12 ms·

Show HN: Pop.com – pair programming with low-latency, Screenhero-style sharing

225 points by jsherwani 5y ago

jsherwani 5y ago
Hello HN! I’m the founder of Pop (https://pop.com https://pop.com) and formerly the co-founder and CEO of Screenhero. Also on the team are a couple other ex-Slack folks and a former Electron co-maintainer. Pop is the spiritual successor to Screenhero and strives toward the same goal: making remote work better than working together in the same room. After Slack acquired and subsequently killed Screenhero and after becoming remote workers ourselves, we found that none of the Screenhero copycats were really solving the problem adequately. Some are unstable, some are slow, some have poor UX. We decided to get back into the space and build a product that we like to use, leveraging some of the good ideas we came up with working on Screenhero and Slack. With Pop, instead of just talking with your coworkers about concepts with words, the shared screen becomes a shared whiteboard for diagrams and flow charts. Instead of barking out line numbers or function names, it’s faster to highlight the line with a mouse. And instead of telling someone what to type, it’s easier to just show them by typing directly in their text editor. You can start a call directly in the app or with the Slack integration “/pop” command and collaborate with coworkers on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Or, if you don’t want to bother someone to download the app, they can join a session via web browser (mobile browsers supported, too!), even without a Pop account. For now, it’s completely free to use. We plan to always maintain a free version, though for heavier team and enterprise use, we’re looking to start charging soon (servers are very much not free). Once we have revenue, we plan to turn some of our attention to adding more remote office features, like spatial audio and presence, and, more broadly, addressing issues of isolation and loneliness in remote work. We’ve bootstrapped the company entirely ourselves and are unbeholden to outside investors. Our goal is to build a product that people enjoy using. We’re not looking for an exit; we’ve been through that and know what it’s like (financially great, but emotionally taxing). We want to create an independent and sustainable company where we are happy to work for our entire careers. Let’s get these out of the way: 1. Yes, we’re building on Electron. Yes, we are aware of the performance tradeoffs, but have decided this is the best choice for us. We’re shipping Windows, Mac and Linux clients along with browsers with a four-person team — it’s the only good way right now to do that without features taking six months. We’ve modified the screen sharing pipeline in Chromium to reduce latency as much as possible, because with interactive screen sharing, milliseconds matter. 2. Yes, the domain was expensive. Roughly $1.5m. We consider it an asset that is unlikely to depreciate significantly. (The domain actually has an interesting history as a failed precursor to Netflix from Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/sep/10/internet.filmnews https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/sep/10/internet....) 3. No, our non-compete no longer applies — it expired two years after Slack’s ScreenHero acquisition. 4. Yes, we were originally called Screen.so. It was not a good name (and HN let us know, thanks!) and we are now very happy with Pop. We’d love you to try Pop and let us know what you think, even and especially if it doesn’t work well for you. The app has gotten exponentially better because our dedicated users tell us about their issues and work with us to get them fixed. And, if you have ideas about how remote work could be more enjoyable, we’re eagerly listening!
rubiquity 5y ago
I loved Screenhero. How do I know you won't hurt me again?
- jsherwani 5y ago
  I'm explicitly not taking funding for Pop for this exact reason: I want to keep Pop around forever. I know that isn't something most people are able to do, and I'm grateful for my past success that's enabled me to do this. But I can tell you that it was incredibly sad for me to see Screenhero die, and I never want that to happen again — both as a founder, but also as a user.
- jauco 5y ago
  Probably because they learned how much it hurts? (They get money but lose their baby) Going through all the trouble to rebuild the product I doubt they’ll do an acquihire again.
dang 5y ago
Previous related threads: Show HN: Pop.com – Video Calls, in 3D - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25497737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25497737 - Dec 2020 (136 comments) Show HN: Screen – screen sharing for remote work, by the cofounder of Screenhero - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22676040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22676040 - March 2020 (203 comments)
- hartator 5y ago
  Thanks dang! I don't seem to be able to reply to OP's top comment for some reason. Is it a wanted behavior or a bug?
  - dang 5y ago
    We do that sometimes with Show HNs when the top comment is introducing the project. The reason is that there's not much difference between "replying to the comment introducing the project" and "replying to the project itself", i.e. posting a top level comment. But the former end up ranking higher on the page, which can be unfair.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - tedmiston 5y ago
    looks like it's restricted for all of us.
smoldesu 5y ago
Am I the only one who can't scroll on this page? There appears to be content, but it won't let me go anywhere past the front page (Firefox, if it helps)
- jpetrucc 5y ago
  +1 for this, I can't scroll at all on Firefox. Works on Chrome though
- hhw3h 5y ago
  I can confirm that I'm unable to scroll on the site while browsing with firefox
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- deleted 5y ago
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- mhash22 5y ago
  Scrolling on Firefox should be fixed now. Apologies about that!
- deleted 5y ago
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tanduv 5y ago
Congrats on the launch! How "low" is the latency? The "Live Share" feature is VSCode gets mentioned a lot and has some advantages over traditional screen-sharing as it seems to beam the diffs of the code itself rather than a typical video stream. How do you compare to that?
- ElijahLynn 5y ago
  I've been using VS Live Share too, and it is good, however, I still use a Pop session along with it, as we still need to share the browser at times as well as other things. So, I use both in tandem and will likely continue to do so.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Sending over keystrokes will always be faster than sending across a video stream of your screen. So VSCode Live Share will always be faster. However, in practice, we've found the cost of a few extra milliseconds in latency are far outweighed most of the time by the benefit of being able to interact with any application on the shared screen (and draw). For instance, if you're building a webapp, and need to look at the product alongside the code, screen sharing (especially with the ability to draw) is a lot more valuable than being able to type in the IDE. Back when we made Screenhero, we had the option to share a specific app, and what our users told us was that they'd often start by sharing the IDE, but then realize they wanted a lot more, and so would have to stop and share the entire screen. We eventually dropped the 'window share' feature for this reason.
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xeno42 5y ago
My team has been using CoScreen (https://www.coscreen.co/ https://www.coscreen.co/) for collaborative meetings and development for much of the last year and it's been really transformational. The ease at which anyone can share any window and everyone can instantly interact with it is quite game changing for distributed teams IMO.
dorian-graph 5y ago
Looks interesting! I've used both https://www.drovio.com/ https://www.drovio.com/ (formerly Use-Together) and https://tuple.app/ https://tuple.app/ during the pandemic successfully at work.
ElijahLynn 5y ago
