Slack is available in beta stages on Windows 10 and Windows Phone devices. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a collaboration platform allowing you to communicate with your co-workers and team mates and collaborate on the status of your projects. Recently, the beta app picked up a big update for both Windows 10 and Windows Phone devices.
The Windows Phone version is merely a bug fixes update, fixing problems related to the company’s Slackbot and direct messages. As for Windows 10, the new update brings a handful of new features such swipe gestures support for people running touchscreen-enable Windows 10 devices and much more. It’s not just about new features, the developer has squashed a few bugs to make the app more stable and user-friendly.
Here’s the complete change log of all the new features and bug fixes for Slack’s Windows app:
What’s New
- If you’re connected through a proxy server or otherwise require in-browser authentication, you’re in luck. This release will let you login directly from the app.
- Like a pair of newlyweds, we compared swatches for days and finally decided on new shades for the team sidebar. Light themes, such as Hoth, are much easier on the eyes. As an added bonus, the sidebar now uses the default system font, which we found to be 37% more legible.
- A litany of improvements to make navigating channel history more reliable: a new History menu; fixes to the
Alt-LeftandAlt-Righthotkeys; even navigate using your mouse! (Provided it has the right buttons).- As if the history changes weren’t enough, we’ve also added support for swipe gestures for touchscreens (if swiping is a thing you do). Swiping two fingers left or right will cycle through your channel history, and swiping three fingers will cycle through your teams.
Fixed
- Blocking some third-party content could prevent our app from loading, leaving you staring– longingly– at our startup screen forever and ever.
- Losing network no longer takes you to the offline screen. Instead, we’ll keep displaying your messages and try to reconnect in the background.
- Links in Posts will open in your default browser, not in a new Slack window. Unless of course, it’s a link to another Post. Ingenious!
- The app window now has a minimum size, to avoid certain squished scenarios that were unpleasant for all involved.
- Clicking on the desktop shortcut or pinned taskbar icon will resume Slack if left running in your tray. As opposed to doing nothing.
- An intriguing crash caused by generating code on the fly has been fixed by generating that code much, much earlier. Like, before we give you the app.
- The Launch app on login preference is 100% more functional on Linux.
- A confusing bug where dragging a file onto the app would try navigate to it, resulting in inscrutable error messages instead of your team’s messages, should happen much less often. Fingers crossed.
Here’s a list of bugs fixed in the latest Windows Phone release:
- Fixed: a bug where a particular users, with a particular set SSO settings (requiring an alternate flow) never could sign in. Which took the SO out of SSO. SO: We fixed it.
- Fixed: After starting a new DM with two or more members, duplicate group conversations could appear in the channel list, which was confusing. It is now less confusing.
- Fixed: Slackbot was showing up at the bottom of the channel list instead of, like everywhere else, being the first channel under Direct Messages. We asked Slackbot to stop shifting about willy nilly and stay in one place. Slackbot agreed.
Head over to the Window Store using the link below to grab the updated Slack (beta) app for Windows and Windows 10 Mobile.
