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Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)
- kodablah 9y agoFor anyone wanting to roll this themselves, it's actually quite easy with Chrome media capture these days. Just make a Chrome extension with desktopCapture permissions, follow the example codes to do things like chooseDesktopMedia and webkitGetUserMedia and let them choose the desktop (or tab). You can do what you want w/ the media stream after that (like capture to blobs which you can send around, or send over WebRTC or whatever). I have even successfully captured a tab to video [0] 0 - https://github.com/cretz/chrome-screen-rec-poc/tree/master/attempt1 https://github.com/cretz/chrome-screen-rec-poc/tree/master/a... Edit: I should say screen capture, screen sharing is a different deal of course.
- faitswulff 9y agoDoes this cover letting your screenshare partner take control of your computer?
- kodablah 9y agoGot my edit in just as you typed this, heh, no it doesn't. But I doubt capturing keyboard and mouse and sending it would be that difficult. Granted at that point I would opt for an OS native approach.
- richardgill88 9y agoSo I think the performance of this API (particularly on Mac) is one of the core problems other people are talking about on this thread. Slack, Hangouts, Appear.in all use it and on Mac in particular it seems to use alot of CPU.
- dceddia 9y agoAnd according to @SlackHQ on Twitter, Screenhero is shutting down in a little over a month: > Now that Screenhero is fully integrated into Slack, we will be closing Screenhero on December 1st. https://screenhero.com/ https://screenhero.com/ for more info!
- house9-2 9y agoIts a real bummer, I would much rather pay for Screenhero standalone than integrated into Slack.
- heliostatic 9y agoWe're daily SH users, and the voice chat still feels leaps and bounds ahead of anything else (Slack, Zoom, Chime, etc). Inevitable sunsetting, but sad.
- teeberg 9y agoSo I suppose that means Screenhero won't be available outside of Slack anymore? I always found it useful as a stand-alone app when you wanted to let somebody control your screen that is not on Slack. Anyone have good alternatives for that?
- giovannibajo1 9y agoWhen is videocalling and screensharing coming to Linux?
- jsherwani 9y agoLinux already has video calls and screen sharing! Just no shared control / drawing.
- lwhsiao 9y agoThat shared control and having both mouse pointers visible was really the key value of Screenhero for me. I would love to see something that does this on Linux.
- wink 9y agoJust tried it, I could see a Mac user's screen without problems (and draw on it, but not click) I could also screenshare which "kind of" worked, but it was a bit wonky with virtual desktops in xmonad (graphics glitches, but workable)
- eikenberry 9y agoSlack's beta Linux client already supports video calling and screen sharing.
- ledbettj 9y agoDoes not seem to work under Wayland. You can see the mouse pointer, but the rest of the screen is black. Haven't tried it under X yet.
- michaelmrose 9y agoDon't worry I'm sure it will work in 5 or 6 years when they get around to implementing this functionality in some subtly incompatible way on each major desktop environment. Since its impossible to implement something that works across multiple environments hopefully whichever one does the best job of providing this feature also does a decent job of providing every other feature that previously was able to be provided by any app.
- adamwathan 9y agoReally disappointing news, rolling Screenhero into Slack doesn't solve the same problem at all. I work for myself and have a large contact list of people who don't know each other who I often pair with or screenshare with. With Slack, there's really no way for me to create the same setup. I'd need to create a new team called "Adam's Screenhero Contacts", invite all of my contacts (who don't know each other) to be part of this "team" together, and I'd have to foot the bill for the whole team since there's no way for each individual to pay for their own Slack account. Is there a viable Screenhero alternative out there yet?
- sosuke 9y agoThey can't take control of your screen but I like https://appear.in/ https://appear.in/
- s_kilk 9y agoI’ll second this, appear.in is great for lightweight small-group video chats.
- exhilaration 9y agoWe use appear.in through our paid Slack accounts. I don't know how our admins set is up but we just type /appear in any channel/chat and immediately get a link.