Been using Pop since beta (on Arch Linux) and while it has had a few rough spots along the way, it keeps getting better. Pop does have a public issue tracker that we can submit bug reports and feature requests to as well > http://support.pop.com/ http://support.pop.com/. Pop used to have a roadmap (https://www.figma.com/proto/bMYNNI6cy4DL1r0dgOFzjI/Screen?node-id=7654%3A0&scaling=min-zoom https://www.figma.com/proto/bMYNNI6cy4DL1r0dgOFzjI/Screen?no...) more visible about the longer term vision which I really liked, it was about creating a constant layer on the desktop where you can just press a hotkey, up comes a list of Pop contacts, and you can basically knock on their door, they get a quick ping and you can be joined together in a second. This is the vision that I am really into and there is an issue to track the progress here > https://screen.canny.io/feature-requests/p/global-shortcut-to-select-a-teammate-virtual-office-v2 https://screen.canny.io/feature-requests/p/global-shortcut-t.... This means no more posting video share links in Slack and the friction to actual pair with someone becomes a couple seconds versus a minute+. Really looking forward to this!!!
- jsherwani 5y ago
  We heard an equal number of people excited about being able to jump into a call with a coworker, vs. being worried about yet another layer of distraction. Having said that, we've now built out most of the infrastructure to support that feature (we have a contact list with your team in it), so we'll be looking into this soon.
  - ElijahLynn 5y ago
    Ahh, I could see some being distracted about that. Suppose one can just set a "status" of "available" or "focused/away" to be able to be pinged or not. Good to hear that most of the infra is built out to support this feature!
    - atatatat 5y ago
      Yes. Give our people back the damn office door.
hartator 5y ago
I've been following you guys' work since Screenhero then Slack integration then Slack reduced integration then Slack killing it (still makes no sense why) then screen.so then now we'll give a try to Pop! > Yes, the domain was expensive. Roughly $1.5m. We consider it an asset that is unlikely to depreciate significantly. Congrats on getting it! Hopefully it wasn't too much of distraction.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Thanks! I worked with https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ted0 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ted0 who was AMAZING at helping find and acquire the domain. I can strongly recommend him as an amazing person to work with. It took a few days to find a domain we loved, and another few days to close the transaction. It was quite an interesting experience!
j3th9n 5y ago
The website instantly overheats my computer and made me close it.
- mhash22 5y ago
  If this is an issue you can replicate, would you be open to debugging this live with me? If so, please pick a convenient time here: https://calendly.com/mustafa-pop https://calendly.com/mustafa-pop. Thanks!
tibiapejagala 5y ago
Since you mentioned in a comment that your non-compete expired, maybe you are also no longer under any NDA. Can explain to a person outside of the startup world how this buy-and-kill works? If not killing a competitor, why? What do they expect a founder to do after killing their baby?
- jsherwani 5y ago
  It wasn’t ever intended to be a buy-and-kill, it’s just unfortunately what ended up happening. When Slack acquired Screenhero, it was with the full intent to bring voice/video/screen sharing to Slack. The problem was that, post-acquisition, leadership lost interest in what could’ve been a promising feature set and growth vector for Slack (see: Zoom in 2020). Partially because integrating disparate pieces of software is a hard problem and partially because management's appetite for investment in the team waned after the first year, building Slack Calls was slow and it was unclear how valuable the feature was to Slack's success. Add in the cost of maintaining what is a very complicated and far-reaching implementation for interactive screen sharing, (not just for engineering, but also for policy/legal and customer support), it made sense for Slack to kill it. While I was still at Slack, there were retrospective conversations around how Screenhero maybe should have been built on the Slack platform, instead of as a first-party app. However, the acquisition happened so early in the life of Slack that the platform didn't really exist yet, so it's unclear how we'd do better if we had to do it all over. With Pop, we're doing things the right way. Pop is a standalone app, with a solid Slack integration. It makes it really fast to jump between the two (in fact, it's faster to jump into a Pop meeting via Slack, than it is to join a Slack Call!).
  - mchusma 5y ago
    Slack's poor calling is baffling to us, and the fact that they are uninterested in making it better is obvious. The quality is so bad, we use google meet for almost everything at the company, even though we would prefer to use the native slack calling. Its actually easier to use other apps than Slack's own apps. For example, you can't schedule a recurring slack call that calls all the participants. I would LOVE this feature, if there is a way to add it into slack.
brightball 5y ago
I miss screen hero, before acquisition. Very glad to hear you’re back in the game!
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Hopefully we can fill the Screenhero-shaped void in your toolbox with Pop. Please do try it and let us know what you think! We're committed to making Pop exceed Screenhero in both functionality and longevity.
  - brightball 5y ago
    I'll just drop in my thoughts on pricing that I wrote up back just before Slack. https://www.brightball.com/articles/screenhero-this-is-your-business-plan https://www.brightball.com/articles/screenhero-this-is-your-... Good luck and I'll be keeping an eye on it!
    - jsherwani 5y ago
      Wow, thanks for sharing, and for the detailed write up! Please keep the feedback coming (I'm j@pop.com if you'd like to keep in touch in the future). I do agree Screenhero should have had a more generous free tier. With Pop, we will likely have a free usage tier when we start charging. We haven't mentioned it on the pricing page just yet since everything is currently free and it would complicate the story. I love the analogy you've made with Adobe Acrobat Reader! We definitely want Pop to become the default tool you'll use when you want to work remotely with someone on a task together on your computer (pair programming today, but a whole lot more in the future). And I agree that keeping a generous free tier will help us enable that, beyond just the ability to join calls started by paid users.
  - atonse 5y ago
    Not that anyone can hold a grudge for founders getting acquired, but I think myself and others here just want to make sure this doesn't meet the fate of ScreenHero, purchased by Slack and disappeared, ruined, etc. Good to hear you're also feeling it.
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danellis 5y ago
> Yes, we’re building on Electron I hope you'll reconsider as your team grows. Developers look at their own app and think the extra resource usage isn't too bad, but the more this happens, the more Electron apps I end up running at once. Because Pop includes presence, it's something that, if it were more lightweight, I'd keep running all the time. As it is, if someone wants to call me, they have to first contact me on another platform to ask me to load Pop.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  When you say Pop could be more lightweight, are you talking about CPU or memory usage? Also, do you keep Slack / Microsoft Teams / Dropbox / 1Password / VSCode always running, and do you have the same concern with those apps or is it something unique to Pop? Performance is definitely a priority for us, so understanding where you're feeling the bloat would be really helpful to us.
  - tfsh 5y ago
    Not OP, but with the apps you've mentioned (and other Electron apps), I'd be less likely to keep them running (and would prevent them from opening at login) due to their outsized resource impact. Which in turn decreases user retention and my ability to recommend it to others. To add to that screen sharing and video calling is already resource intensive, so whilst the argument could be made - what's another 500mb of ram, I'd expect the client to be as optimised and light weight as possible, because a system under strain is no longer "blazing fast".
