Newsletter
Collaboration and communication app Slack, made to allow quick and easy communication between teams and on different projects, has complied with Material Design and used a hamburger menu to access different areas of the app for a while. While this works great on phones, it results in some wasted screen real estate on larger tablets. Google has been pushing developers as far back as 2013 to adopt a more intuitive user interface for tablets, rather than having tablet apps simply be upscaled phone apps. Having been on Android for a good while, they’ve finally made good on that directive, and have rolled out a pretty nice tablet user interface in their latest update.
For tablets that support it, or for enterprising root users that change around their DPI settings on certain devices, Slack now shows the contents of the hamburger menu full-time, allowing quick and painless switching between channels and individual conversations. A handy search bar is also present, with more options further down the menu. While the new UI is only officially shown on larger tablets, it can be accessed through certain root tweaks on smaller devices. As a further boost to tablet users, those with a hardware keyboard or who are using a supported software keyboard can now press CTRL + K to quickly access the channel switching menu.
While the new tablet UI is certainly the flagship feature of the release, as with any other beta app update, users get a few extra features and some under the hood fixes as well. In this particular version, a bug that previously caused trouble for disconnected users hopping back on has been fixed, and users should no longer have messages disappearing on them in this scenario. Adding team members to private channels will now net you a prompt to either add the user as you were going to, keeping channel history, or to create a whole new private channel, helping to keep slip-ups involving privileged information within organizations to a minimum. The update is currently rolling out via the Play Store to all users who are opted in to receive beta updates of Slack.
