We’ve added some new features to Flowdock, the team messenger, to help you communicate with specific members of your team more efficiently.
Display names
Firstly, all users can now specify a unique display name, which is the name that will be shown to other users in the flow. You can change the display name in your edit account page any time you want.
Highlights in the chat
If someone mentions your name in the chat, the line will be highlighted so you can spot important messages more easily. Also, highlighted messages will appear in the dashboard so you can see them even if you missed them while being out of Flowdock. Now when you ask somebody in your team an important question you can be quite sure you’ll get an answer even if you don’t have time to chat at the same time.
@User tags
The third major new feature is the addition of @user tags. They behave just like other tags, but they are specially linked to the users in the flow. For example, the team leader, Alice, wants to assign an email in the flow to another member, called Bob. Alice clicks the little tag icon beside the message and writes “@Bob” to the field that appears over the message. Instantly after that, Bob will see the message in his Dashboard and can start working on the task.
As with other tags, you can use the @user tags anyway you want. Use them for emulating an issue tracker or just pointing your team member’s attention to a single message. Just remember, tagging with @user tags means that the information is somehow important to the team member.
Remember to give feedback!
We are constantly improving Flowdock and this update is just a starting point for a better way of organizing your conversations. We need your feedback to make Flowdock better, so tell us what you think about these new features. To give feedback, you can use the feedback form in the Dashboard, add new ideas to our UserVoice page or email us at team@flowdock.com.
Bonus: Flowdock tips
Autocomplete names when writing chat messages and comments
Write a couple of letters from the beginning of your team member’s display name and press the tab key to fill the rest.
Better-looking code snippets in the chat
Paste a bunch of code to the chat input field, select it all with Cmd-A or Ctrl-A and press the tab key to indent it. Indented lines will be displayed with a monospace font and white-space will be preserved.
Click on any tag to search with Flowser
All tags, including @user tags, now link to Flowser searches so you can quickly navigate between your organized messages.
This is great! Thanks for the brilliant service.
Please add a message though when “John is typing…” – that’d be really useful.
Nice new features, and highly desired. Does it track if the person changed their display name? So if someone tags with @Kris and I change my display name to @Setok, will the tags follow me? Otherwise changing a nick is a bit risky!
@Kristoffer Lawson: Highlighted messages and @user tags actually stay attached to the user even if the display name is changed. So feel free to change your display name even after you’ve used these new features.
When I send a Gmail to Main@etcetcetc.flowdock.com and it contains text, inserted images (JPEG’s), and photo captions, all that displays at the Flowdock end is the text. The photos and captions don’t appear. Yes, I can send images, etc. as attachments and there isn’t a problem, but then the pix are separated from both their captions and the accompanying and complementary narrative.
Am I doing something wrong or is this not possible? (I was sure I’d done it before, without issues).
Otherwise, like the new tweaks!
@GITANAJAVA:
We haven’t done any changes to inline image handling lately. Could you please send one of these problematic e-mails to our team@ address as well, so we can analyze what’s wrong.