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Show HN: I made an open-source Loom alternative
- paulcole 2y ago> Lightweight, powerful, and stunning What about it is stunning to you? The Steve Jobs-ification of marketing copy has hit epidemic proportions.
- martinesko36 2y agoThis is not a nice comment, but the poster is right. You can get rid of that whole line. Keep it simple.
- arnavbathla 2y agoThanks for building this! Making this my default for demos.
- JasonSage 2y agoHow do you quantify “lightweight”? This is used in a couple places, but without additional information it’s essentially meaningless. I’m starting to think that this is a red flag when looking at a project when there’s no further information. It’s marketing-speak masquerading as a technical attribute, but without additional information could just be 100% incorrect. It’s also overly-generic… depending on the intent of the author, lightweight could mean CPU-efficient, small binary, feature-light, and so on, but when not qualified further it seems to be implicitly all of these and more, but most likely that’s not accurate. My marketing pet-peeve aside, this looks nice and I will be trying it out. :) Congrats on your HN launch!
- mcilroy 2y agoGood point. Will definitely take another look at the copy! I'm referring to it being a small bundle size to download :)
- klabb3 2y agoNote that hackernews is notoriously anti “marketing speech”. I don’t think there’s anything bad with elaborating but lightweight/snappy/slim is pretty much what’s important, given that there’s so much slow bloatware out there. Not all users are technical, and eg throwing out benchmarks on the front page would be complete mumbo jumbo to many users. That said, I also think the best way to communicate the intended vibe is also through screenshots (which you already have) and design. Looks awesome.
- jerf 2y agoIn that case I'd go straight to "responsive" or "fast" or something. The vast bulk of users literally don't understand what we mean by lightweight; ask around as to which is larger, a kilobyte or a gigabyte, with your non-technical friends and I bet you find even the ones who get it right do a lot more fumbling than you expect.
- klabb3 2y agoYes, I like responsive too, although it’s borderline industry jargon. I still think snappy is perhaps a bit more down to earth but I don’t know how common it is outside of American English, which could be a problem with an international audience.. words are hard. I think the important thing to get across isn’t binary size or even RAM usage per se, but rather that it’s the opposite of bloated. Regular non-techies are tortured every day with really slow and unnecessarily networked applications. There was a thread like a month ago about the 400+ MB LinkedIn iPhone app.
- bombcar 2y agoLightweight is a great adjective when comparing with existing "heavyweight" software - most people would understand what it means if you say "Numbers is a lightweight Excel-like spreadsheet"; "Zoom is a lightweight Go-to-meeting". As a stand-alone adjective it's not as useful.
- RileyJames 2y agoReasons I use Loom: - Social features, users can comment & engage with my video to provide feedback - Analytics, I get notifications when a user views a video (useful for demos/sales) - Post-capture editing - Set 1.X speed by default on videos (significantly reduces video length) I don't find the capturing element of loom very good. Their chrome integration is pretty bad, seems to not handle clicking/changing pages when capturing a tab. I recently started using Screen Studio and have really liked it.
- neerajdotname2 2y agoWe built neetoRecord (https://neeto.com/neetoRecord https://neeto.com/neetoRecord) which is also a Loom alternative. Full disclosure - I'm part of the team that built neetoRecord.
- xyst 2y agoIt’s poor taste to hijack another “show hn” post. Probably not against the rules but definitely frowned upon. Similar to proposing to significant other at a friends engagement party.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- j45 2y agoMaybe. I agree it could have been worded different including giving some constructive feedback on it.. Ppl who discover a category of software might hesitate to try it out while looking for alternatives to compare it against. It also helps the author be aware of other features that might be of interest to them. Cap.so would still remain my first option to try out. It's unique compared to another good screen capture, screenity.io, which is more locally run in the browser.
- neerajdotname2 2y agoThe intent was not to hijack the discussion but to provide choices to the people. After all, we are talking about Loom alternatives here.
- j45 2y agoThe thread is about an author who created an alternative to loom. People discussing other alternatives to Loom, or alternatives to what the author created is besides the point, to the extend that there might be helpful comparisons and questions. Could be just me tho, which is totally fair.
