Slack for Desktop 4+

Good but could be great :)

Like this chat app a lot. Saves me a lot of time with its built-in features as well as the available integrations. Also a big fan of the styling, makes work chat less boring!

However, noticed with recent update that the "Slack Helper" processes are chugging CPU time, so much so that the fans on my top-spec Macbook Pro run on medium to high. Didn’t have this issue before so I’m sure this is an optimization they just need to make.

One thing I would LOVE to see is the ability to “sleep” a group, so that it didn’t have to be always running in the background. For someone like me, who uses Slack for 9 different groups, having each of those chats actively run leads to each spinning up a Slack Helper process that consumes a fair amount of CPU. Would love to be able to “sleep” less important chats e.g. disable background updates for those groups until I explicitly “un-sleep” it. This would primarily be used for chats of lower priority than others.

Developer Response ,

Interesting idea about "sleeping" a workspace! You've given us some great food for thought here— thanks for sharing this with us!

Good chat app, just a few annoying things

Overall Slack is a good messaging/chat/sharing app. Plenty of useful things within the threads or PMs. Nice feature to delete messages and it archives shared images and docs automatically.
One annoying bit is the lack of a dark theme for the main message area. Seriously, how hard is it to adjust the style sheet? I’ve read that Slack is just a glorified Chrome app. Older versions of slack could be hacked to display better, why not the latest? Seriously, this looks like amateur hour. Update: Slack got back to me stating this is on their radar. Yeah, far as I know it’s been “on the radar” for years. Come on guys, just do it.
Second is the channel ordering on the sidebar. The “scienfific” ordering bears absolutely no resemblance to how I use the channels. All I want is the channels I use most frequently at the top. And those with unread or tagged messages filtered higher to the top. Right now the placement seems random. My most common channel usually makes it to position 1 or 2, but the rest are all over the list, Channels I have never posted to show up higher than ones I use most every day. If I reply to a message in a channel it usually drops to the bottom of the list.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for the feedback. We do not have an ETA to share, but we do have dark mode on our radar. So sorry it’s taken so long! With regards to channel sorting, apologies that the scientific method is not reflecting how you use Slack. Perhaps starring these most used channels could help. You can read more about that here: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201331016-Star-channels-messages-or-files#star-a-channel-or-dm.

Priceless tool

This is a game changer for my digital marketing agency. We use it every day and a lot of my clients are now using it too. I love all the free features it comes with but it be great if I have more privacy features for my team and clients. Because each user has a profile with contact details, it prevents me from mixing my teams together with other teams and clients. I have to create several Slack accounts for different teams/clients. I don't need my clients contacting everyone directly or vise versa. For paid, because I work with such a large team it would be too expensive to upgrade. But if I could pay a flat fee $20 up $50 a month just for that feature (ideally $25) I would pay to keep my team's contact details private and limit use of DM between each other and clients so I can add clients and team members to one channel and limit what my clients can do and DM. To pay per account is not realistiic, it's way too many people. Please add this feature it would be so great and I would pay a flat fee for it! :) I'm still giving 5 stars because the value deserves it. This would just take it to the next level.