[HN Gopher] Show HN: Screen - screen sharing for remote work, by...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Screen - screen sharing for remote work, by the cofounder
of Screenhero
Author : jsherwani
Score : 259 points
Date : 2020-03-24 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (screen.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (screen.so)
| ganstyles wrote:
| Nice! I've been using screen for many years, switched to tmux
| though as I thought it was easier to manage.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Zing! I see what you did there :D
| hashamali wrote:
| How does this compare with Tuple (https://tuple.app/)?
| Interestingly, Tuple was inspired by Screenhero and motivated by
| it's closure.
| jsherwani wrote:
| I can't speak to other products and their performance, but
| we've worked hard on performance and wide platform support
| (Mac, Windows, Linux apps to host screen shares, and web
| support for joining meetings). Do try Screen and let us know
| what you think!
| mritchie712 wrote:
| why can't you speak to other products?
| frizkie wrote:
| This was my immediate thought as well. The obvious benefit, and
| the thing that I think holds Tuple back the most - is that
| Tuple only supports macOS. That, and they don't seem to have
| taken the pandemic as an opportunity to lower prices at all.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| why would they lower prices when people need the product
| more?
| frizkie wrote:
| Because when the barrier to entry is getting your company
| to spend more money to try a product that you've never used
| before, it might help to sacrifice a little bit of revenue
| up front in order to keep them as a customer in the future.
|
| That's how I see it, at least.
| bluebur wrote:
| Just tried it out and it works great! It seems to be fast enough
| so pair programming can work and gettinf started was
| straightforward. I would maybe like to see a feature where you
| could disable someone's access (kind ok f like silence, but for
| yhe multiplayer control). Can't wait to try it out for real this
| week.
| jsherwani wrote:
| We've heard this feature request a few times, so it'll likely
| make its way into the product soon.
| marcinzm wrote:
| At work we use USE Together but it's not too tolerant of
| intermittent internet connection issues (ie: WiFi in any
| congested area). I wonder if Screen is any better on that front.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Screen has worked really well for us and a handful of companies
| that use us daily in our private beta. If you do have any
| issues, let us know and we'll fix them asap!
| jsherwani wrote:
| Just to address the naming issue -- we (myself and the other
| engineer, that comprise the entire Screen team) honestly have not
| used GNU Screen for more than 5 years, and didn't even remember
| it existed until today's post. I'm sorry for the oversight, but
| this is the point of a public beta -- to help us unearth issues
| we may have overlooked ourselves!
|
| I'm open to finding a new name -- in fact, a few days ago, I had
| reached out to Slack to see if they'd be open to letting us use
| the Screenhero name since they're not using it. If that doesn't
| work out, and and there's still significant distaste for the
| name, we'll change it. 99.9% of the time we've spent to get here
| has been on the product, getting it to work on all the platforms
| it supports, and making sure it's performant and fast. The 0.01%
| of time we've spent on getting our name and domain is something
| I'm happy to revisit before our GA release.
| vntok wrote:
| Don't bother, the people who you are going to sell this product
| to have never heard of the GNU utility and they do not care the
| least about it. You'll be just fine.
| phil_folrida wrote:
| You are right, it is odd (at least I think of it is), people
| don't really care about the name, though to be fair some
| people really think it is important, .com is so important, ok
| it is true for you, but reality is nobody cares, just focus
| on the product capabilties.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Totally agree. The people who have heard of GNU screen will
| learn the difference and those that haven't are blissfully
| unaware.
| abraae wrote:
| And if you do change, don't change to Windows.
| tjoff wrote:
| One thing I hated with GNU screen was how hard it was to
| google. I knew there was a certain fix for a special edge-
| case but the generic name made it hard to search for.
|
| This project don't even have the GNU keyword to help.
|
| I guess this is an aspect where search engines are much
| better today, to get the context. But still, the issue
| remains.
| fangorn wrote:
| What about the remaining 0.09% ? ;)
| jsherwani wrote:
| Good catch! Hopefully our product is better than my math :D
| lightwin wrote:
| I see what you did there ;)
| drenginian wrote:
| The name is too generic. Think searchability.
|
| What was that product name? Screenmaster screenlord turboscreen
| are all more likely to get potential customers to remember and
| find you.
|
| It's a terrible name as is.
| rvz wrote:
| Perhaps Slack was a terrible name then, maybe Zoom was also
| extremely generic as well and couldn't get any users or
| customers to find them. /s
|
| All your other suggestions are even more horrific, you might
| as well call it TurboScreenMaster 3000.
|
| 'Screen' and 'Screen Inc' is fine as it is.
| pfranz wrote:
| When I have issues like this when searching my next search
| is usually "slack chat" or "zoom video." Now that they're
| popular, you don't need these qualifiers. What would
| someone add to "screen"? "screen sharing"?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I don't know if I'm a weirdo but I am _so_ interested in
| learning about TurboScreenMaster 3000, but it needs to be
| inherently at least as good as BattleChess 3000 and Class
| of 3000
| wilg wrote:
| Forget GNU Screen, we recently launched a professional video
| player called Screen. Check it out!
|
| https://videovillage.co/screen/
| jsherwani wrote:
| Looks great! :D
| Androider wrote:
| The name is great, as is the slack command /screen, just keep
| using it. Saying this as a user of GNU Screen. It's OK,
| approximately nobody is going to be confused by this in the
| real world.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I first expected a "screen -x" tutorial (which attaches
| multiple clients to the same session; screen sharing, if you
| will) when skimming HN titles, but yeah the "by the cofounder
| of X" tipped me off when I read a little closer. Going to be
| hard to google, though. For reasons unrelated to GNU screen,
| I dislike product names that appear in a dictionary with the
| most common words. Not saying that /screen would be a bad
| Slack alias or whatever, so long as that isn't taken why not,
| but as a product name there might be a nice thing to tack on
| that you can abbreviate to Screen but still allows you to
| google for the right thing or clarify when someone is
| confused.
| enilsen16 wrote:
| Tried to install on Arch. Excited for to test the product(loved
| screenhero) but the installation is a pain. Would be great if
| there was a AUR package.
| jsherwani wrote:
| We'd ideally like to create one or two distributions that are
| most widely useful, instead of having to support every single
| option out there -- we picked Snap for this reason. Slack also
| supports Snap + Debian as their only two options, from what I
| understand.
|
| Could you please post this as a feature request on
| https://support.screen.so so we can follow up with you and
| update you on our progress?