  - nawgz 5y ago
    1Password and Dropbox being on Electron seems absurd. Regardless, you kind of hit on the point - Slack & VSCode are basically non-optional, maybe for other people it's some other combo. Pop, on the other hand, only has potential to be "non-optional" for collaborative work. Thus, given that real-time collaboration is not the standard way of working, being a resource hog on the level of "non-optional" apps means you will be shut off first for most users.
    - 5y ago
Palmik 5y ago
Pop.com is a great domain name. How did you manage to get it, if you don't mind sharing.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Thanks! Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28225447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28225447
jeremyw 5y ago
Your security doc says 1-on-1 calls are end-to-end encrypted, and I'm glad for it. Recommend promoting that bit to homepage marketing. Do you expect to be able to make 3+ multiparty calls end-to-end encrypted, eventually?
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Yes! Once it's available in WebRTC, we'll implement end-to-end encryption for group calls. There is progress being made in this direction: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webrtc-insertable-streams/ https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...
nonameiguess 5y ago
Please provide a way to voluntarily downgrade stream quality. I understand if people with poor vision require it, but I really don't need everything in hi def and definitely don't need 3D. A serious issue I've had lately is Teams consuming 90%+ of my total Internet usage. The fact that it is consuming massively more bandwidth even than Netflix doesn't seem at all justified. My ISP is throttling me now and again and preventing me from being able to work at all. I understand it isn't the place of your company to fix the problem of crappy residential network infrastructure in the United States, but if you want broad adoption from people working from home in the United States, you really have no choice but to accommodate this. Note that the only reason I'm using Teams is because I'm required to while working on government contracts because it's the only service right now certified to transmit controlled unclassified information.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  This is a great point. We'll add support for this soon, thanks for the idea! We actually have a developer console command you can type to achieve this today if you really need something ASAP: - In the desktop app, click the hamburger menu, and then click the Pop logo 8x to launch Dev Tools - In the console, type setBandwidth(1000) to set the max and min bandwidth to 1000kbps. You can type resetBandwidth() to undo the change. If this doesn't work for you, please email us at hello@pop.com to let us know.
  - orzig 5y ago
    This is awesome, thank you for your original post and thoughtful replies
  - nonameiguess 5y ago
    Awesome, thanks! Seriously love the responsiveness.
DrBenCarson 5y ago
I think I remember seeing this when it was screen and being a little confused why you were using daily.co if it’s your core business. Still using daily.co?
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Our core business is enabling remote work and remote pair programming. WebRTC infrastructure is largely commoditized, and we're open to revisiting how we handle our WebRTC infrastructure in the future. Daily is a great infrastructure provider, and moreover, the team was incredible to work with. The reason we switched out from Daily was because we were running into bugs in the product, and weren't able to tell whether they were on our end or Daily's end. By owning our own infrastructure, this became a non-issue: every bug was ours to find and fix. It turns out most of the issues we had were bugs in our custom modifications to Electron to reduce screen share latency, but we had no way of knowing at the time. Now that we've invested in our own infrastructure, it's the path of least resistance to continue using it, but we're open to revisiting this decision in the future. The Daily team is stellar to work with, and I strongly recommend them to anyone looking for a WebRTC infrastructure provider.
nathell 5y ago
At Fy!, we’ve been using Pop for impromptu remote pair programming sessions for a few months now. The killer feature, for us, is how easy it is to take or surrender control over the sharer’s screen. Much lower friction compared to Zoom or GMeet. It works well, too. There’ve been random hiccups, but nothing too disturbing. Most of the time it just gets out of the way. Thanks for the great tool!
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Wow, that's great to hear! Please do let us know about the random hiccups at hello@pop.com, since the long tail of issues is surprisingly long in this product space, and so we really appreciate any feedback that can help us improve.
lucas3 5y ago
Helloo!! I found a bug which I can replicate as many as I want. Steps: 1. Share screen 2. Change cameras videos to the big option (Out of the 3 options available) 3. Click on draw Result: You are not able to click elsewhere on the screen, you just keep drawing. Great tool though :D
- jsherwani 5y ago
  This is now fixed, thanks for the heads up!
Cu3PO42 5y ago
I have a small bug to report with the website: I cannot scroll the Privacy Policy site. This is on Firefox 91 on Windows 10, it does seem to work in Chrome, however.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  This is now fixed, thanks for the heads up!
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rexreed 5y ago
Why is it so important to get an expensive domain? Does the three-letter .com really add that much value? Especially when it's not a B2C product / offering and specific to a focused audience? I'd think a three-letter .com would be something with widespread, international appeal to be worth the expense.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  My personal opinion is that in this case it’s going to make a world of difference. Very difficult to know for sure, not like we have a control group, but it’s super catchy and feels premium.
  - jsherwani 5y ago
    Agreed! After starting with screen.so, we realized firsthand the importance of having a name that's easy to remember and communicate. Also, instead of viewing the domain as an expense, it's more of an enduring asset, which potentially increases its value over time.
    - benatkin 5y ago
      It wasn't great that it was called Screen anyway. GNU Screen predated screen.so by decades.
      - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
        ...and it's hard enough to search the internet for GNU screen.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      > Also, instead of viewing the domain as an expense, it's more of an enduring asset, which potentially increases its value over time. Well, except you also can't really sell it unless you also shut down the company.
      - 5y ago
jmacd 5y ago
Hey @jsherwani Welcome back!
vladharbuz 5y ago
I'm on Firefox on iOS and your website has a few pixels of horizontal overflow. It makes scrolling feel shoddy. Anyway, OG Screenhero user here wishing you good luck with Pop! If Electron is too slow and you need a systems programmer, let me know. :)
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Thanks for the heads up on Firefox/iOS — we'll take a look! Your repertoire of skills is crazy impressive — it's really inspiring and amazing to see all the stuff you've built and work you've done. Your manifesto is also exactly the kind of thing the world needs more of. We're not currently hiring but I would love to chat with you to exchange notes and war stories if you're up for it! Feel free to grab a slot via https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min :)
keithnz 5y ago
