“This was really our first foray into this.” But it won’t be the last: Atlassian and HipChat are also working on native apps for Linux and Windows, to be launched at a later date.ĪIR, Curley said, was a great solution for HipChat in the early days, since it meant they could code once and deploy on multiple platforms, saving precious time and engineering resources. “It’s clear just the way that they’re taking AIR that we could do a lot more stuff building native apps, which AIR was just handcuffing us on,” HipChat co-founder Pete Curley explained in an interview about the switch to native. Now it’s time to come back to a standalone app, and revel in the difference. The AIR version used to quit so many times during the day that most users I know gave it up for the web version long ago. Scrolling is butter smooth, and it works with OS X’s native dictionary, spellcheck, accessibility and notification center features.īut all of these pale in comparison to what I consider HipChat for Mac’s number one greatest ability – it can now handle animated GIFs of seemingly any size, without causing a kernel panic.

It loses a heck of a lot fewer system resources, occupies less hard drive space, and has an improved layout which can handle far more open chats. It offers a number of improvements, including improved speed for things like logging in, changing rooms and tabs, typing response and more. The native HipChat app is the number one requested feature from user’s of the service, which is why it was put into the priority queue for development and arrives before native clients for other platforms. Today, the company is officially launching its native Mac client in beta form, and it’s already a complete 180 from the previous version.

HipChat has been doing some good things since it was acquired by Atlassian back in March 2012, including updating its iOS apps with much-needed improvements, but the sorry excuse for a Mac app it offered built on Adobe AIR remained a huge sore spot.

Hipchat for mac review