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Pie
p/pie-3
Chat for work
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Pieter Walraven
Pie for Android 1.0 — Deliciously simple chat for work
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Thijs Jacobs
Maker
Hi - I'm Thijs - I worked on the design for this. Ask Me Anything... For Android, we went all in on Material Design - I, for one, am really excited about Google's evolved design thinking for Android. It's fresh, clean and possibly a tiny bit 'Scandinavian'. Material Design, compared to iOS, really requires a shift in mindset for designers, with a strong preference for white-space, top-heavy navigation, smaller thinner icons, large tappable areas and, physical-like, layers (like the FAB and shadows on the UI elements). After working with Material Design, it's impossible to unsee the invisible 72dp line that runs through each and every Material Design inspired app - probably the easiest way to spot Material Design. What surprised me though, is that going with Material Design also presents a larger shift in UX thinking. Modals perform rather poorly on Android - the large amount of padding, shadows, and supersized font-/line-sizes make modals feel very different from iOS, and perhaps a bit crude. On iOS, we've been using a compact modal design as a way to quickly add coworkers to a chat, but on Android, this just doesn't work and we ended up going with full-screen views. Overall, it feels like Material Design in general prefers large full-screen feedback, whereas on iOS there's a more natural divide between navigation and content. FYI. If you want to get started with Material Design - Google's resources are simply awesome: http://www.google.com/design/
Pieter Walraven
Maker
Pie - deliciously simple chat for work - for Android turns 1.0! ^_^ This latest version has lots of new stuff and improvements. Quick replies let you send messages with a single tap or swipe, swipe down to see your latest chats (we call it the ‘WhatsApp view’), send important messages to reduce noise, ultra-fast loading & syncing + lots of tasty Duarte-inspired Material design. Curious to hear what you think!
Thijs Jacobs
Maker
@shashwatpradhan thanks! The "What new on Pie" (in Settings) shows off some of the new stuff as well.
umair awan
So its a custom solution. Did you build it using protocols like xmpp, mqtt etc?
umair awan
Excellent work! How did you guys implement chat. Is it a 3rd party or custom?
Mohit Kanwal
Maker
@umair_s_awan Technically a chat is just a stream/list of messages. However, implementing it has various factors: performance, data consistency, realtime-sync etc. So I can't advise for a one size fits all approach like a 3rd party framework that solves all of these issues. There are some prominent ones that are developed in the open community (like Telegram). As such we started with the simplest implementation and then moved on to a more complex one. Implementing your own chat system is not complicated and allows you to cater to your specific use case.
Willis Wee
Nice, Pieter :) Keep going!
Thijs Jacobs
Maker
@williswee Cheers Willis ;)
Yoav Anaki
Hi guys! Pie looks really cool. How do you compete in a space which is sort of dominated by Slack and maybe Hipchat? How do you differentiate?
Thijs Jacobs
Maker
@yoavanaki thanks Yoav!! Slack, and HipChat, are awesome products - especially if you're a tech company and use lots of other tech services. We're not competing with them though - people that sign up for Pie are using WhatsApp, WeChat or LINE for work. A bit like using Hotmail for work... We try to deliver the same ease-of-use, speed, and fun, as the best consumer apps, and layer on useful, yet simple, features -like in-line links, files and stunningly large images- that make you more productive at work.
Lester Chan
Nice! Angelo work on this as well?
Thijs Jacobs
Maker
@gamerz yup - he sure did.
Pieter Walraven
Maker
@gamerz he certainly did! :)
Angelo Rohit
Maker
@gamerz To reiterate, I sure did! Working on Pie for Android has been a great learning experience for me. The epic team at Pie will testify to the fact that I have, in fact, learnt nothing. *insert Jon Snow meme*