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Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls
- ryanmarsh 9y agoSlack finally integrates Screen Hero FTFY
- brightball 9y agoHope so. Screen Hero was really well done.
- WestCoastJustin 9y agoYeah, the dual mouse cursors was a 10x improvement.
- NDizzle 9y agoI still use Screen Hero daily. Your account probably still works!
- thinbeige 9y agoOT: Do the video calls work on mobile?
- Uhhrrr 9y agoI worry that this could cause Slack to use a lot of memory.
- Klathmon 9y agoWhy? If you aren't using the feature why would it cause your slack instance to use more memory?
- problems 9y agoThe scripts for it still likely get loaded and compiled. I'm not sure how much of a hit that is, but Electron apps tend to eat a lot of memory quickly even doing basic stuff.
- EpicEng 9y agoYes, programs that do more stuff tend to use more memory. That's what memory is for.
- macspoofing 9y agoWhooosh
- EpicEng 9y agoYes... not the only one though. Not a very obvious joke. Also, just checked slack on my Mac: 38MB memory usage, 4 open groups and many channels. So, not a good joke either?
- dgavey 9y agoCheck the helpers, the main app is low, but it's likely over 1GB of RAM in use with the helpers.
- FireBeyond 9y agoOur team instance, 10 people, effectively idle (1000 messages/week, 99% direct). Client up for one day. Mac: currently using 620MB Windows: currently using 340MB
- vultour 9y agoThere is like 5+ Slack processes running at any one time. Knowing the efficiency of Slack 38MB is just the taskbar icon.
- yborg 9y agoWant some more examples of the awesome that is the Slack desktop app? Have a single animated emoji on screen in a channel. Just visible in the currently active channel. The Slack app is using ~30% of the CPU in my 2016 MBP, even when it's in the background. I quiver at the thought of the awesome that will be available when Slack's valuation hits $20B.
- 9y ago
- waleedka 9y agoLOL. I'm guessing you're sarcastically jabbing at Slack for the known issue that their desktop app uses a lot of memory.
- dzhiurgis 9y agoI don't get why people use Slack app. The whole Slack deal is to get away from desktop apps and run on the browser. This opens up freedom to start Slacks where corp is blocking app installs (but not zealous enough to be blocking/MITM'ing network yet).
- jackfraser 9y agoFor me, it's mainly because it gives me one icon that's always Slack, no matter how many browser tabs I have open, no matter how many windows or even different browsers I am using at once. Click there, get Slack. No risk of accidentally closing it or losing it somewhere.
- ransom1538 9y agoChat apps in 4 billion lines of javascript are totally terrible. Wrap the turd in 4 layers of react. It is still awful.
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoMultiple tabs in a web browser flat out sucks for multi-tasking. macOS, Windows and many flavors of window managers for Linux provide many ways for switching between windows, seeing what's open, hiding things, etc. In a browser they're just straight tabs. Have you ever need to switch between multiple tabs semi regularly while keeping other tabs open? Have you ever wanted two tabs to be side-by-side? It's a usability horror show. Wrapping Slack in its own app let's me use the windowing manager my operating system came with.
- abrowne 9y agoHonest question: Can't you just open a new browser window then?
- mrmondo 9y agoI wonder if their app is just a bunch of javascript wrapped in a web frame? That's how other 'apps' of such design seem to perform (atom etc...)
- mcintyre1994 9y agoIt is, with that web frame being Electron (Chromium + node.js): https://slack.engineering/building-hybrid-applications-with-electron-dc67686de5fb https://slack.engineering/building-hybrid-applications-with-...
- mrmondo 9y agoOk, well I'm willing to bet that's the problem then.
- coldpie 9y agoStrikes me as a poor future when we use proprietary protocols on other peoples' servers to facilitate all of our communications.
- koolba 9y agoThat's been the present for the majority of most people's lives. Even with email there wasn't much, if any, time where the majority of people ran their own servers.