- back button from the download is broken - connect with discord would be good Not sure how this fits, but often we don't get services like this these days because of the pricing model. We like a lot of these kinds of things, and we subscribed to a bunch (many cancelled now), but they all added up and didn't really charge us based on our usage. Perhaps we aren't the target audience as you want people who integrate this into their regular work so people use it all the time. But for us, we'd want all employees to be able to use this, but if we don't use it, we pay nothing. When we do use it, we really want max concurrent users to be charged (concurrent being not necessarily exact time, but within a day or so ). i.e., if 1 user uses it for 10-15 minutes for the entire month, we want to be charged something representing that usage. Then we'd be much more likely to signup and have this kind of thing available if and when we need it. Or any other model that seems fair for occasional / spikey use, psychologically, we just don't want to feel like we are paying for something we aren't using when we don't use it.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  We're pushing out a fix for the back button as I speak, thanks for the heads up! It should be live in ~10 minutes (CI build + test + deploy). Discord: we haven't looked into their API yet, but it's an oversight on our part. We'll take a look soon! Pricing: thanks for the detailed explanation of where you're coming from. Your perspective resonates well with ours, which is that we'd like the amount our customers pay us to be roughly commensurate with the value we provide them. If you're truly interested in using Pop and providing feedback, I'd love to learn more about your team and your background so we can make sure we're aware of that perspective as we work on our pricing plan. Feel free to find a time via https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min or drop me a line at j@pop.com. Thanks!
borisdesouza 5y ago
Hands down the best thing to come out for remote collaboration since the pandemic. My team and I have been using pop.com since we discovered it as screen.so. It's been amazing! We added it to Slack and it make it seamless for us to get into a pairing session with one command. Prior to pop.com we tried a bunch of other tools but didn't find any that gave us the fluidity of collaboration we got with pop. One of our favorite features is the drawing capabilities. It's weird to believe that this is the only tool we've used that has perfected drawing - something that has truly helped us collaborate without having to use a virtual whiteboard application.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Thanks for the positive words!
presentation 5y ago
Any thoughts how this compares to Tuple?
- t0mbstone 5y ago
  It seems like it maybe does a better job of handling video and audio than tuple does, and it looks like it plays nicer when there are multiple people involved. For example, inviting someone to a screen sharing session is as easy as sending them a link. It also has virtual whiteboarding, which Tuple doesn't have
caslon 5y ago
Something initially very light and small (PowWow) turned into something very... not. Is second-system effect the right term here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect > The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.
pjot 5y ago
My first thought was, “this looks a lot like screenhero”. Glad to see y’all are back!
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Glad to be back :D
sagivo 5y ago
> I named it “Screen” as homage to Screenhero, only to realize that such a generic word makes a terrible brand name, and consequently makes it impossible to find via search engines. So you've changed it to "pop"? I don't think you're going to get any better here.. Btw I'm an old fan of screenhero.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Glad to have you back! And honestly, the feedback on Pop as a name has been overwhelmingly positive :)
makstaks 5y ago
Huge fan of Screenhero back in the day so I'm happy this is back and you have full control over pop.com's future.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  We're happy you're happy! Please try out the product and let us know if there's anything we can do to improve.
anotherevan 5y ago
This HN post was quite timely as I don't often need to remote control (usually screen sharing is fine) but there was definitely a case today. One weird thing: Every key typed was doubled. So I'd type one "m" and on the remote screen would get "mm" in the input field. I'm on Linux (Arch) and the other end was Windows 10. Other than that, it was VERY smooth and my colleague was quite impressed. He is planning to use to for parental tech support!
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Please email us at hello@pop.com so we can figure out how this happened and fix it asap!
t0mbstone 5y ago
If you are looking for screenhero alternatives, you should check out Tuple! Our team has been using it for about a year now and we love it. My favorite part about Tuple is how it HAS NOTHING that overlays the screen. It just hides in the tray. I HATE when these screen sharing apps all try to put floating windows and menus and chrome around the screen edges. Just let me share my screen without getting in the way, dang it! Why is that so much to ask?
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Tuple's done a good job of their minimalist UI (it's largely modeled after Screenhero). With Pop, you can minimize the control panel with 1 click. We'll soon also be adding the ability to remove the border around your shared screen entirely (some users have told us it gives them anxiety to not see something that clearly shows them that they're sharing their screen, but we've now heard the opposite perspective from enough people to realize we need to support both preferences).
spockz 5y ago
We have been using VS Code’s and IntelliJ code with me features. Usually accompanied with just a voice call. What is the added benefit of this? The on screen annotations?
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Similar discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224881 In short: when you need to see anything outside the IDE (e.g. a debugger, or even just seeing the running app alongside the IDE), a tool like Pop is very helpful. But you can also use it in conjunction with those IDE features, as Elijah in the above thread said he does.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
Congrats on the launch! Can you tell us a bit more about the company? How many of you, where are you based? Also, did you consider using Signalwire APIs [0] to power the service? (disclaimer: I know the team well and I am an early investor) [0]: https://docs.signalwire.com/ https://docs.signalwire.com/
kirillzubovsky 5y ago
Have been using Pop for 1:1 pair programming sessions with a friend and it’s been great! To me there is a massive value in simplicity and speed with which we can go from zero to working. It’s 100x faster than Zoom or Meet. Two clicks and we are on! Good luck, team Pop!
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Thank you for the kind words!
pmontra 5y ago
> Sorry, your browser isn’t supported. > Please use a supported browser Chrome, Safari, Firefox or download Pop for Linux. I'm using Firefox 91 on Ubuntu 20.04. Is this a browser version check failing or a some missing capability? Maybe one of the extensions in my browser is blocking something needed by Pop. It seems to work on Vivaldi. At least it gets to the account registration page. I hoped it would work without an account so I didn't go any further.
- worble 5y ago
  If you've got an extension disabling WebRTC, turn it off, that worked for me.
danr4 5y ago
I loved screen, but only Debian/Fedora killed it for me. No love for other linux distros? :(
- jsherwani 5y ago
  We have a .deb and .rpm download, and also have an AUR package. Let me know if you need something else!
rvz 5y ago
Well done for your rename. At least they renamed to something better than Screen and obviously not taking something like 'TurboScreenMaster 3000'. [0] How does Pop compare to Watercooler? [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678477 [1] https://www.getwatercooler.io/ https://www.getwatercooler.io/
programmarchy 5y ago
On macOS please allow me to turn off the Menu bar icon.
chadxz 5y ago
I love pop and recommend it frequently. Great work.