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| Everyone seems to be talking about the name, and for the life of
| me I can't figure out why. I'm well aware of GNU screen, but it
| hadn't come to mind until I saw all the comments. Keep the name--
| or don't; maybe ask someone who know more about marketing than
| most engineers ;)
|
| Now I've been doing it as well... What I really wanted to say is
| thank you for launching this product in a time where it's
| desperately needed by many people and making it free. You said
| elsewhere that you're bootstrapped and I really don't want to
| think of the server costs coming your way, so I seriously do
| commend you.
|
| One thing I always do first with products like this is take a
| look at the privacy policy: I probably care more than the average
| person, but I feel like people, or at least companies and
| institutions, also care quite a lot in Germany. The policy
| mentions that video data is transferred through third parties and
| not stored, but as far as I can tell it doesn't say anything
| about whether the data is analyzed in real time nor about the
| privacy policies of the third parties applying (or not). I want
| to assume the best and I understand that legalese can be a kind
| of a pain, but it would be wonderful to get some clarification
| here.
| jsherwani wrote:
| It's exactly as you described -- no one in the chain is
| analyzing the content of the data being transferred. Both our
| infrastructure providers (Daily is our primary, Twilio is an
| opt-in secondary) care deeply about security, and both are used
| even in healthcare settings.
|
| If you have suggestions of what we can say and do to make this
| better, please let me know. I will be looking into improving
| the language before we do our GA launch.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| Wonderful to hear, thank you for the reply! Given this I'll
| be sure to pitch this at work, I think it looks like a
| wonderful solution.
|
| While I do take a lot of interest in law, I am by no means a
| lawyer. Personally, I would feel good about: "Neither Screen
| nor these third parties store or record media data as part of
| the Service, nor process it other than necessary to provide
| the Service to you."
|
| I'm sure corporate will have opinions on this when I propose
| it, and I'll be sure to pass those on. As an additional point
| of feedback, it would be wonderful if you listed payment
| options somewhere. Although maybe it's an artefact of your
| early launch or by design that you don't.
|
| EDIT: changed "our Service" to "the Service" above for
| consistency
| quartz wrote:
| Just tried this out, really cool concept and something we want at
| our 100% remote company. Sadly it didn't work out for us on the
| first test.
|
| Here's our experience in case it's helpful:
|
| Signup:
|
| - There's no concept of user provisioning or inviting users, so
| when I first signed up and started a session in slack everyone
| was a little confused about if they needed to individually sign
| up or if they should be expecting an invite to their corp email.
|
| - I'd also like some degree of user management at a corp level if
| for no other reaosn consolidated billing and basic auditing.
|
| Screensharing:
|
| - One of our cofounders is on linux and tried to do a
| screenshare. He has 3 monitors hooked up and even though screen
| asked him which monitor to share, it still shared all 3 at once.
|
| - On my side from a macbook as a viewer the app wedged all 3 of
| his monitors into view on my tiny 13" monitor and this completely
| destroyed the aspect ratio of each of his monitors (ha, it's
| really hard to write this without using the word screen), also
| the resolution was super low, likely because one of his monitors
| was showing a twitch video and the screen app was trying to keep
| up.
|
| - I tried zooming in on the one monitor where he had code open
| and it was super pixelated.
|
| - I tried drawing and there was a very noticeable delay for both
| of us even though we're both on high speed connections.
|
| - I tried to take screenshots of all this but every screenshot I
| took just resulted in a grey image (not sure if screen
| intentionally blocks screenshots but they're pretty important for
| us).
|
| ...sadly there was no way for us to do anything like remote
| debugging under these conditions. Will keep an eye out for
| updates since this is something we really want!
|
| Systems: Mac OS 10.15.2, Arch (Manjaro)
| [deleted]
| jsherwani wrote:
| Sorry about that!
|
| Looks like a bug in our Linux multi-monitor code. I'm going to
| look into this right now! It's been a while since we touched
| that code, and it's likely that bugs may have crept in since
| then.
|
| Also, corp level user management is something we've got in the
| works, but we wanted to get the product out so that people
| could start using it, and then add admin tools on top of that.
| For instance, if you're on G Suite, everyone should be able to
| OAuth in. But I hear you on the need for better tooling around
| users.
|
| Were you able to try screen sharing from your Mac to his Linux
| computer?
| quartz wrote:
| Yep I believe mac -> linux was fine but we didn't do much
| deep testing in that direction.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| Two things:
|
| 1) GNU Screen exists and people use it everyday to do something
| similar. 2) Why do you mention that started Screenhero and that
| Slack acquired that company in the banner? That's great for you,
| it just comes off a little haughty, because it's pretty
| irrelevant to a new user reading about this product imo
| burrows wrote:
| Are the screenhero guys making you feel like a little man? It's
| okay little man.
| jsherwani wrote:
| This is day 1 of our public beta, and we're looking for
| feedback on things we may not have considered. The name is one
| such thing -- based on the response, we'll think about changing
| it.
|
| The point of the intro is to convey that I've built a similar
| product before, and have experience in the videoconferencing
| space, and that this product builds upon the ideas of the
| previous products I've worked on. Sorry if it came across as
| haughty, I didn't mean it that way.
| troquerre wrote:
| I've been wishing for a ScreenHero replacement for years. It
| seems odd to me that no one came out with a replacement earlier,
| but I'm super excited to try this out now!
