More Observations About The "Wire" App
December 04, 2014
Group Chats ARE Persistent
In my post yesterday I said that it seemed like Wire group chats were "persistent" (something I'd previously written about with regard to Skype). Today I can confirm that they ARE persistent. When I fired up the Wire app this morning I received all the messages that had been posted into the group chat overnight while I'd been offline.
Further, when I went to add someone to the group chat, I received this message:
The Wire team also deserves credit for how smoothly they make the scrolling back through the chat history. Works very well!
No IPv6... yet
Friends tested Wire in an IPv6-only network and confirmed that it unfortunately does not yet work. In reaching out to someone at Wire the word was that they are definitely investigating this to see what can be done. The issue is that the Wire app connects to Amazon EC2 servers - so it's really an issue of Amazon's capabilities.
I will say again that Wire at the very least deserves credit for coming out with a website, www.wire.com, what works over IPv6! That immediately puts them far ahead of most other communications startups.
The Mac OS X Client Rocks!
Wow! What a great desktop client! It works extremely well. I loved the ability to drag and drop images directly into a chat window. Calls worked great from the client. So far a great experience!
The Heavy Use Of Profile Pictures Takes Getting Used To
The profile photo you use winds up being the background for the entire screen on the mobile device - or for the sidebar in the Mac and iPad clients. And that photo changes to be of the last person with whom you communicated. Sometimes that can lead to a bit of strange user view depending upon the profile photo used. Here's one that worked fine for me:
... but others were a bit strange. The ubuiquitous presence of the photos does take a bit to get used to.
The Use Of Colors Is Fun
Wire lets you choose a color in the settings. This is then used for the highlighting and cursor color that you see. It also shows up in other places such as this listing of people:
... where it shows the colors people are using. I can see people having fun with this.
Pings Are Useful
At first I was skeptical of what a "ping" could really be useful for (remember Facebook's "Poke"?). But then a friend sent a ping while I was off in some other app - on my Mac I got this nice big box:
I could then just hit "REPLY" and flip over to the Wire app. Of course, he sent another ping and I then had the option to silence the pings:
It was a useful way to know there was something to pay attention to over in Wire. Obviously this could be abused... I've not yet checked into what settings there are to control this.
More To Explore...
I continue to be quite impressed with both the iOS and Mac versions of Wire. More thoughts as I get a chance to experiment further...
P.S. If you are using Wire, feel free to find me as "Dan York" or "[email protected]" ...
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