225 points by jsherwani 5y ago

Hello HN! I’m the founder of Pop (https://pop.com https://pop.com) and formerly the co-founder and CEO of Screenhero. Also on the team are a couple other ex-Slack folks and a former Electron co-maintainer. Pop is the spiritual successor to Screenhero and strives toward the same goal: making remote work better than working together in the same room. After Slack acquired and subsequently killed Screenhero and after becoming remote workers ourselves, we found that none of the Screenhero copycats were really solving the problem adequately. Some are unstable, some are slow, some have poor UX. We decided to get back into the space and build a product that we like to use, leveraging some of the good ideas we came up with working on Screenhero and Slack. With Pop, instead of just talking with your coworkers about concepts with words, the shared screen becomes a shared whiteboard for diagrams and flow charts. Instead of barking out line numbers or function names, it’s faster to highlight the line with a mouse. And instead of telling someone what to type, it’s easier to just show them by typing directly in their text editor. You can start a call directly in the app or with the Slack integration “/pop” command and collaborate with coworkers on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Or, if you don’t want to bother someone to download the app, they can join a session via web browser (mobile browsers supported, too!), even without a Pop account. For now, it’s completely free to use. We plan to always maintain a free version, though for heavier team and enterprise use, we’re looking to start charging soon (servers are very much not free). Once we have revenue, we plan to turn some of our attention to adding more remote office features, like spatial audio and presence, and, more broadly, addressing issues of isolation and loneliness in remote work. We’ve bootstrapped the company entirely ourselves and are unbeholden to outside investors. Our goal is to build a product that people enjoy using. We’re not looking for an exit; we’ve been through that and know what it’s like (financially great, but emotionally taxing). We want to create an independent and sustainable company where we are happy to work for our entire careers. Let’s get these out of the way: 1. Yes, we’re building on Electron. Yes, we are aware of the performance tradeoffs, but have decided this is the best choice for us. We’re shipping Windows, Mac and Linux clients along with browsers with a four-person team — it’s the only good way right now to do that without features taking six months. We’ve modified the screen sharing pipeline in Chromium to reduce latency as much as possible, because with interactive screen sharing, milliseconds matter. 2. Yes, the domain was expensive. Roughly $1.5m. We consider it an asset that is unlikely to depreciate significantly. (The domain actually has an interesting history as a failed precursor to Netflix from Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/sep/10/internet.filmnews https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/sep/10/internet....) 3. No, our non-compete no longer applies — it expired two years after Slack’s ScreenHero acquisition. 4. Yes, we were originally called Screen.so. It was not a good name (and HN let us know, thanks!) and we are now very happy with Pop. We’d love you to try Pop and let us know what you think, even and especially if it doesn’t work well for you. The app has gotten exponentially better because our dedicated users tell us about their issues and work with us to get them fixed. And, if you have ideas about how remote work could be more enjoyable, we’re eagerly listening!

rubiquity 5y ago

I loved Screenhero. How do I know you won't hurt me again?

jsherwani 5y ago
I'm explicitly not taking funding for Pop for this exact reason: I want to keep Pop around forever. I know that isn't something most people are able to do, and I'm grateful for my past success that's enabled me to do this. But I can tell you that it was incredibly sad for me to see Screenhero die, and I never want that to happen again — both as a founder, but also as a user.
jauco 5y ago
Probably because they learned how much it hurts? (They get money but lose their baby) Going through all the trouble to rebuild the product I doubt they’ll do an acquihire again.

dang 5y ago

Previous related threads: Show HN: Pop.com – Video Calls, in 3D - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25497737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25497737 - Dec 2020 (136 comments) Show HN: Screen – screen sharing for remote work, by the cofounder of Screenhero - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22676040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22676040 - March 2020 (203 comments)

hartator 5y ago
Thanks dang! I don't seem to be able to reply to OP's top comment for some reason. Is it a wanted behavior or a bug?
- dang 5y ago
  We do that sometimes with Show HNs when the top comment is introducing the project. The reason is that there's not much difference between "replying to the comment introducing the project" and "replying to the project itself", i.e. posting a top level comment. But the former end up ranking higher on the page, which can be unfair.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- tedmiston 5y ago
  looks like it's restricted for all of us.

smoldesu 5y ago

Am I the only one who can't scroll on this page? There appears to be content, but it won't let me go anywhere past the front page (Firefox, if it helps)

jpetrucc 5y ago
+1 for this, I can't scroll at all on Firefox. Works on Chrome though
hhw3h 5y ago
I can confirm that I'm unable to scroll on the site while browsing with firefox
- deleted 5y ago
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mhash22 5y ago
Scrolling on Firefox should be fixed now. Apologies about that!
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tanduv 5y ago

Congrats on the launch! How "low" is the latency? The "Live Share" feature is VSCode gets mentioned a lot and has some advantages over traditional screen-sharing as it seems to beam the diffs of the code itself rather than a typical video stream. How do you compare to that?

ElijahLynn 5y ago
I've been using VS Live Share too, and it is good, however, I still use a Pop session along with it, as we still need to share the browser at times as well as other things. So, I use both in tandem and will likely continue to do so.
jsherwani 5y ago
Sending over keystrokes will always be faster than sending across a video stream of your screen. So VSCode Live Share will always be faster. However, in practice, we've found the cost of a few extra milliseconds in latency are far outweighed most of the time by the benefit of being able to interact with any application on the shared screen (and draw). For instance, if you're building a webapp, and need to look at the product alongside the code, screen sharing (especially with the ability to draw) is a lot more valuable than being able to type in the IDE. Back when we made Screenhero, we had the option to share a specific app, and what our users told us was that they'd often start by sharing the IDE, but then realize they wanted a lot more, and so would have to stop and share the entire screen. We eventually dropped the 'window share' feature for this reason.

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xeno42 5y ago

My team has been using CoScreen (https://www.coscreen.co/ https://www.coscreen.co/) for collaborative meetings and development for much of the last year and it's been really transformational. The ease at which anyone can share any window and everyone can instantly interact with it is quite game changing for distributed teams IMO.

dorian-graph 5y ago

Looks interesting! I've used both https://www.drovio.com/ https://www.drovio.com/ (formerly Use-Together) and https://tuple.app/ https://tuple.app/ during the pandemic successfully at work.