- 9y ago
- tedmiston 9y agoScreenhero is hands down the best (smoothest) screen sharing app I've ever used. It's bittersweet to see them acquired by Slack as a paid only feature, but I'm happy for the team and it seems like a very ideal kind of acquisition where they solve a problem Slack has and wasn't solving well, and then Slack can scale the Screenhero userbase overnight. Edit: I just tried this feature in Slack with /call then enabling others to edit and it didn't seem to be as smooth as the usual Screenhero experience. I wonder if something was changed in the integration.
- jsherwani 9y agoScreenhero co-founder here. We're committed to making Slack Calls better, and have a number of upcoming improvements in the works.
- 49531 9y agoYea I found the window a bit harder to control as well. I'm also really bummed because I'm not sure how I am going to help my little sister learn to code now that we can't screenhero together. Not gonna make a paid slack channel just for that.
- tedmiston 9y agoMaybe a shared online "cloud IDE" fits your use case? Something like https://glitch.com/ https://glitch.com/.
- ballenf 9y agoTeamViewer still has a free personal level account option, although its days seem numbered based on how much harder is to find on their website now.
- macintux 9y agoIf you're both on Macs (I know, not a safe assumption) there's a trivial screen sharing facility built in.
- 9y ago
- macintux 9y agoMost unfortunate. I don't recall any other collaboration tool which has been so dramatically better than the alternatives for such a long time.
- vladgur 9y agoDoes anyone know of the “secret” sauce that made screenhero so much better than the alternative. When I used it years ago, it was super smooth and felt more like the real screen rather than the remote screenshare
- ballenf 9y agoI have the same question. Using it a lot, there were little quirks that made it feel like it had very low level access to my Mac. Sometimes it would move the mouse on my screen outside the SH window, but synced up with the other person's mouse (on their 2nd monitor not shared). Especially noticeable with dual screens or when moving the SH window. Kind of hard to explain in words.
- davideous 9y agoStand-alone ScreenHero sharing is smooth as butter -- truly amazing. Controlling a remote computer feels local. Right now I'm using the slack-integrated "ScreenHero", and it's really laggy. This is super disappointing, and painful to use. It's actually making the mouse pointer of the person sharing lag for them. Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.
- philwelch 9y ago> Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance. Given the shitty performance of the Slack desktop client (which basically only does IRC with gifs and emoji), I'm not too confident in their ability to improve the performance of, well, anything.
- mk89 9y ago1gb of ram for an IRC client.... I don't know... :|
- zymhan 9y agoThat's what happens when you bundle an entire web browser
- StudentStuff 9y agoSomeone has to eat all your ram and wreck battery life tho!
- amedvednikov 9y agoTry out eul: https://eul.im https://eul.im It's a native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Slack, Facebook, etc. It's only 4 MB, it has minimal CPU usage, and it can handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag.
- 9y ago
- wferrell 9y agoThe audio quality of ScreenHero has always been so great. What codec are you using? I think I remember you saying you switched the video codec to H.264. How did you make the audio side work so well?
- Mindstormy 9y agoI use screenhero daily for work and I am incredibly sad to see it go, even though we all knew this day was coming. It hits even harder for me since my company just moved us off of slack due to their lack of hippa compliance and cost issues, so not only is the standalone screenhero gone, I've lost the ability to use it in slack too. Does anyone have a good suggestion for an alternative?
- e40 9y agoYou mean HIPAA? Assuming so, what were the issues?
- wpietri 9y agoI'm curious too. Slack claims HIPAA compliance: https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security
- anderiv 9y agoMany companies claim HIPAA compliance. That doesn't mean much, though, unless they're willing to sign a BAA with their customers. I don't have direct experience with this and our Slack usage, but I'm guessing this is where the disconnect is.
- Mindstormy 9y agoYeah typo my bad.
