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> - 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

by munro 7y ago

> - 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 7y ago
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.
- yani 7y ago
  To my knowledge, Slack has always been an electron app. Did they use something else initially that was unnoticed?
  - jsherwani 7y ago
    In 2015, when we joined, Slack’s Mac app was using "MacGap" (i.e. the PhoneGap/Cordova model but for Mac). Electron was being used for Windows only, and it was a lot later that it became the platform for Slack’s Mac, Windows and Linux apps.

by munro 7y ago

jsherwani 7y ago

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.

yani 7y ago
To my knowledge, Slack has always been an electron app. Did they use something else initially that was unnoticed?
- jsherwani 7y ago
  In 2015, when we joined, Slack’s Mac app was using "MacGap" (i.e. the PhoneGap/Cordova model but for Mac). Electron was being used for Windows only, and it was a lot later that it became the platform for Slack’s Mac, Windows and Linux apps.