ElijahLynn 5y ago

Been using Pop since beta (on Arch Linux) and while it has had a few rough spots along the way, it keeps getting better. Pop does have a public issue tracker that we can submit bug reports and feature requests to as well > http://support.pop.com/ http://support.pop.com/. Pop used to have a roadmap (https://www.figma.com/proto/bMYNNI6cy4DL1r0dgOFzjI/Screen?node-id=7654%3A0&scaling=min-zoom https://www.figma.com/proto/bMYNNI6cy4DL1r0dgOFzjI/Screen?no...) more visible about the longer term vision which I really liked, it was about creating a constant layer on the desktop where you can just press a hotkey, up comes a list of Pop contacts, and you can basically knock on their door, they get a quick ping and you can be joined together in a second. This is the vision that I am really into and there is an issue to track the progress here > https://screen.canny.io/feature-requests/p/global-shortcut-to-select-a-teammate-virtual-office-v2 https://screen.canny.io/feature-requests/p/global-shortcut-t.... This means no more posting video share links in Slack and the friction to actual pair with someone becomes a couple seconds versus a minute+. Really looking forward to this!!!

jsherwani 5y ago
We heard an equal number of people excited about being able to jump into a call with a coworker, vs. being worried about yet another layer of distraction. Having said that, we've now built out most of the infrastructure to support that feature (we have a contact list with your team in it), so we'll be looking into this soon.
- ElijahLynn 5y ago
  Ahh, I could see some being distracted about that. Suppose one can just set a "status" of "available" or "focused/away" to be able to be pinged or not. Good to hear that most of the infra is built out to support this feature!
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Yes. Give our people back the damn office door.

hartator 5y ago

I've been following you guys' work since Screenhero then Slack integration then Slack reduced integration then Slack killing it (still makes no sense why) then screen.so then now we'll give a try to Pop! > Yes, the domain was expensive. Roughly $1.5m. We consider it an asset that is unlikely to depreciate significantly. Congrats on getting it! Hopefully it wasn't too much of distraction.

jsherwani 5y ago
Thanks! I worked with https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ted0 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ted0 who was AMAZING at helping find and acquire the domain. I can strongly recommend him as an amazing person to work with. It took a few days to find a domain we loved, and another few days to close the transaction. It was quite an interesting experience!

j3th9n 5y ago

The website instantly overheats my computer and made me close it.

mhash22 5y ago
If this is an issue you can replicate, would you be open to debugging this live with me? If so, please pick a convenient time here: https://calendly.com/mustafa-pop https://calendly.com/mustafa-pop. Thanks!

tibiapejagala 5y ago

Since you mentioned in a comment that your non-compete expired, maybe you are also no longer under any NDA. Can explain to a person outside of the startup world how this buy-and-kill works? If not killing a competitor, why? What do they expect a founder to do after killing their baby?

jsherwani 5y ago
It wasn’t ever intended to be a buy-and-kill, it’s just unfortunately what ended up happening. When Slack acquired Screenhero, it was with the full intent to bring voice/video/screen sharing to Slack. The problem was that, post-acquisition, leadership lost interest in what could’ve been a promising feature set and growth vector for Slack (see: Zoom in 2020). Partially because integrating disparate pieces of software is a hard problem and partially because management's appetite for investment in the team waned after the first year, building Slack Calls was slow and it was unclear how valuable the feature was to Slack's success. Add in the cost of maintaining what is a very complicated and far-reaching implementation for interactive screen sharing, (not just for engineering, but also for policy/legal and customer support), it made sense for Slack to kill it. While I was still at Slack, there were retrospective conversations around how Screenhero maybe should have been built on the Slack platform, instead of as a first-party app. However, the acquisition happened so early in the life of Slack that the platform didn't really exist yet, so it's unclear how we'd do better if we had to do it all over. With Pop, we're doing things the right way. Pop is a standalone app, with a solid Slack integration. It makes it really fast to jump between the two (in fact, it's faster to jump into a Pop meeting via Slack, than it is to join a Slack Call!).
- mchusma 5y ago
  Slack's poor calling is baffling to us, and the fact that they are uninterested in making it better is obvious. The quality is so bad, we use google meet for almost everything at the company, even though we would prefer to use the native slack calling. Its actually easier to use other apps than Slack's own apps. For example, you can't schedule a recurring slack call that calls all the participants. I would LOVE this feature, if there is a way to add it into slack.

brightball 5y ago

I miss screen hero, before acquisition. Very glad to hear you’re back in the game!

jsherwani 5y ago
Hopefully we can fill the Screenhero-shaped void in your toolbox with Pop. Please do try it and let us know what you think! We're committed to making Pop exceed Screenhero in both functionality and longevity.
- brightball 5y ago
  I'll just drop in my thoughts on pricing that I wrote up back just before Slack. https://www.brightball.com/articles/screenhero-this-is-your-business-plan https://www.brightball.com/articles/screenhero-this-is-your-... Good luck and I'll be keeping an eye on it!
  - jsherwani 5y ago
    Wow, thanks for sharing, and for the detailed write up! Please keep the feedback coming (I'm j@pop.com if you'd like to keep in touch in the future). I do agree Screenhero should have had a more generous free tier. With Pop, we will likely have a free usage tier when we start charging. We haven't mentioned it on the pricing page just yet since everything is currently free and it would complicate the story. I love the analogy you've made with Adobe Acrobat Reader! We definitely want Pop to become the default tool you'll use when you want to work remotely with someone on a task together on your computer (pair programming today, but a whole lot more in the future). And I agree that keeping a generous free tier will help us enable that, beyond just the ability to join calls started by paid users.
- atonse 5y ago
  Not that anyone can hold a grudge for founders getting acquired, but I think myself and others here just want to make sure this doesn't meet the fate of ScreenHero, purchased by Slack and disappeared, ruined, etc. Good to hear you're also feeling it.

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danellis 5y ago

> Yes, we’re building on Electron I hope you'll reconsider as your team grows. Developers look at their own app and think the extra resource usage isn't too bad, but the more this happens, the more Electron apps I end up running at once. Because Pop includes presence, it's something that, if it were more lightweight, I'd keep running all the time. As it is, if someone wants to call me, they have to first contact me on another platform to ask me to load Pop.

jsherwani 5y ago
When you say Pop could be more lightweight, are you talking about CPU or memory usage? Also, do you keep Slack / Microsoft Teams / Dropbox / 1Password / VSCode always running, and do you have the same concern with those apps or is it something unique to Pop? Performance is definitely a priority for us, so understanding where you're feeling the bloat would be really helpful to us.
- tfsh 5y ago
  Not OP, but with the apps you've mentioned (and other Electron apps), I'd be less likely to keep them running (and would prevent them from opening at login) due to their outsized resource impact. Which in turn decreases user retention and my ability to recommend it to others. To add to that screen sharing and video calling is already resource intensive, so whilst the argument could be made - what's another 500mb of ram, I'd expect the client to be as optimised and light weight as possible, because a system under strain is no longer "blazing fast".
- nawgz 5y ago
  1Password and Dropbox being on Electron seems absurd. Regardless, you kind of hit on the point - Slack & VSCode are basically non-optional, maybe for other people it's some other combo. Pop, on the other hand, only has potential to be "non-optional" for collaborative work. Thus, given that real-time collaboration is not the standard way of working, being a resource hog on the level of "non-optional" apps means you will be shut off first for most users.
  - 5y ago