| jsherwani wrote:
| I hope we exceed your expectations!
| vietjtnguyen wrote:
| Something I've done before to share a screen with coworkers is to
| work in tmux and start a web tty service like gotty
| (https://github.com/yudai/gotty). After you resolve the standard
| network issues (port visibility and whatnot) you just need to
| configure it with `tmux attach` as the starting command. tmux
| already supports shared sessions if multiple terminals attach to
| the same session, the session window size simply shrinks to the
| minimum of all clients. If you've established trust then you can
| use --permit-write with gotty to actually work in the same
| terminal. Hop into a voice chat and you've got pair programming.
| jsherwani wrote:
| If text editing is all you need, and both sides are comfortable
| with the tools, then what you've suggested is definitely faster
| than Screen (tmux sends text, we send pixels).
|
| But if the guest needs to see something else on the host's
| computer (if you're working together on a webpage, or a desktop
| app), then whole-desktop screen sharing is the best approach.
|
| Screen definitely isn't the best tool for every job. But it's
| great for when you want everyone on the same page, seeing the
| same thing, and able to talk about the content of your screen
| and even control it together.
| vietjtnguyen wrote:
| I guess I should have qualified my post, I did look at Screen
| (OP) and it definitely does more than just sharing a
| terminal. It also just reminded me of something I've done
| before (Screen -> screen -> tmux -> gotty, the mind is so
| good at connections) which I thought was apropos and worth
| sharing.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Hello HN!
|
| I was the co-founder and CEO of Screenhero, and after its
| acquisition by Slack in 2015, I led the team that built Slack
| Calls (voice, video and screen sharing in Slack), and left Slack
| in 2018.
|
| Today, we (myself and another engineer) are launching Screen,
| which is in many ways a successor to Screenhero. Our goal is to
| help you work with others like you're in the same room.
|
| Like Screenhero, it supports low-latency screen sharing with
| multi-mouse control. How low? It has the lowest screen sharing
| latency of any product we've tested: 30-50ms best-case end-to-end
| latency between screen capture and render, vs. 100ms-150ms in
| regular WebRTC. This means it's great for remote pair
| programming, which was Screenhero's biggest use case.
|
| We have voice, video, multiplayer drawing and control, and
| ephemeral messaging, and we integrate with GCal and Slack.
|
| We have native apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux (Screenhero's
| top-requested feature was Linux support). We use custom native
| code to make multiplayer control work, and a heavily-modified
| custom fork of Electron to minimize latency. It's WebRTC-
| compliant, so you can share meeting links that anyone can join
| with a WebRTC-compliant desktop or mobile browser -- no download
| required. Daily.co is our primary WebRTC-infrastructure provider
| (they've been amazing to work with!).
|
| We're hoping Screen will be useful for engineers (pair
| programming, live debugging), designers (review with stakeholders
| - they can draw on your screen to give feedback), students and
| teachers, and anyone collaborating remotely.
|
| You can view a 1-minute demo video by clicking the play button at
| https://screen.so, and there's a longer article at
| https://screen.so/about, if anyone's interested.
|
| I'll be around to answer questions and welcome any feedback. I
| hope you'll find Screen useful, especially during these times!
| thisplacesucks wrote:
| Congrats on vesting your Slack stock and thanks for bringing
| back Screenhero. It was one of my essential tools before the
| acquisition.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Thanks for being a supporter! I hope Screen can take the
| place left by Screenhero.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _Today, we 're launching Screen, which is in many ways a
| successor to Screenhero. Our goal is to help you work with
| others like you're in the same room._
|
| Question for clarity sake, have I read this properly that you
| all still are _with_ Slack, does this mean Screen.so is "A
| Slack Company" or just leveraging that relationship for tightly
| coupled/efficient integration as a wholly separate company?
|
| Thanks!
| jsherwani wrote:
| I left Slack in 2018, and Screen has no formal relationship
| with Slack outside of the fact that it uses the Slack API.
| Screen is a heavy user of Slack, though!
| dvtrn wrote:
| Appreciate that! Good luck to you all
| munro wrote:
| > - __Speed matters __. The main reason why Screenhero was
| loved was because it was fast. We did a lot of work to reduce
| latency and increase responsiveness -- which is critical when
| working remotely. We weren't able to bring the speed
| improvements over to Slack (because of the constraints
| described in the previous point), which made it far less
| useful.
|
| This resonates with me, and is definitely why I loved
| Screenhero so much, it felt VERY fast, and visually looked
| crisp. Even the initial connection speed was fast, while Slack
| takes about 3-8 seconds to connect. And also why I was so
| disappointed with Slack's product, now it's back to the same
| level as Google Hangouts.
|
| It's surprising that having the same lead, and access to the
| same source code, that the product was unable to achieve the
| same level of quality & performance. What would you say the
| culprit is? And if I may lead the question... Bureaucracy
| inside Slack? Managing a new team? Having to rewrite on
| presumably a new language & software stack? Rushing to meet
| deadlines?
|
| Anyways, awesome to see your back at it again, and that you
| have such care about latency, people do notice & care!
| jsherwani wrote:
| This is a really good question, and the simple answer is that
| Slack uses an unmodified version of Electron, and it's not a
| good idea to make custom modifications to that project for
| such a small, niche feature. The cost/benefit just doesn't
| make sense for Slack, neither to me, nor to Slack management.
| But Electron didn't even exist when Screenhero was acquired,
| and so the constraints we eventually faced were not possible
| to predict when we got acquired.
| brightball wrote:
| I'm excited to see this because I was a big fan of ScreenHero.
| The Slack equivalent was never up to the same quality.
|
| But to echo other comments, you really need to change the name.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I was a paying customer of Screenhero, and disappointed that
| Slack left out so many features, so excited to see this.
|
| Curious: I assume you can't just sell your company and rebuild
| it in most cases. Was there an embargo on the amount of time
| before you could build this?
