.<p>Most people are going to use the Electron App on either Mac, Windows, or Linux on a laptop with a decent amount of memory. Also, the part about no "GitHub integrations" is false too, because I'm looking right at githubbot that is maintained by the Keybase team. Maybe it doesn't support all the things the author is looking to do, but that is different than saying there is no GitHub integration at all.
I'm curious why people want to have work slack available on their phones. I can imagine some specific roles where it may be useful, but in general... why? I can't imagine it being more than an extra distraction. What's the use case for it?<p>I'm asking because I've seen many people complaining about the phone notifications from their work.
I expected this article to be about the downsides of being forced to work from home (possibly due to recent events). But it's just a list of 4 SaaS tools that this company happens to use. And they just happen to be fully remote. I don't see the correlation.<p>Any chance of changing the title to something more...I don't know, accurate? It's a good write-up otherwise and I enjoy these kinds of posts.
At my employer we've used Skype, Lync, Slack, Teams, Slack again, Zoom for our meetings and whilst some have started to become OK now (Slack and Teams), it's laughable to me how bad the voice experience still can be considering how this has been a solved problem in the gaming community for what, 15 years?<p>Today? If I could choose, I'd just use Discord. The only annoying limitation is the 10 people screenshare/Go Live limit but that's only really a problem for company-wide meetings but thankfully in my case they're usually not very, ahem, informative (and thus not essential), plus they get recorded anyway.
As a long time (paid) user of whereby (aka appear.in) I've been pretty disappointed by recent changes. You used to be able to visit appear.in/anything and get a room. Now there is an explicit and annoying "create a room" step. It's still much simpler than Zoom, which is why I still pay for it, but if someone created a service with "the old appear.in experience" I'd switch a heartbeat.
> We're using Notion as a team wiki and note taking app. It's ... okay. I mean, it's probably the best tool for the job, and it's great in some ways, but it's severely limited in others.<p>Has anyone had experience using Org Mode files in a Git repo to achieve the same effect as Notion or a team wiki? Seems like it checks many of the same boxes (forgive the pun): todo lists, easy links, hierarchy, tables, Kanban (with org-kanban), formatting. I think that it would address the issues, too: ‘show me what changed’ would just be git diff, comments could live in comment blocks, todo lists and reminders are rather insanely powerful & flexible, and it’s very extensible and, of course, free software.
> The "show me what changed" view is nearly useless; tons of updates about tiny clutter changes, but no good way to give me a deduplicated list of all the docs that changed. Virtually any wiki's RecentChanges view is better.<p>We use Quip (<a href="https://quip.com/" rel="nofollow">https://quip.com/</a>), it's very equal to Notion.so, and suffers from the same issue. But Quip has a small API, and every hour i just grab my stared documents, flatten them to plain text and `diff` them. Changes are sent to email by a cron job. <a href="https://github.com/torvald/quipdiff" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/torvald/quipdiff</a>
Has anyone managed to replicate the linked Gmail guide[1] on Thunderbird? I currently am able to reply+archive[2] some emails, but the todo emails hang around in my inbox till I complete the task and then archive them.<p>Ideally, I would like to not see the ToDo emails till I am ready to look at them.<p>[1] <a href="https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more" rel="nofollow">https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-...</a><p>[2] Ctrl+R, compose reply, Ctrl+Enter to send, A to archive message.
Having spent two decades in online meetings and conf calls with many partner companies, both SME's and Corporates, in my experience the only thing that 'just works' right of the bat under all circumstances is GoToMeeting [1].<p>For in-company meetings you can of course use whatever you feel comfortable with, but when it comes to large meetings with many external parties, some of which will phone in, many of which are very restricted in what they are allowed on their computer, nothing beats GoToMeeting (no affiliation), and I have tried or been forced to try a lot of different solutions.<p>For email we use O365/Outlook. Although I use GMail for personal/family stuff, I find the Outlook client still beats everything else out there for business matters, and O365 mail has been pretty solid the last few years.<p>As for planning, notes, follow up, tracking etc. We use Tasks in a Box [2] (full disclosure, I am affiliated with an investor in this company). It integrates very well with Outlook and has been pain free and solid since the 2018 release.<p>I don't like Slack, nor Teams. Skype used to be fine for persisted chats but they ruined it. I'd love Discord for business. I use it with colleagues and some like-minded companies, but as of now it is not acceptable for many businesses.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gotomeeting.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.gotomeeting.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://tasksinabox.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tasksinabox.com/</a>
Another one for the videoconferencing is AWS Chime. It pretty much just works. It doesn't try to be an amazing product on its own which makes it free from weird features and bloat. The best one I've used so far.