Palmik 5y ago

Pop.com is a great domain name. How did you manage to get it, if you don't mind sharing.

jsherwani 5y ago
Thanks! Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28225447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28225447

jeremyw 5y ago

Your security doc says 1-on-1 calls are end-to-end encrypted, and I'm glad for it. Recommend promoting that bit to homepage marketing. Do you expect to be able to make 3+ multiparty calls end-to-end encrypted, eventually?

jsherwani 5y ago
Yes! Once it's available in WebRTC, we'll implement end-to-end encryption for group calls. There is progress being made in this direction: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webrtc-insertable-streams/ https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...

nonameiguess 5y ago

Please provide a way to voluntarily downgrade stream quality. I understand if people with poor vision require it, but I really don't need everything in hi def and definitely don't need 3D. A serious issue I've had lately is Teams consuming 90%+ of my total Internet usage. The fact that it is consuming massively more bandwidth even than Netflix doesn't seem at all justified. My ISP is throttling me now and again and preventing me from being able to work at all. I understand it isn't the place of your company to fix the problem of crappy residential network infrastructure in the United States, but if you want broad adoption from people working from home in the United States, you really have no choice but to accommodate this. Note that the only reason I'm using Teams is because I'm required to while working on government contracts because it's the only service right now certified to transmit controlled unclassified information.

jsherwani 5y ago
This is a great point. We'll add support for this soon, thanks for the idea! We actually have a developer console command you can type to achieve this today if you really need something ASAP: - In the desktop app, click the hamburger menu, and then click the Pop logo 8x to launch Dev Tools - In the console, type setBandwidth(1000) to set the max and min bandwidth to 1000kbps. You can type resetBandwidth() to undo the change. If this doesn't work for you, please email us at hello@pop.com to let us know.
- orzig 5y ago
  This is awesome, thank you for your original post and thoughtful replies
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Awesome, thanks! Seriously love the responsiveness.

DrBenCarson 5y ago

I think I remember seeing this when it was screen and being a little confused why you were using daily.co if it’s your core business. Still using daily.co?

jsherwani 5y ago
Our core business is enabling remote work and remote pair programming. WebRTC infrastructure is largely commoditized, and we're open to revisiting how we handle our WebRTC infrastructure in the future. Daily is a great infrastructure provider, and moreover, the team was incredible to work with. The reason we switched out from Daily was because we were running into bugs in the product, and weren't able to tell whether they were on our end or Daily's end. By owning our own infrastructure, this became a non-issue: every bug was ours to find and fix. It turns out most of the issues we had were bugs in our custom modifications to Electron to reduce screen share latency, but we had no way of knowing at the time. Now that we've invested in our own infrastructure, it's the path of least resistance to continue using it, but we're open to revisiting this decision in the future. The Daily team is stellar to work with, and I strongly recommend them to anyone looking for a WebRTC infrastructure provider.

nathell 5y ago

At Fy!, we’ve been using Pop for impromptu remote pair programming sessions for a few months now. The killer feature, for us, is how easy it is to take or surrender control over the sharer’s screen. Much lower friction compared to Zoom or GMeet. It works well, too. There’ve been random hiccups, but nothing too disturbing. Most of the time it just gets out of the way. Thanks for the great tool!

jsherwani 5y ago
Wow, that's great to hear! Please do let us know about the random hiccups at hello@pop.com, since the long tail of issues is surprisingly long in this product space, and so we really appreciate any feedback that can help us improve.

lucas3 5y ago

Helloo!! I found a bug which I can replicate as many as I want. Steps: 1. Share screen 2. Change cameras videos to the big option (Out of the 3 options available) 3. Click on draw Result: You are not able to click elsewhere on the screen, you just keep drawing. Great tool though :D

jsherwani 5y ago
This is now fixed, thanks for the heads up!

Cu3PO42 5y ago

I have a small bug to report with the website: I cannot scroll the Privacy Policy site. This is on Firefox 91 on Windows 10, it does seem to work in Chrome, however.

jsherwani 5y ago
This is now fixed, thanks for the heads up!

deleted 5y ago

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rexreed 5y ago

Why is it so important to get an expensive domain? Does the three-letter .com really add that much value? Especially when it's not a B2C product / offering and specific to a focused audience? I'd think a three-letter .com would be something with widespread, international appeal to be worth the expense.

flyinglizard 5y ago
My personal opinion is that in this case it’s going to make a world of difference. Very difficult to know for sure, not like we have a control group, but it’s super catchy and feels premium.
- jsherwani 5y ago
  Agreed! After starting with screen.so, we realized firsthand the importance of having a name that's easy to remember and communicate. Also, instead of viewing the domain as an expense, it's more of an enduring asset, which potentially increases its value over time.
  - benatkin 5y ago
    It wasn't great that it was called Screen anyway. GNU Screen predated screen.so by decades.
    - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
      ...and it's hard enough to search the internet for GNU screen.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    > Also, instead of viewing the domain as an expense, it's more of an enduring asset, which potentially increases its value over time. Well, except you also can't really sell it unless you also shut down the company.
    - 5y ago

jmacd 5y ago

Hey @jsherwani Welcome back!

vladharbuz 5y ago

I'm on Firefox on iOS and your website has a few pixels of horizontal overflow. It makes scrolling feel shoddy. Anyway, OG Screenhero user here wishing you good luck with Pop! If Electron is too slow and you need a systems programmer, let me know. :)

jsherwani 5y ago
Thanks for the heads up on Firefox/iOS — we'll take a look! Your repertoire of skills is crazy impressive — it's really inspiring and amazing to see all the stuff you've built and work you've done. Your manifesto is also exactly the kind of thing the world needs more of. We're not currently hiring but I would love to chat with you to exchange notes and war stories if you're up for it! Feel free to grab a slot via https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min :)

keithnz 5y ago

- back button from the download is broken - connect with discord would be good Not sure how this fits, but often we don't get services like this these days because of the pricing model. We like a lot of these kinds of things, and we subscribed to a bunch (many cancelled now), but they all added up and didn't really charge us based on our usage. Perhaps we aren't the target audience as you want people who integrate this into their regular work so people use it all the time. But for us, we'd want all employees to be able to use this, but if we don't use it, we pay nothing. When we do use it, we really want max concurrent users to be charged (concurrent being not necessarily exact time, but within a day or so ). i.e., if 1 user uses it for 10-15 minutes for the entire month, we want to be charged something representing that usage. Then we'd be much more likely to signup and have this kind of thing available if and when we need it. Or any other model that seems fair for occasional / spikey use, psychologically, we just don't want to feel like we are paying for something we aren't using when we don't use it.

