Philosophical question:

Is it really a bad "beta", or has your preconceived notion on what a "beta" should be been radically altered by the sheer number of startups that throw the word around now?

Gmail was in "beta" for about a million years, and was incredibly stable for most of that. I think it has become the allegorical metric these days. But I remember back in the late 90's and early 2000's when making the choice to use beta software was a decision not to be taken lightly because you probably would find tons of very easily reproducible, obvious, critical bugs.

Don't forget that before "beta" was widely used as an adjective, it was a noun and it was immediately followed by the word "test".

Agreed, that's some serious melodrama thrown at people who are just looking for help testing their app that's not ready for general release. Big deal.

I'd agree in principle, but did the email announcement might have been a bit more toned down if that was what they were thinking. I'm pretty sure they wanted some buzz.

Been using it for an hour or so and haven't run into any issues - what have you found? Just saying critical bugs is pretty unhelpful to everyone.

I used it for five minutes and found: There is no way to search for a person in the Lobby and you can't reorder the tabs. These are two things I do a lot.

Interestingly the first thing I did was re-order the tabs. Now I went back to check and I can't re-order them. Maybe that info helps the Hipchat devs out - I just trashed prefs and then you can re-order one tab. Then it stops allowing you to do this.

I had the same experience.

Those aren't bugs.

The tab thing is a bug, but it's unclear from jedberg's wording. The actual problem is that you can reorder the tabs, but only once, after which reordering stops working.

I don't do those things at all. I'm surprised you consider those critical bugs.

One day we will be big enough to need the ability to search for a person! :)

I agree on reordering tabs though - you can re-order one tab and then it locks down.

Command+N works to search for people everywhere (when it does work, the app does freak out occasionally).

Slow, crashed within minutes of using it. It's not very pretty either. I'll stick with Adium/Jabber hooks but was really hoping for something good here.

I agree - I feel like the time would have been better spent implementing Adium/Pidgin plugins first.

HipChat uses XMPP, so you can already use it with Adium/Pidgin without much trouble. The only things that are really missing by default are the syntactic sugar for @-mentioning people, HipChat's custom emoticons, and inlining of image/link previews (many of which you can fix with already-existing plugins).

And the fact that, unless you identify as "bot", you get disconnected for inactivity and reconnecting spams your logs with repeats of conversations.

Oh, and the fake roster pushes, gibberish names for guest users, and the fact that you can only join a room with your full name.

You don't need to identify as "bot", just send a keepalive message (can be a single space, XMPP ping, whatever) every 60 seconds or so. You can also request no history when joining rooms (most bot frameworks do this). It's part of the XMPP spec as well. Our roster pushes are also as in the spec, or have you found an oddity we should correct?

Joining a room with your full name can be an unexpected requirement but it really aligns with the way we enforce names on our service.

The app actually crashes each time I try to open it. You're very right, this is a terrible beta version.

I've switched from using HipChat on the web (because I didn't like the AIR version's scrolling behaviour) to the native Mac client beta and I'm really happy with it so far.

I'm on the most recent OSX version in case this might make a difference. No bugs or crashes for me so far.

What kind of bugs have you found?

There's a difference between a new beta and an app that has been in closed beta for months already and only today has been made available to the public. Just because it's 'beta' doesn't mean there should be obvious trivial bugs present.

Just to run off a few issues we found within literally minutes of using the app:

1. Resizing window to a small size then making it large again causes the entire chat view to become very narrow.

2. Messages sent by one user, often get displayed next to another person's username (so it looks like someone else wrote the message).

3. Notification popups appears even when the app is actively being viewed.

4. If you go away from keyboard, the app sets you as idle, but when you return, the idle indicator doesn't get removed

I could go on and on...

++ on the notifications. my biggest beef with hipchat is it will send emails of conversations as i am having the conversations. email notifications when I am away is nice, kind of annoying when you are actively typing in the window.