- degenerate 9y agoMattermost, the (leading?) Slack open-source alternative, seems to be HIPAA compliant if you know what you are doing: https://docs.mattermost.com/overview/security.html#hipaa-compliance https://docs.mattermost.com/overview/security.html#hipaa-com...
- austenallred 9y agoCan someone tell me how screenhero performs in a call of 50+ people? We teach classes, and Slack is our home base, so Screenhero would be great, but I’m not sure of how it scales.
- kraigh 9y agoI have the same question- I teach a class with 60 students in a lab and like to share my screen so they can follow along if they're in a poor position to view the projector screen. Currently use join.me but it's a little expensive and I'd love tighter Slack integration.
- ballenf 9y agoAs of 12 months ago, I inevitably had problems with more than 3-4 people in a session. But that was mainly when we'd try to rotate presenters. Got used to restarting the call in order to pass the baton. Even without rotating however, there would often be connectivity issues where someone had to drop off and reconnect. That slowed us down with small groups, so if you had to pause anytime one of 50 people had connectivity issues I'd guess it would be unusable unless they fix the connectivity issues. Have you tried youtube for live streaming? Never tried a private stream, but they certainly know how to scale video.
- austenallred 9y agoWe use Zoom and it’s fantastic, just not as tightly integrated into Slack.
- tarikjn 9y agoI wish this was forked instead of killed. Everytime I use Screenhero, it has been butter smooth. I would be ready to pay $3/month for screenhero standalone or a pay-per-use. I'm not interested in Slack, the use cases are clearly different. I think Slack missed or rather killed an opportunity here, they could have kept Screenhero (and use it to upsell Slack) and also integrated it in Slack. Not only that but it took them over 2 years to make this integration and in the meantime Screenhero remained invite-only.
- woodrowbarlow 9y agoi wonder if screenhero's smoothness had anything to do with it being stuck in invite-only limbo. when you have tight control on how many people are using your app, you don't really have to solve infrastructure scaling problems yet.
- mden 9y agoDid Screenhero not work with the slack add-on? I think I made an account without an invite recently just to check it out.
- corywatilo 9y ago+1 Screenhero was the best way for me to remotely support my parents computers. I know there are a thousand tools out there for this, but Screenhero was so incredibly simple that it beat out everything else.
- ballenf 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- adamnemecek 9y agoDoes screehero still use 200% cpu?
- binarycleric 9y agoIt'll use 0% after December.
- trumpownsyou420 9y agoSLACK BLOWS!
- carusooneliner 9y agoWhile this Slack feature is meant for live screensharing, remote teams also need a way to record and share screencasts outside of live meetings. My cofounder and I having faced timezone inflicted pain in remote teams before, wanted to scratch our itch, and built a solution for anyone to easily record and share screencasts. If you feel remote work pain, do check us out at https://checkoutclip.com https://checkoutclip.com. Interested to hear thoughts.
- petarb 9y agoI can't believe it took them over two years to integrate this.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- revmoo 9y agoJust got spam about this. Guess they felt like burning their "one" shot with this subject. Bad move.
- bbarn 9y agoWe user both Slack and Screenhero at work. This is not a move I'm looking forward to. Slack's Video/Audio issues are so many that we also still use webex for person to person video chats more often than not. I've been nothing but disappointed every time I've tried to use slack for something that's not text based chatting.
- lobster_johnson 9y agoThis is highly appreciated (as someone who never got an invite to Screenhero, so was never able to compare)! I hope it's stable. Slack's audio/video conferencing is not exactly... smooth. In fact, it still boggles my mind that in 2017, conferencing is still in the stone ages when it comes to reliability. With Slack I often either get a one-way connection (only one party can hear the other) or the call is unable to connect, claiming that "Bob ended the call". Meetings tend to start with five minutes of "Can you hear me? Hello? Testing, testing..." until we either are able to get a connection, or we give up and move to Skype, which isn't perfect, but much more reliable. Incredibly, it also turns out that if you try calling someone who's already calling you on Slack, you get a busy error! How insane is that? We were both trying to reach each other, both expressing — in terms of UI — the exact same intent, and the app interprets that as a conflict. There's also some pretty shoddy intergration between the desktop and mobile app. Recently, I tried talking to a colleague, and we went through all of the above insanity, but at one point, as he was calling me, Slack on my phone was ringing, but the desktop app wasn't. Some of these bugs are hard to understand. My company's go-to solution the last couple of years has been GoToMeeting, which is 99% rock solid, but doesn't integrate well with anything, and doesn't have a good mobile app. The biggest benefits to GTM are the ability to record meetings, and the ability to dial in through a normal phone. The latter feature has saved is a lot of times when one person has been on a bad Internet connection.