- bluetidepro 9y agoAs someone else mentioned, they are finally doing some more with their purchase of Screen Hero most likely. However, one major feature that Screen Hero had that I don't _THINK_ this new screen sharing built in Slack has, is the ability for the other person to control the mouse/keyboard on your screen. I could be wrong, but if that is the case it's a huge feature missing. That was one of my favorite things that Screen Hero had, being able to click for the other person or type while they were screen sharing to help them out on a task, if needed. If it's not in there for this release, I hope it gets added soon.
- ChrisClark 9y agoThat was basically the entire point of Screen Hero. So I hope this is only the first step in integration with Slack.
- austenallred 9y agoScreenhero was such a fantastic product. I miss it every day.
- levthedev 9y agoWhat do you mean you miss it? It still is around. I use it all the time.
- austenallred 9y agoYou have to have been a customer at the time it shut down to use it, which means I can use it and invite other people, but it's pretty limited
- mi100hael 9y agoIt's also included with all Slack paid accounts, existing and new.
- ckrailo 9y ago
- brightball 9y agoI'm really surprised this took so long. Hipchat has had this available for a couple of years now. If they aren't adding the pairing features that made Screenhero so good (dual mouse pointers, dual control, resolution adjustment and scrollaround windowing) then what's the value add?
- lsjdfkljdfwkwdf 9y agoHow long till Slack can replace webex/adobe connect (both terrible at multiplatform)
- mikelinington 9y agoI see mentions of Screen Hero in a way that makes it sound like it's dead, but my team still uses SH daily (via Slack's `/hero` command). It's easily the best _remote pairing_ tool that I've found. This new Slack feature seems like something different, for presenting content to everyone on a call, not for collaborating on code.
- bluetidepro 9y agoYou are correct that Screen Hero still works and all, but it is technically "dead." No one new can sign up for the service. You can only use it if you already had it setup. I would personally consider that "dead" if it's now closed off for anyone to signup with. It's not like you can recommend this as alternative to what Slack is doing with their screen sharing. On https://screenhero.com/login https://screenhero.com/login they even say "New signups are closed while we integrate with Slack." - I consider that "dead."
- mikelinington 9y agoI've dropped the Screen Hero binary to a few people (even outside of my Slack org) and they were able to sign up via the app even after that message appeared, but you're totally right, we're on borrowed time.
- piptastic 9y agoI typed /hero in slack It gave a link to "add the Screenhero Integration" I clicked that link and it took me to a Slack prompted me to create a "free account", which it did using my Slack information. Then I was able to download screenhero. So, anyone new can sign up for the service via Slack.
- yxhuvud 9y agoNo, when I try I get You do not have a Screenhero account for your Slack email <redacted>
- 9y ago
- shmerl 9y agoDo they use WebRTC and do they work in Firefox on Linux?
- latortuga 9y agoStill no linux support for video and now no linux support for screen sharing. Here's to hoping Google ramps up whatever Slack competitor they're trying to roll hangouts into.
- owaislone 9y agoLack of Linux support is the only thing preventing our organization from ditching hangouts.
- joeblau 9y agoWhat's wrong with Google Hangouts? (I don't have any perspective, just asking)
- ajmurmann 9y agoHangout's encoding also it's a real performance hog because most devices don't support H.264 in hardware. Every time I'm in a hangout the fans come on and the battery rapidly drops towards zero.
- izacus 9y agoMost devices DO support H.264 encoding. Hangouts however uses VP9 in Chrome and that's not HW accelerated. If you use Safari on Mac it'll switch to H264 and that will stress CPU less.
- unfamiliar 9y agoIt has exactly the same problem in Safari on mac in my experience. Battery is dead in about 10 minutes.
- ajmurmann 9y agoYes, you are of course right. Confused the two.
- 9y ago
- pbw 9y agoIt says you can only share your entire screen. That's fine from a laptop, but if you have a 4k/5k display sharing to people with laptops, wouldn't the text be unreadable? Sharing just a single window is the standard solution here.