jsherwani 5y ago
We're pushing out a fix for the back button as I speak, thanks for the heads up! It should be live in ~10 minutes (CI build + test + deploy). Discord: we haven't looked into their API yet, but it's an oversight on our part. We'll take a look soon! Pricing: thanks for the detailed explanation of where you're coming from. Your perspective resonates well with ours, which is that we'd like the amount our customers pay us to be roughly commensurate with the value we provide them. If you're truly interested in using Pop and providing feedback, I'd love to learn more about your team and your background so we can make sure we're aware of that perspective as we work on our pricing plan. Feel free to find a time via https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min or drop me a line at j@pop.com. Thanks!

borisdesouza 5y ago

Hands down the best thing to come out for remote collaboration since the pandemic. My team and I have been using pop.com since we discovered it as screen.so. It's been amazing! We added it to Slack and it make it seamless for us to get into a pairing session with one command. Prior to pop.com we tried a bunch of other tools but didn't find any that gave us the fluidity of collaboration we got with pop. One of our favorite features is the drawing capabilities. It's weird to believe that this is the only tool we've used that has perfected drawing - something that has truly helped us collaborate without having to use a virtual whiteboard application.

jsherwani 5y ago
Thanks for the positive words!

presentation 5y ago

Any thoughts how this compares to Tuple?

t0mbstone 5y ago
It seems like it maybe does a better job of handling video and audio than tuple does, and it looks like it plays nicer when there are multiple people involved. For example, inviting someone to a screen sharing session is as easy as sending them a link. It also has virtual whiteboarding, which Tuple doesn't have

caslon 5y ago

Something initially very light and small (PowWow) turned into something very... not. Is second-system effect the right term here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect > The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.

pjot 5y ago

My first thought was, “this looks a lot like screenhero”. Glad to see y’all are back!

jsherwani 5y ago
Glad to be back :D

sagivo 5y ago

> I named it “Screen” as homage to Screenhero, only to realize that such a generic word makes a terrible brand name, and consequently makes it impossible to find via search engines. So you've changed it to "pop"? I don't think you're going to get any better here.. Btw I'm an old fan of screenhero.

jsherwani 5y ago
Glad to have you back! And honestly, the feedback on Pop as a name has been overwhelmingly positive :)

makstaks 5y ago

Huge fan of Screenhero back in the day so I'm happy this is back and you have full control over pop.com's future.

jsherwani 5y ago
We're happy you're happy! Please try out the product and let us know if there's anything we can do to improve.

anotherevan 5y ago

This HN post was quite timely as I don't often need to remote control (usually screen sharing is fine) but there was definitely a case today. One weird thing: Every key typed was doubled. So I'd type one "m" and on the remote screen would get "mm" in the input field. I'm on Linux (Arch) and the other end was Windows 10. Other than that, it was VERY smooth and my colleague was quite impressed. He is planning to use to for parental tech support!

jsherwani 5y ago
Please email us at hello@pop.com so we can figure out how this happened and fix it asap!

t0mbstone 5y ago

If you are looking for screenhero alternatives, you should check out Tuple! Our team has been using it for about a year now and we love it. My favorite part about Tuple is how it HAS NOTHING that overlays the screen. It just hides in the tray. I HATE when these screen sharing apps all try to put floating windows and menus and chrome around the screen edges. Just let me share my screen without getting in the way, dang it! Why is that so much to ask?

jsherwani 5y ago
Tuple's done a good job of their minimalist UI (it's largely modeled after Screenhero). With Pop, you can minimize the control panel with 1 click. We'll soon also be adding the ability to remove the border around your shared screen entirely (some users have told us it gives them anxiety to not see something that clearly shows them that they're sharing their screen, but we've now heard the opposite perspective from enough people to realize we need to support both preferences).

spockz 5y ago

We have been using VS Code’s and IntelliJ code with me features. Usually accompanied with just a voice call. What is the added benefit of this? The on screen annotations?

jsherwani 5y ago
Similar discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224881 In short: when you need to see anything outside the IDE (e.g. a debugger, or even just seeing the running app alongside the IDE), a tool like Pop is very helpful. But you can also use it in conjunction with those IDE features, as Elijah in the above thread said he does.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

Congrats on the launch! Can you tell us a bit more about the company? How many of you, where are you based? Also, did you consider using Signalwire APIs [0] to power the service? (disclaimer: I know the team well and I am an early investor) [0]: https://docs.signalwire.com/ https://docs.signalwire.com/

kirillzubovsky 5y ago

Have been using Pop for 1:1 pair programming sessions with a friend and it’s been great! To me there is a massive value in simplicity and speed with which we can go from zero to working. It’s 100x faster than Zoom or Meet. Two clicks and we are on! Good luck, team Pop!

jsherwani 5y ago
Thank you for the kind words!

pmontra 5y ago

> Sorry, your browser isn’t supported. > Please use a supported browser Chrome, Safari, Firefox or download Pop for Linux. I'm using Firefox 91 on Ubuntu 20.04. Is this a browser version check failing or a some missing capability? Maybe one of the extensions in my browser is blocking something needed by Pop. It seems to work on Vivaldi. At least it gets to the account registration page. I hoped it would work without an account so I didn't go any further.

worble 5y ago
If you've got an extension disabling WebRTC, turn it off, that worked for me.

danr4 5y ago

I loved screen, but only Debian/Fedora killed it for me. No love for other linux distros? :(

jsherwani 5y ago
We have a .deb and .rpm download, and also have an AUR package. Let me know if you need something else!

rvz 5y ago

Well done for your rename. At least they renamed to something better than Screen and obviously not taking something like 'TurboScreenMaster 3000'. [0] How does Pop compare to Watercooler? [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678477 [1] https://www.getwatercooler.io/ https://www.getwatercooler.io/

programmarchy 5y ago

On macOS please allow me to turn off the Menu bar icon.

chadxz 5y ago

I love pop and recommend it frequently. Great work.