- cstejerean 9y agoScreen hero audio was wonderful for me. It felt as if you were sitting next to the other person, even when the other person was half way around the world. I hope the new functionality in Slack will be comparable.
- kjksf 9y agoPeople are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers. Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face. Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it's less than 2 years. You have a validated product that many people love and are willing to pay for and enough of a "outside of Slack" market to sustain a small company. On launch you'll get free PR just by announcing "Screenhero alternative". And if you do a good job, it's likely that Atlassian (or some other Slack competitor) will want to acquire you for a tidy sum. Lot's of the hard code has been written for you (libraries for stun firewall traversal, vp8 for the video codec). You need to write a simple backend for matching people and 2 desktop apps (mac and windows). It's not easy but it's also not a problem that requires breaking new ground, just solid engineering. What we get instead are pleas to Slack to not kill stand-alone Screenhero and bemoaning that someone didn't write OSS (aka free) clone.
- zpr 9y agoYou mean you could make a YouTube clone in a weekend? It's easy to fall into this way of thinking. But hey, maybe you will build the next Screenhero, or TeamViewer. Or maybe you'll end up as one of the thousands of other versions of this nobody has ever heard of. The idea is usually not the hard part.
- derefr 9y agoNo, but you can probably build YouTube in two years. (Yes, including their global CDN.) Also, “exact replacement for killed product” is a realy good advertising pitch to differentiate from those thousand other versions. It worked for The Old Reader, and later Feedly, when Google Reader was killed.
- kjksf 9y agoI mean that you can make a Screenhero clone in approximately the same amount of time that it took to write it originally. Should be a bit less because straight path (cloning) is shorter than twisty one (things that Screenhero did that did not end up in the final product). Note that by the time of Slack acquisition Screenhero was approaching v2.0, they had product out far longer than that. So it's not unreasonable to say you could do a v1 of similar product in a year. Both idea and execution are hard. Cloning existing idea removes one hard part, therefore increasing the chances of success. Look at Excel, Word or Baidu or Sina Weibo. As to "thousands of other versions of this": you would have to point to at least one. It's hard to argue against imaginary products. Based on this thread for many people Screenhero has no acceptable substitute.
- ekvintroj 9y agoMake it linux compatible!
- rsoto 9y agoI'm going to mention Jitsi Meet[1] since nobody has mentioned it. 6 months or so ago I started looking for a simple, reliable and cheap option to share a screen. I don't like GoToMeeting because it's too enterprise-y and there are a lot of steps involved—not too friendly for my tastes. And there are a few like that. I stumbled upon Screenhero, but it was already too late—Slack bought it and it's not possible to create a new account. What we chose for a few weeks was Appear.in—a simple, painless and reliable tool. However I feel like it's not polished enough, and some of our clients had issues with it, so I kept looking. Jitsi has been a blast: just install an extension (or no extension if you're on Firefox) and you're ready to go. It's uncluttered, it's reliable and too good to be free to be honest. Only downside it's that all the URLs are public and since there are no registration involved, there's no admin on each channel. 1: https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/
- weitingliu 9y agoCongrats to J & the Screenhero team! :)
- xuanlq 9y agoTwo years to do integration, which make me remember that Thread feature spent 3 years. that's why slack make things so easy to use.