- pfista 9y agoI keep finding myself wanting to use slack more and more for customer calls. Generally the audio quality has been pretty great compared to Google Hangouts / Uberconference / Gotomeeting. Screensharing makes me want to use it more. The only issue is that you can't just invite any random person to a call, they already have to be within your slack organization. I wonder if they'll end up pulling this out as a separate product.
- jordigh 9y agoI rather like appear.in Just give someone a url and you can start chatting with them. No plugins, no logins, all WebRTC. It seems to try to load some flash, but it looks optional.
- coob 9y agoLike the idea of appear.in but it really pegs CPU
- jtim404 9y agoThere is actually a "guest" feature in Slack (for business). I imagine yours would be the intended use case. More info: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202518103-Multi-Channel-and-Single-Channel-Guests https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202518103-Multi-Cha...
- eyeonai 9y agoDidn't know that! Can't they invite guests in a video chat / screensharing session ? Sounds odd. Did you check any hidden UI controls ?
- zwieback 9y agoWe're a Microsoft shop so we use Skype for Business, which seems to work well for talk/IM/screen sharing. Now we're getting "Teams" to be slacker. I'd be curious to hear how the Slack video/screen sharing compares to Skype Business, after a rocky start it's working pretty smoothly for us now.
- nvr219 9y agoWe're doing the same thing. I want to use Slack but we're going with Teams for cost reasons (included in o365). I've never had any problems with screen sharing with skype for business.
- kzisme 9y agoI wish we were at least moving to teams. I can't stand Skype For Business (Lync) - half of the time copying+pasting in and out of messages fails and or messages are too long. I would even prefer slack over this.
- nvr219 9y agoI've been using Lync for so long that I'm just used to all the little stupid things it does. Teams is a definite improvement. Someone (on hn maybe?) compared Teams to Google Wave and I can't really get that comparison out of my head now.
- cygned 9y agoWe tried Teams and returned to Slack. Broken notifications and horrible SharePoint magic behind the scenes. The way Teams is organized confused some of my team. Interestingly, we also had a lot of problems with Skype for Business. The dark theme and the way Teams formats while you type was great, though!
- hndl 9y agoWe're trying it out now (since it's included with o365) and I find it mostly usable. It has most of the things I need (group (video) calls, screen share, search, files tab etc). My biggest complaint has been the random glitches you run into every now then (repeatedly being logged out for no reason comes to mind). That and the slowness (i'll often see a lag between when I've hit return and when my message shows up in the conversation). Hope someone from Teams is reading this :).
- dyeje 9y agoCan't believe it took them 2.5 years integrate ScreenHero.
- paulcole 9y agoa mean and lean team of hacker news readers could probably knock out the integration in a weekend or two.
- khaledtaha 9y agoJust because something could be built it doesn't mean it should be. I, for one, applaud the fact that they rolled it out when they were good and ready. Shows a steady hand at the steering wheel.
- mlvljr 9y agoin two hours
- droopyEyelids 9y agoThis isn't an integration of screen hero, this is a noninteractive screencast.
- yeukhon 9y agoSeriously, are you going to knock this out in a few weeks? Have you tried integrate someone else's giant codebase and their infrastructure? Also, integration does not stop other features and bugs from being implemented and fixed. Also they probably have a path to sunset the service and perhaps that means they need to think about future migrations.
- adjkant 9y agoMaybe not a few weeks, but 2.5 years seems pretty intense. Why not six months? I find it hard to believe they couldn't have executed well in six months if it was a priority. Clearly, it wasn't.
- 9y ago
- tankerdude 9y agoI'm curious. I've used Screen Hero, Webex, Google Hangouts, and GotoMeeting extensively. People evoke a lot of love for Screen Hero and I can never figure out why. Video quality is pretty awful and pixellated. I don't see a single feature in Screen Hero that isn't in the other ones and the other ones have many more features that I use.