| jsherwani wrote:
| We had a non-compete for 2 years (which expired in late
| 2016), and I left Slack in 2018. The reason I decided to re-
| enter the space was after Slack sunset interactive screen
| sharing, since my earlier hope was to see it thrive within
| Slack. Once that wasn't possible, I decided to build it
| myself!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Congrats on the exit (money helps live life on easy mode),
| but after being left to hang out to dry with the
| acquisition and losing access to Screenhero (which was
| absolutely essential at the time at a fully remote org), I
| would never consider a non OSS solution again for this use
| case.
|
| I would absolutely pay for any open source competitor to
| this type of product, preferably one that integrated with
| Jitsi (which itself is open source). Fool me once.
| levidxyz wrote:
| Do you perceive this to be a direct competitor to Tuple? I
| recall Ben Orenstein saying on his podcast that he reached out
| to you about creating a "successor" to Screenhero and you were
| all for it. (FWIW I think more competition in the space is
| good.)
| jsherwani wrote:
| I believe Ben spoke with my co-founder Faraz, not with me.
|
| Screen's goal is to support remote work of any kind --
| including engineering & pair programming, for sure, but
| extending to many other uses cases, such as creative review,
| education, and beyond. And yes, I agree competition is good!
| :)
| MonkeyIsNull wrote:
| Next to crying right now .... I've been whining for YEARS that
| ScreenHero was gone. This is like Xmas all over again! Thank
| you thank you thank you!
| jsherwani wrote:
| So happy to hear this <3
| scorchin wrote:
| Congrats on launching!
|
| Are you able to share further technical details on what you've
| had to do to get the speed gains you're describing?
| Y_Y wrote:
| The name
| threedots wrote:
| This is cool. I've been searching for a better screensharing tool
| but it always seems to be an afterthought in the conferencing
| tools we've tried so far. I usually couldn't care less about
| seeing the other person/people on the call but i usually care a
| lot about being able to see their screen.
|
| Gave it a quick spin immediately and looking forward to using it
| more in future. Pricing looks about right for us too.
|
| My feature request would be to make it easier to have it always
| on. For us friction to initiate is one of our biggest annoyances,
| if the whole team can have it on then knock (like sneek) to get
| the attention of the other(s) that would be great.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Check out our roadmap, with the two items for virtual office.
| One has a small screenshot, and the other has a Figma prototype
| that walks you through the idea. Please post any feedback there
| so we can have it in one place, and so you can be updated as we
| make progress.
|
| https://support.screen.so
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Hey jsherwani! I just tried it out and it works amazingly well.
| Nice job.
|
| Can you go into some detail on the tech stack you used to make
| this?
|
| The UI seems non-native, but there must be native layers for each
| platform in order to link into the accessibility features of
| each.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Sure!
|
| It's built on a private fork of Electron, but the UI is all
| web-based. Electron handles most of our native needs, and where
| it doesn't, we have a node module to connect into the OS. A lot
| of our secret sauce is on the native side, but honestly,
| there's a lot of complexity across the product.
|
| If you have any specific questions, ask away!
| fareesh wrote:
| How do you get the latency so low :D
| dvduval wrote:
| Do you know if you can share screens between China and the United
| States? Are there some geographical limitations?
| jsherwani wrote:
| As long as you can make a network connection between the two
| hosts (either directly or mediated via a server in the middle),
| you should be fine. We haven't tested specifically between
| China and the US, though.
| mushufasa wrote:
| `GNU Screen` I use every week for remote sessions on a server.
| Confusing especially if you're targeting programmers.
| rozab wrote:
| Right. What were they thinking?
| jsherwani wrote:
| If the name continues to be a source of confusion over time,
| we'll happily revisit it.
| exhilaration wrote:
| I'm going to get downvoted for this but the corporate folks
| that will eventually pull out their credit cards and pay
| you for this service have never heard of the screen command
| much less used a command line interface. I think you should
| stick with the name.
| scrollaway wrote:
| My weasel words alert is ringing.
|
| For it not to "continue to be" a source of confusion, then
| it has to "stop" being a source of confusion. What makes
| you think it'll stop?
|
| GNU screen won't stop being on millions of machines, nor
| will it suddenly stop being a popular tool.
|
| I suggest a cute acronym, instead. How about "SSH", for
| "Screen SHaring"?
| vntok wrote:
| The HN crowd is not a representative sample of the
| market. People here on HN will hate for a day or two,
| then they will turn their anger and cynicism to another
| cause, therefore that name will stop being a source of
| confusion :) Seriously, a few days from now noone will
| complain anymore.
| scrollaway wrote:
| The HN crowd is a fairly representative sample of a
| significant portion of the product's potential users.
| Otherwise, this would not have been a Show HN.
| mrlala wrote:
| No it's not.. I am a developer but my god it seems that
| 90% of the people here are of the extreme privacy + low
| level programmers who think that any programmer outside
| of a phd in computer science isn't doing it right because
| they doing dissertation type work everytime they code.
|
| This is basically slashdot with a different color
| scheme..
| vntok wrote:
| I don't understand how your second sentence logically
| follows the first. Where does the "significant" adjective
| come from?
| mushufasa wrote:
| Speaking from my own experience as a founder, it's hard to
| change your name once you have an ounce of traction. If
| you're just launching and anticipate a problem I would
| recommend considering taking advantage of the opportunity
| now.
|
| It will also be very hard for you to trademark your name.
| vntok wrote:
| Is the GNU screen utility trademarked? In what capacity?
| danieldk wrote:
| IANAL, but in most legislations you do not have to
| register a trademark for it to be valid. It is important
| that you defend you trademark, and you will lose your
| right to a trademark if you fail to do so.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Enforcing_rights
|
| I do agree with those saying that in the wider audience,
| GNU screen does not mean anything, including (probably)
| the large armies of Windows developers. Besides that you
| should use tmux anyway ;).
