Many people switching from 37 Signals’ Campfire to HipChat have asked for an easier way to update the scripts they use to send notification messages to their rooms. Now we have one. It won’t let you configure all the fields we support (like sender name) but should provide a helpful starting point.
By the way, we already have integrations with GitHub, Pivotal Tracker, and other services as well as libraries to help you build your own.
Welcome to HipChat!
UPDATE: We are no longer looking for new beta testers – we’ve had a great response from existing users! Version 1.0 of the app is now available in the App Store. Please feel free to download and rate it. We hope it improves your HipChat mobile experience.
We’re getting near the end of our iPhone app development and are looking for current HipChat users interested in beta testing. If you want to get an early sneak peek at the app and are willing to provide feedback and submit crash reports, drop us a line at support@hipchat.com. All that we need is the device ID from your iPhone (and your name, of course) so we can add you to our list of testers. You can find instructions on how to get that data at Distributing Applications on the Apple developer docs (just search for “sending your device ID”).
Thanks – we’re looking forward to getting the app out ASAP!
As some of you may know, there are dozens of secret emoticons in HipChat. We haven’t released the list publicly because it’s more fun that way (at least to us).
In the holiday spirit we’ll let you in on a few new ones we’ve added.
(present) - 
(menorah) - 
(kwanzaa) - 
(tree) - 
(santa) - 
(rudolph) - 
But wait! There’s more! You may recognize those last two from a classic stop-motion holiday movie. There are two more characters from the film available. Can you guess what they are? Here’s a hint: one loves silver and gold, the other is abominable.
If you haven’t signed out of HipChat in a while, you may need to restart your client in order to see them.
Happy Holidays!
Hot on the heels of our last big release, we have some cool new features in our latest update to tell you about.
YouTube and Twitter link previews
When you share a link in a room to a YouTube video or Twitter message/account, we now automatically show a preview inline under the link. We use this to help us keep track of what people are saying about HipChat in our ‘PR’ room. We also added previews for images shared through the CloudApp service (which we’re big fans of).
What else would you like to see previews of? Add a comment or contact us.
Pam is typing...
When you’re in a one-to-one conversation with someone you’ll now see a notification of when that person is typing. Happy chatting!
We’re excited to announce a pair of features that we’ve had lots of requests for: guest access for chat rooms and video calling for one-to-one chats.
With guest access, you’re now able to invite people outside your company to chat without requiring them to sign up for an account. You just check the guest access toggle, give them the URL, and they can enter their name and start chatting with you in a matter of seconds.
There are lots of uses for guest access – from chatting with contractors and clients to offering an easy solution for live chat support. Please give it a try and send us your feedback. We’re always looking for ways to make HipChat even better. Guest access is available for Plus, Premium, and Ultimate plans.
Here’s a quick demo:
Also in this release, we present video chat for one-to-one conversations. Now, when you want to have a quick back and forth with someone without having to type everything out, you can just start up video chat and talk with them face-to-face:
Video chat with voice
Video chat is available for all plans.
Last night we released a new version of the HipChat desktop client with lots of updates, including several user requests. Among the goodies are a new, more compact lobby display, putting status icons into tabs, and dividers in chats to show breaks between days.
Other updates included some new shortcut keys (ctrl-a for beginning of line, ctrl-e for end of line, ctrl-h for delete character, ctrl-shift-z for redo), an option for hiding chat history, and a modified text layout that should make it easier to distinguish a long wrapping message from several individual messages.
As always, we’re eager to hear any feedback. You can post your thoughts at http://help.hipchat.com or send us an email directly at support@hipchat.com
We’re excited to release a feature we’ve heard many requests for (and have wanted ourselves for a while): status messages. If you use the web version or update to the latest client, you’ll see a small UI addition in your Lobby. Now, you can let everyone know whether you’re available, away, or don’t want to be disturbed. Just click the dropdown below your name in the Lobby to set your status:
Set status UI
Once you’ve chosen a status, you can also add a short message to go with it:
Status messages
For our advanced users (or anyone who just prefers the keyboard), you can also use slash commands to set your status, just type /away and then your message (we support /available, /back, /here, /away, and /dnd):
Slash commands
Enjoy! As always, send any feedback to support@hipchat.com or post a message at help.hipchat.com
We’ve had a lot of feedback here at HipChat and it’s a constant challenge to figure out what things we should do first. We always try to fit in user requests among the long list of tasks we have. Here are two of the latest updates:
Now you no longer have to save images to a file in order to upload them to HipChat. Just copy directly from your web browser or image editing program and paste into the message area in the desktop client (sorry, web users, this is a benefit only available to the desktop client right now).
We’re also letting you change the name of uploaded files, so you don’t fill your sidebar with things like “Picture 1″ or “upload.png”:
Paste an image from the clipboard
Several people have contacted us wondering how they can change a room from public to private (or vise versa). Sadly, we’ve always had to tell them the feature wasn’t availble…until now. In both the desktop client and the web, when you choose “Manage permissions” for a room (you have to be a group admin or owner of the room), it will present you with a dialog to control whether the room is public or private. Now you don’t need to send an email and wait for us to change it manually.
Change room privacy settings
Many of our updates lately have been ‘minor’ – that means you won’t be bothered by a popup window telling you it’s available. To check if there’s an update for your client you can hit ctrl/cmd-u while running HipChat. If you’re using a recent version of the client, you can also check for updates by using the top level menu on Mac (under HipChat -> Check For Updates…), or the system tray icon on Windows (right-click and choose Check For Updates).
Many of our tech-savvy users have been asking us for an API for quite a while, and we’re happy to announce that it’s now available! This first release will let you browse users and rooms as well as send messages to rooms (the most requested feature). Here are some of the useful notifications our API testers have been sending to their rooms:
API messages will show up with a yellow background
Please check out the API documentation and client libraries to get started.
We’d love to hear what you think about the current API and what you’d like to see in the future. We’re also looking for people to help write client libraries in Perl, Python, Ruby, or any other language.
Use GitHub? We’re trying to get HipChat added as a GitHub service hook so you can get push notifications like in the screenshot above. Please show your support by commenting on this issue.
When we launched 3 months ago it became clear what people wanted: more ways to access HipChat! Getting your software to run an increasingly long list of platforms (we’re looking at you, iPad) is both exciting and frustrating. We take user experience very seriously and want you to enjoy using HipChat no matter where you are or what device you’re using.
Applying those standards, we’re excited to give you these new ways to use HipChat.
Web version of HipChat
Web chat, optimized for iPhone & Android
Messaging via SMS
Your honest feedback is how we continue to improve HipChat. Please give us yours in our community-powered support or contact us directly. Happy chatting!