- yohann305 9y agoi wonder why people down voted you. you're asking valid questions... I'm starting to see a recurring pattern on HN. If you say something that somehow goes against "HN ideology", you get downvoted. Anyone else see this too? oh wait... watch me get downvoted too...
- briandear 9y agoIt's because "I don't see a single feature in Screenhero that others don't have." Which is just incorrect. Screenhero has interactive screen sharing while the others don't. Or course he qualified it with "I don't see.." however, that tells me that he never used Screenhero and thus really doesn't have much credibility when critiquing it. Express all the opinions you want, but they ought to be based on facts.
- detaro 9y agoWhat do you mean by "interactive screen sharing"? AFAIK both WebEx and GotoMeeting allow for remote control of a PC.
- eyeonai 9y agoI use https://www.acrossio.com https://www.acrossio.com because they record the video chat and the screensharing directly in the cloud. The best feature is that they bookmark moments and tasks while they record and you can play back the sessions from the bookmark I start sessions from within slack and i can search in past sessions because everything is indexed It's like slack for video. I can also contextualize existing video recordings from YouTube and Vimeo but also from direct mp4 and mp3 urls Sharing and mentioning make meetings social.
- necrodome 9y agoYou sound more like an advertisement than a genuine comment.
- eyeonai 9y agoWell, I love Slack https://www.slack.com https://www.slack.com too and I use it every day. I also referred it to hundreds of my friends and colleagues all these years and they've thanked me about that many times. I try stuff that give me value and I am not ashamed to share my experiences. If that sounds like a Slack advertisement or whatever I can only say that I've used WebEx, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Hipchat, Zoom.us, Gotomeeting and other collaboration tools as an early adopter (sometimes in the first alpha and beta versions) searching for something that could stick with my needs. I love this stuff (collab s/w) and I used screenhero at least a year+ before slack bought them. I was not impressed back then, but I am ready to see how they evolved. Slack is great but sometimes all these large companies are doing stuff the way Microsoft did with Skype .. took them ages to evolve the product after they bought it. I like having options nevertheless :)
- socialist_coder 9y agoOn Windows 10 whenever I click the "Start a call" button it causes the entire slack app to become extremely blurry. Other apps do this too sometimes. It has something to do with how they are being rendered, maybe related to high-dpi support or something. I've tried disabling the high-dpi support and enabling compatibility mode but it doesn't have any effect. Even after I close the "start a call" dialog the blurriness persists. It doesn't go back to normal until I restart Slack. Any ideas what is going on? I can't find any working fixes for this in Slack or any other apps where this also happens. An interesting thing I noticed was that in Unity (game dev IDE) when I set the render method to anything but DX9 it causes this same blurriness. Only DX9 makes it render sharp. DX10, DX11, etc all cause the blurriness. I just have a normal Windows 10 desktop, latest drivers & updates, GTX 1080 GPU.
- maxpert 9y agoThere goes Lync and Skype Pro down the drain...
- nvr219 9y agoI work for a 75-staff company on a pretty tight budget, and we have office 365. For us to use slack with SSO and have more than 10k messages, we'd have to pay about $11k/yr. Teams, we're already paying for with o365 (and even if we weren't on o365 yet, E1 plan is approx $7k/yr and includes teams, exchange... sharepoint (not that I'd use that)). That's what's going to prevent Lync/s4b from going down the drain.
- benwilber0 9y agoCan someone explain why slack web app always turns my MacBook video indicator light on when I'm on a call even when I'm not sharing video? I don't like them accessing the camera unless I actual want to share video.
- kiddz 9y agowe loved Screenhero too, but now switched to aws chime and find it even better (except for funky UI) because you can have multiple video calls and control presenters screen.
- Zaheer 9y agoBe sure to give them feedback on the UI. I recently gave em feedback and they're fairly receptive.
- falconman 9y agoI try to use Slack voice as much as possible with my team but I find it quite unstable in terms of call quality with lots of dropped calls. Is this the case for others?