| mushufasa wrote:
| the issue is that you can't easily trademark a common
| word. It's possible (e.g. Apple for computers) but you
| run into problems. Apple ran into some notorious
| trademark problems.
|
| Trademarks don't need to be officially filed to be real
| in common law -- you just have to use a distinguishing
| mark for a certain period of time. so the GNU/FSF screen
| would have rights to Screen in the computer program
| industry even if they haven't officially filed. Filing
| just helps you defend a trademark, it's not strictly
| necessary.
| jsherwani wrote:
| I just posted a top-level comment to address the naming issue,
| which a number of people have now brought up. Sorry for the
| confusion!
| rconti wrote:
| And they specifically advertise it for people pair programming.
| _facepalm_
| Reubend wrote:
| Looks good to me. The one thing is that the name is really
| confusing to talk about.
| jsherwani wrote:
| If the name continues to be a source of confusion over time,
| we'll happily revisit it.
| stratosgear wrote:
| The audience that you posted this at will never get over that
| unfortunate product name, as I bet they are heavy users of
| the real screen program, (or tmux)
|
| Has there been no real research that your chosen name is
| already taken?
| jsherwani wrote:
| I've posted a top level comment addressing this issue since
| it's probably best to have the discussion in one place.
|
| But yes, we didn't hear from anyone in our private beta
| that there was any confusion regarding our name, and we
| ourselves completely missed the fact that GNU Screen exists
| with this name. I'm sorry for the confusion, and we will
| revisit our naming decision.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| dude, don't worry about it.
| faitswulff wrote:
| I'm really glad to see you back in action! I was so sad when
| ScreenHero shuttered. May I ask what makes this time different
| from ScreenHero in terms of running a sustainable business?
| jsherwani wrote:
| Longer story here: https://screen.so/about
|
| Summary: we were sustainable ($1MM ARR), but chose to join
| Slack since we felt we could get to our goal (have everyone use
| our product) faster. We didn't foresee our product getting
| dropped.
|
| This time around, the company is 100% bootstrapped, and I have
| no intention of taking any investment. We just want to be able
| to keep our burn rate low, build a product people love, and
| stay independent forever. I believe we can do that as long as
| we continue to make something people want.
| hartator wrote:
| Still sad that Slack killed ScreenHero. Why this time will be
| different?
|
| I feel it's like 1 step forward and 2 steps back kind of thing.
| capableweb wrote:
| It's only "1 step forward and 2 steps back" for the users using
| the product.
|
| For the share owners and everyone involved in the acquisition
| it's loads of dollars in the bank. So who cares about the
| users?
| jsherwani wrote:
| Short answer: we have no intention of ever getting acquired. We
| are 100% bootstrapped, and we plan to become and stay
| sustainable, so we can be in it for the long haul.
|
| Also, regarding acquisitions, I've been there, done that, and I
| wouldn't be building this company just to do the same thing
| again (life's too short for that).
|
| I love Slack as a company and as a product (I spend many hours
| in it daily). However, in hindsight, it's not possible to
| integrate one complex piece of software into another complex
| piece of software. We ended up with a union of two separate
| sets of constraints (from each product) which made it
| impossible to make it all work. We didn't know this when we
| started. I really value my experience at Slack, and it was
| through that experience that I learnt this lesson, along with
| many others, that have helped us make Screen what it is today.
|
| For Screenhero users, I feel that with Screen being publicly
| available today, the Screenhero -> Slack -> Screen transition
| has been one step forward, two steps back, and three steps
| forward again. I'm committed to continuing the forward steps
| from here on in.
| hartator wrote:
| Ok, I will bet this is true! Sorry you weren't given more
| latitude in Slack. Anyway you have my support. Starting
| tomorrow we will be giving a full try to screen.so.
|
| Why not making a Slack-like chat system as well? It seems a
| natural expansion. (I am the CEO of SerpApi. Feel free to
| email me at julien at serpapi.com)
| jsherwani wrote:
| We don't want to reinvent the wheel. Slack is great for
| what it does! And if you read through
| https://screen.so/about, I have lived the experience that
| it's impossible to do two things well. So in an ideal
| world, Slack continues to innovate on the messaging side,
| we continue to innovate on our side, and we mindfully
| integrate with each others' platforms to give our users the
| best possible experience.
| beagle3 wrote:
| There is already a product for that use by that name (GNU Screen,
| installed on millions of machines already).
|
| You cannot get a trademark on it, or at least shouldn't be able
| to if the USPTO observed its rules.
|
| You really need to change the name.
| dsabanin wrote:
| I get your point, and I agree with the poor naming, but one can
| hardly call "screen" a product.
| gombosg wrote:
| or Windows, right? :P
| marcinzm wrote:
| There was a company we used that had to do a massive re-
| branding after they realized they couldn't trademark their
| company name. Doubt it helped their brand visibility to do such
| a switch.
| [deleted]
| jacobkg wrote:
| I was a Screenhero customer for about 3 years. I used it daily
| for pair programming and it was far and away the best screen
| sharing tool I have experienced. Being able to have both people
| use the mouse and type on the same screen was a game changer. I'm
| extremely excited to try out this new product.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Is this product connected with Somalia?
| CraftThatBlock wrote:
| Seems like .so is the new .io. Another product using it is
| Notion (which is pretty awesome)
| jsherwani wrote:
| Notion was what inspired me to get our domain!
| scaredpelican wrote:
| I love this idea, this is a wonderful thing you're doing. Really
| clean design, great featureset. I genuinely think it has the
| potential to be a powerhouse.
|
| I think it's perfect for businesses, and large companies, but
| might not be something suited towards somebody like me.
|
| TeamViewer is the current tool of choice as I do volunteer work
| remote-teaching art to students and I'd just be a little worried
| about migrating everything over while it's free, only to suddenly
| not be able to afford it.
|
| This is of course no fault on your end, and I just think while
| this is aimed at a certain demographic, others might be more
| suited to working elsewhere as 'Free' and 'Free for a period of
| time until we decide to start charging' is a little intimidating.
|
| Brilliant program, brilliant work, and I wish you the absolute
| best of luck <3
| jsherwani wrote:
| Our plan is to charge $10/u/mo for unlimited use. If you're
| using Screen for educational purposes, we'll likely be able to
| work out a non-profit / educational discount down the line too.
| stevenicr wrote:
| Thank you for putting this out there. 10 a month per user
| puts me in the 'likely never' category.
|
| I suppose people that use it a lot will benefit and those who
| have big budgets won't think about the price.
|
| I loved screenhero and bemoaned it's disappearance into the
| slack neververse. Glad to see you are able to bring something
| back that was good before an aquihire gone blank.
|
| If there's ever a version where I could pay a hundred bucks
| to use the code on my own servers for as much as the servers
| can handle, I would jump on it.
|
| I like the way the privacy policy it put together. With my
| bit of research into webrtc, am I assuming that "In 1:1
| meetings with two participants, media data is sent peer-to-
| peer" - would mean a direct connect shares each person's ip
| address with the other person's system - and this does not
| happen when going through the third party servers(?)
|
| No big deal when screen sharing with friends, creates an
| issue for some people who don't know about these things and
| they get stalked by someone who suddenly knows what city and
| internet provider you are using, for some people.
| scaredpelican wrote:
| Real talk, tho. I'd sell a kidney and pay whatever you ask if
| it could suport pen pressure from the Windows Ink API.
| jsherwani wrote:
| No need to sell kidneys... :)
|
| Could you post this as a feature request on
| https://support.screen.so, along with some context to your
| use? That way we can follow up with more questions, others
| can vote for it, and we can update you on our progress.
| Thanks!
| SamBam wrote:
| Will there be a free/lower price tier for open source or non-
| profits?
| jsherwani wrote:
| Yes! We've been laser focused on getting the product right, so
| the discount model hasn't been fully fleshed out, but you can
| expect something similar to what other SaaS companies do in
| this space, but leaning to the more-generous side of that
| spectrum. I don't know exactly what other companies do just
| yet, but that's the philosophy we'll use when we get to this.
| For now, it's free for everyone, of course.
| cjbprime wrote:
| I guess it's closed-source. That probably means I can't use it.
| Are there any plans to open-source at least the client?
| jsherwani wrote:
| There are no plans to open source our product, sorry!
| orware wrote:
| Does your solution allow for Administrator Escalation assistance
| on Windows?
|
| Over the past few days we've been transitioning our higher ed
| staff to working remotely and are able to use Microsoft Teams or
| Zoom already to see another staff member's screen and walk them
| through basic things, but if the user needs to install a program,
| which would normally require admin rights on the machine, it
| appears that neither of those two solutions allow for that type
| of assistance from our IT staff.
|
| Does Screen provide a solution for that situation? If so, we can
| give it a shot with our IT staff ;-).
| jsherwani wrote:
| You may be able to install and run Screen on Windows, although
| to be 100% honest, we haven't spent a lot of time outside the
| assumption that the user has the access they need. If you can
| drop us an email at team@screen.so, one of us will make sure to
| follow up with you once we try it out.
| jen20 wrote:
| I've just tried this, and by far the biggest issue I've found so
| far is a lack of ability to turn off remote control while
| sharing. This is important for lots of reasons - not least if you
| want to step away from a machine for a second without signing
| everything out without remote users having the ability to do
| whatever they like. Other than that, the experience is quite
| nice.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Hey, LOVE to see it! Screenhero was an amazing tool, and I
| absolutely loved using it for pair programming and desktop
| support.
|
| I waited with bated breath for the features to show up in Slack,
| and when they did I was basically satisfied until they shut it
| down, where I was crushed again.
|
| Here's hoping the lawyers don't beat you up!
|
| Guess what color I'd paint a bike shed? Any color at all if it
| worked!
| jsherwani wrote:
| I felt the same way, and then decided to build Screen!
|
| Your bike shedding comment made me laugh out loud :D
| maxired wrote:
| Serioulsy it rocks ! happy to see it works without any problem on
| linux, and can join a session in the browser.
| jsherwani wrote:
| We worked REALLY hard to make sure we had Linux support this
| time around! It's in beta, and there will likely be issues.
| Please report them to us, and I promise we will try to solve
| them asap!
| incog_nit0 wrote:
| Congrats on reinventing your baby (again) and props for making it
| free during this pandemic.
|
| Can you shed any light on what WebRTC server you use? ie. Jitsi,
| Janus, etc.
|
| This is HN after all - be great to get a nutshell description of
| the tech stack and after all your experience at iTeleport,
| Screenhero, Slack, etc. the things you've learned from a
| technology and even bootstrapping/product market fit standpoint?
| jsherwani wrote:
| Sure!
|
| WebRTC server: Daily (primary), and Twilio (secondary)
|
| There's no shortcut to the performance side of things, so we
| had to do a lot of custom work on Mac, Windows and Linux to get
| screen sharing to be super fast. The high level bit there is
| the boring-but-correct advice: measure everything, start with
| the biggest bottleneck, optimize, repeat.
|
| The desktop apps follow a Slack approach (with a slight twist).
| Like Slack, we use Electron, but in our case, we've heavily
| modified it to make screen sharing super fast. We then use the
| standard Electron model to have main & renderer processes. The
| renderer process fetches the UI from our website (hosted on
| Firebase).
|
| Almost everything (other than our custom node module) is in a
| monorepo. Even our modifications to Electron are stored as
| patch files, which just makes it easy to keep things aligned
| between our app and our modifications to Electron.
|
| Our website/webapp (they are one and the same) are built on
| Ionic/Angular (we started before Ionic supported React). We
| used Ionic because I didn't want to have to create new
| different UIs for each platform -- I think the user is served
| by having a low cost product where the effort is spent mainly
| on performance and quality, rather than a slightly different UI
| for each different platform (which has significant cost). We've
| tried to maximize code re-use wherever possible, which is how a
| 2 person engineering team was able to build this product
| (granted, it took almost an entire year, or more if you count
| the project we pivoted from).
|
| Happy to dive into details if you'd like!
| fooblat wrote:
| I would seriously consider renaming this. Many of us have been
| using GNU screen for very similar tasks of terminal sharing and
| pair programming.
|
| The name you have chosen requires an explanation just to discuss
| this with my coworkers. Perhaps it is a generational thing, but
| in a quick survey asking around "Have you heard of the new tool
| screen?" the response was 100% "screen isn't new and yes I've
| heard of it... have you heard of tmux?"