- kinduff 9y agoI can confirm some bad connection and sometimes unstable, but at the moment is much more stable than it was a couple months ago.
- timtamboy63 9y agoI use Slack voice a ton as well - quality has been perfect for me and I don't think I've ever had a dropped call.
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoNo issues here though I only use it on occasion so not very frequently or heavy use.
- reconbot 9y agoThis is great. I hope they're able to stay on top of other things like cpu usage and general bug fixes while they add these new features. On OSX it hovers around 20% cpu while idle.
- intoverflow2 9y agoMake sure it is actually idle, the gif reactions under messages use up a lot of CPU. I often switch to the slackbot channel when not using it to save CPU/
- zeptomu 9y agoI always wonder if people would be interested in a small SAAS providing a terminal demonstration and sharing service with web and terminal client. Users could on one hand share step-by-step demos for common tasks on the terminal (say "Let's build $foobar on Ubuntu 16.04 optimized for the following infrastructure") similar to asciinema.org and on the other hand share there terminal read-only to demonstrate live-debugging or development operations. Obviously this is already possible using a setup involving tmux and ssh (or pixel-screen sharing via Slack), but maybe a streamlined service that has both a powerful terminal and web-client would be an interesting addition to some documentation-heavy workflows or remote debugging sessions. There is also shellshare.net, which is also a nice little project.
- badosu 9y agoA shame this had priority over firefox support over a year.
- iamdave 9y agoOur team is equally parts remote and in-office and we've had so many issues with hangouts for our daily stand-ups. Not picking up audio, screen just stops sharing, links outright breaking for unknown reasons. We're a slack house already and will be very likely switching to this after some internal testing to see how we like it.
- hobarrera 9y agoIsn't slack videocalling in beta and still macOS only? I wish they'd finish implementing a feature [on all platforms] before moving onto other features. As a team, we can't really use videocalling until the entire team can use it. It's really all-or-nothing.
- devin 9y agoNo one else has mentioned zoom.us here. For my money, it's easily the best of its kind for multi-person video chat. The UI could be made a bit easier to navigate, but beyond that, it's a fantastically well-built piece of software.
- simplehuman 9y agoThe zoom mobile app is truly a disaster
- alanh 9y agotheir UI in general is a nightmare. Ugh.
- omginternets 9y agoAt the risk of being confrontational, is usable VoIP going to come at some point? Not only do I systematically get dropped calls, but also enraging UI bugs, e.g.: interrupting calls from other apps (whatsapp, phone, google hangouts, etc.) fails to put the slack call on hold and renders the "hang up" button ineffective.
- ProMarc 9y agoDid this work also with the App?
- imazurenko 9y agoOmg, slack is worst shit i ever seen
- djhworld 9y agoHave never been able to get Slack calls working behind our corporate proxy, gave up after many attempts, changing network settings, "noproxy" settings etc.
- dy 9y agoCurious if anyone has an idea how the multi-mouse system worked. My guess is that on the screen being shared, a transparent full-screen window is overlaid that just draws in the second mouse and that when this proxy mouse is clicked the event gets simulated on the sharer's side. This effect was so cool and would love to see an open-source library that shows the effect over WebRTC. Curious if it's anything more complicated than that and why it's never been replicated by other packages.
- dy 9y agoCurious if anyone has an idea how the multi-mouse system worked. My guess is that on the screen being shared, a transparent full-screen window is overlaid that just draws in the second mouse and that when this proxy mouse is clicked the event gets simulated on the sharer's side. This effect was so cool and would love to see an open-source library that shows the effect over WebRTC. Curious if it's anything more complicated than that and why it's never been replicated by other packages.
- harisamin 9y agoSo I'm glad they're doing something with the purchase. I LOVE screenhero. But right now...holy crap this is bad. Really crude benchmarks but I'm seeing an ADDITIONAL ~3.5gb of ram usage when screensarhing via slack. Checkout screenshots here. https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/864908004176658433 https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/864908004176658433 I know its beta, plz help improve this. I love both products