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think it's generational, knowledge domain, and probably also
| sort of being jerks in that if their response is "screen isn't
| new and yes I've heard of it... have you heard of tmux?" it
| sounds like typical programmer one-upmanship.
|
| I mean either they think you are significantly less informed
| than them and you actually think GNU screen is new, or they are
| using the chance to make a quick joke of not particularly
| startling originality.
|
| Because if they do think you know what GNU screen is then they
| must think this new tools you're referring to isn't it.
| fooblat wrote:
| In our department everyone has had the debate of tmux vs
| screen with just about everyone else (most of us have moved
| to tmux). The question was interpreted more like "(hey tmux
| user) have you heard of the new tool screen?"
| jsherwani wrote:
| I can see how that would be confusing. Sorry about that!
|
| I just posted a top-level comment on the naming issue,
| where we were coming from, and that I'm open to changing
| the name.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ok, so again I'm back to thinking your department is very
| much not like most places.
| fooblat wrote:
| We like to think so :)
| pgt wrote:
| We live in an HN bubble. Most people have no idea there exists
| a GNU utility called `screen`.
| rvz wrote:
| This is the same reason why HNers at the time failed to see
| why Dropbox succeeded and curl + git + sftp on Linux isn't
| sufficient for end users to solve their problem [0]. They
| just don't care about your GNU tools, even if it does better
| at SEO.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| [deleted]
| blast wrote:
| That analogy doesn't hold. People aren't saying that you
| should just use GNU Screen instead, they're saying that the
| name creates confusion. Totally different.
| rvz wrote:
| Well that 'confusion' is between developers and there are
| many other business tools out there with similar names
| which from the perspective of an average customer, they
| will still use it and won't care about a name clash with
| a decades old developer tool used only by software
| engineers.
|
| For the majority of businesses looking at 'Screen' now,
| they won't bat an eyelid and will use it along as it
| 'just works' no matter the name conflict. If they saw GNU
| Screen they'll just say 'What's that' and forget about
| it.
| vntok wrote:
| "People _here_ are saying... " is the parent's argument.
| The situation is very similar: people here, on this
| forum, aren't a representative sample of the market,
| outside. That statement holds _even_ when said market is
| comprised of developers.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Me and my coworkers know screen but we don't call it "screen
| sharing", it's more of a "tool that makes processes not die
| after you quit ssh".
| blast wrote:
| One of the main audiences he's pitching this to is developers
| (for pair programming etc.) so it's more of an issue than it
| would be for a pure consumer tool.
| jsherwani wrote:
| We're a 2 person team, and neither of us uses Screen (the last
| time I used it was more than 5 years ago, and until HN's
| response, had completely forgotten about it).
|
| Also, nobody in our private beta mentioned GNU Screen.
|
| A public beta helps us get feedback on issues that we have
| missed before, and this is one of them!
| fooblat wrote:
| I rarely use gnu screen anymore but when I see "screen" on HN
| that's what immediately and searingly comes to mind for me.
|
| I think what you've got looks great. And it's a great
| opportunity to claim a name of it's own!
| iffybookmark wrote:
| I'll throw my voice in that "screen" 100% refers to GNU
| screen in my friend circle. Tmux and dtach still don't quite
| supplant the specific slot that screen has occupied for
| decades.
| rvz wrote:
| > I'll throw my voice in that "screen" 100% refers to GNU
| screen in my friend circle.
|
| > 1M Developers: GNU Screen exists you know.
|
| > 90M+ Customers and Businesses: Take my money now! Let's
| use 'Screen' to screen share!, Yay!
|
| I'm pretty sure that 'Screen' would appeal to businesses
| and customers who really just want to get on and instantly
| collaborate with who ever rather than to know that
| something called GNU Screen exists and would be less likely
| to be confused by the conflict anyway.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Yeah, I can totally see how in some circles, "screen" is
| synonymous with GNU Screen, and that our choice of name
| would be confusing. Sorry about that! I've posted a top-
| level comment about the naming issue, in case more context
| is helpful.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| This is really exciting. I loved screenhero and I thought the
| screenhero acquisition was going to play out differently at
| Slack. However, the features they adopted never worked as well in
| slack as they seemed to before the acquisition.
|
| Were there any issues from slack corporate with you launching
| this? Seems like it competes pretty directly with the features
| they already bought from yall...
| jsherwani wrote:
| I only decided to re-enter this space after Slack announced it
| was sunsetting interactive screen sharing. It ended up being
| too expensive a feature for Slack to support for a niche
| audience.
|
| I can't speak for the company, but I imagine they'd be happy
| that another collaboration tool has launched that integrates
| with their platform to give their customers even more choice in
| how they work.
| gregwebs wrote:
| On Ubuntu Linux using Xmonad my screen goes black. Other screen
| share programs do work for me.
| jsherwani wrote:
| We'll look into this! Please post a bug report on
| https://support.screen.so so we can follow up with you with
| questions and update you on our progress to fix it.
| dguo wrote:
| I'm looking forward to trying it out!
|
| I'm surprised by how much attention the name is getting. I don't
| think I personally know anyone who would use GNU Screen over
| tmux. And disambiguation doesn't seem hard in this case anyway.
|
| One thing that does mildly concern me is the prospect of Screen
| just turning out to be another Screenhero in terms of being
| acquired and then neglected or discontinued. But hopefully that
| won't happen based on the lessons learned in the founder's
| post[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-
| Work-57df16351a884bc...
| jsherwani wrote:
| FWIW, I believe life's too short to be doing the same thing
| over again. I'm building Screen because I want to see where we
| can take it independently, as I think we had some great ideas
| that weren't able to see the light of day. Screen is already a
| far more useful product IMO than Screenhero was.
|
| Having experienced an acquisition, there's not much value in
| going through the same experience again.
|
| What's personally interesting to me is: can we make something
| that helps all knowledge workers work together remotely in a
| way that they couldn't before? We were onto something with
| Screenhero, and I'm excited at the chance of following that
| thread again, and seeing where it takes us!
|
| Having said that, I know trust takes time to build, and I hope
| to prove this to you with actions rather than words.
| dguo wrote:
| Thanks for the reply, and good luck! I'm particularly excited
| about trying it out since you've already implemented cross-
| platform support.
| rvz wrote:
| > *Free, so you can stay healthy & productive during the
| coronavirus outbreak
|
| As a former and early Screenhero adopter, I'm not sure why they
| had sold to Slack and have now come back with the same, if not a
| worse reincarnation of Screenhero.
|
| At least they have Linux support this time since Screenhero and
| Slack repeatedly refused to port Screenhero to Linux. But again,
| having no web support would reduce the friction for new users
| having to install something rather than downloading a specific
| electron app.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Could you elaborate on why you think this is a worse
| reincarnation of Screenhero? Are there specific features we're
| missing?
|
| Also, there is no way to make a web app that does what Screen
| does. If there were, we'd have built a purely web-based app.
|
| With Screen's desktop app, you can share your screen TO someone
| on the web, but they need the app to share their screen, since
| multiplayer drawing and control can't be done otherwise.
| xemoka wrote:
| Hey, so I can't imagine you've never used or heard of GNU's
| Screen: why did you choose to use a conflicting name for software
| that's essentially in the same space?
|
| PS edit: this isn't glib. I'm genuinely curious why, who and how
| this choice was made.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Until this post, I hadn't thought of GNU Screen at all. It
| isn't a tool that I've used in more than 5 years, and is not
| top of mind for me at all.
|
| Also, no one in our private beta ever raised this concern.
|
| Screen just switched to public beta today, and the idea is for
| us to get feedback on issues we may not have seen before. This
| is a great example of such an issue! And as I've said
| elsewhere, if this continues to be an issue, we will change it.
| It's not in our interest to have customer confusion either.
| xemoka wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. What kind of market analysis did you do
| before building this, err, again (and better)?
|
| You support Linux (well!), I'm surprised your beta testers
| didn't say anything. That's an interesting problem --I wonder
| what other blind spots like this can be avoided.
| jsherwani wrote:
| The main market analysis was asking users what their pain
| points were and solving them. Screenhero didn't have robust
| drawing, for instance.
|
| Admittedly, we only had a handful of Linux users in our
| private beta, but still, none of them mentioned the GNU
| tool.
| ycombobreaker wrote:
| Why would it "stop" being an issue? GNU screen is not going
| anywhere. Maybe you'll stop hearing complaints once all
| initial grievances are aired and it's obvious that you don't
| care, but it will continue to cause confusion in the
| workplace.
|
| Just today I was recommending (GNU) screen to a coworker to
| address transient outages with a remote connection. It would
| get pretty annoying to constantly clarify which screen I
| mean, as they are both used in the same circumstances.
| holler wrote:
| Probably 99% of their users will either have never heard of
| gnu screen, or don't care. It's such a common word that
| it's silly to think one thing "owns" it any more than the
| next.
| e12e wrote:
| That's a little bizzare, but ok. Gnu screen has low latency,
| works well on Linux and bsds, works well with vim and emacs,
| works well for pair programming? I'm not sure how good the
| mouse support/sharing is - but I think selection and cursor
| is shared fine?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I've got lots of colleagues who use
| various other editors, like vs code - but... This isn't
| _just_ a case of pre-existing software with a similar name -
| combined with ssh, gnu screen is arguably superior for pair
| bugfixing in production, for example (multiple ppl can ssh
| into the same server).
|
| I get that this is "like gnu screen, but for xorg/Wayland -
| and without any support for resuming remote sessions" - just
| sounds like an odd pitch - as you say you especially want to
| target Linux support...
| dstaley wrote:
| I honestly don't get why people are getting so caught up on the
| name. The number of people who use screen is so small compared
| to the target market (which encompasses anyone doing work on a
| computer) that I highly doubt any significant number of people
| will be confused.
|
| If you're intelligent enough to use screen, surely you're
| intelligent enough to understand the difference between a
| terminal app and an app that shares your screen.
| xemoka wrote:
| Because it sticks out like a sore thumb, and has trademark
| problems irrespective of its reuse. And you know, everyone
| deals with naming things, so we can all relate and pull from
| our own experiences.
| dstaley wrote:
| > sticks out like a sore thumb
|
| Again, the number of people who this impacts is so small
| that it's hardly significant. Sure, here on HN I'm sure it
| seems that everyone is confused, but we're hardly a
| representative sample here.
|
| > has trademark problems
|
| Honestly I don't buy this. When you trademark something,
| you do so in a very specific manner, and I think Screen's
| market is specific enough as to defend a trademark in the
| screen sharing/collaboration segment _should they even
| choose to trademark the name_, which they can easily choose
| not to do.
| jsherwani wrote:
| To be honest, I've never considered trademarking the
| name. We just want to build a product that works and is
| loved by its users. It's really quite simple! :)
| bluebur wrote:
| Tried it out - really good! It's fast enough that it may actually
| work for pair programming and was super easy to use. Thanks and
| can't wait to test this with my team mates this week.
| jsherwani wrote:
| Happy to hear that! :D
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