- re 2y agoI'm curious about your plans around open-source, since you're using it as a selling point. There's been a lot of discussion about projects that start as open-source but then go to a more restrictive license once other companies start offering their own hosted versions. Is that a concern for you? Do you plan to include any/all of the "pro" features on the roadmap in the open-source code?
- lolinder 2y agoNote that they appear to have started with AGPL, which goes a long way towards preventing the kinds of uses that prominent license switches were designed to prevent.
- singron 2y agoAlso it looks like they don't (yet) have a copyright assignment, which would make it exceedingly difficult to relicense if they got significant external contributions.
- xyst 2y agoIf there’s one way to turn off a good portion of people from using your project, it’s by locking down the community into a discord.
- mcilroy 2y agoah sorry to hear that! where would you prefer it?
- xyst 2y agoMatrix for IM, discourse for longer discussions, … Plenty of open source alternatives. Can even bridge between matrix channels and discord
- refulgentis 2y agoMatrix lost, or never even won, outside some unusually neckbeard-y communities. I gotta admit I kinda enjoyed watching someone try to make normies use it. Impossible. To be fair, discord is hard. But Matrix was really impossible.
- Arathorn 2y agoMatrix is a protocol, not an app, and it's still evolving rapidly. Meanwhile, Element as an app is also evolving rapidly too. Totally agreed that the onboarding has been awful in the past, but we're plugging away improving it and trying to make it more glossy and less neckbeardy, as per https://element.io/labs/element-x https://element.io/labs/element-x etc. The fact is that Discord has raised $1B+ to run a centralised unencrypted comms platform; meanwhile Element is doing something ~10x harder (decentralised & E2EE) with a tiny fraction of the $. It takes longer, but the difference is that Matrix should last indefinitely, whereas Discord will get Eloned sooner or later. I wouldn't say we've lost yet, but ymmv. I do wish we'd progressed faster though.
- mynameisvlad 2y ago
- martinesko36 2y agoCongrats on the launch! It looks quite slick and something I could see myself using. I'm curious, what do the costs of operation and margins look like for a service like this?
- ec109685 2y agoInterestingly ycombinator passed on Cap due to them not having a co-founder: https://x.com/richiemcilroy/status/1788996498081951848?s=46 https://x.com/richiemcilroy/status/1788996498081951848?s=46
- JasonSage 2y agoWhat's missing (maybe for brevity) is why it's important to have a co-founder. I find it hard to believe that they just wanted that box ticked and more that there's something else a co-founder brings to the table... so what is it? What is _actually_ missing in the formula for them? Also [0]. > "probably not good enough / won't get in" - you'd be surprised at how many people feel that way, whether because of impostor syndrome, lack of credentials, whatever—and often they turn out to be among the best founders. So this a terrible reason not to apply! Maybe it's not a terrible reason not to apply. /shrug 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091622
- xahrepap 2y agoSome honest feedback: describe your product/tool without using a competitor’s name. I’m on mobile and the landing page only tells me “recording software” and “Loom” before it drops into Twitter like 3rd party comments. I honestly have never used Loom. I don’t know what it is. Do you really want me to have to go look up “the competition” just to know who you are?
- pooriar 2y agoI think it's really useful to describe your product as an alternative to a well known product. Most people will instantly get it, much more so than a long re-definition of the original product.
- ezconnect 2y agoI have no idea what Loom is, I also have the same issue I didn't tell me what the product is and just got confuse and didn't explore further.
- ARandomerDude 2y agoSame. I’ve never heard of Loom and (therefore?) I’m honestly not sure how this would be different on a Mac than a QuickTime screen recording. And since the promo images are from a Mac, my first thought is Quicktime is probably safer.
- memset 2y agoJust to address this comment chain: loom does make it easier to do screen recordings and demos, and additionally has features like timestamped comments and notes and sharing functionality. The target customer is a business who is making demo videos and needs these kinds of tracking/collaboration/commenting features. Folks interested in open source maybe want a better offering, don’t want to be locked in, want more favorable pricing, or want a self hosted version. As someone who has used loom, the value proposition is clear from the title without even going to the website.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago"This pricing will be locked in for the lifetime of your subscription." Highly doubtful, I have been cheated out of lifetime guarantees so many times. Latest when the company is sold.
- RamblingCTO 2y agoYou're also robbing yourself of increasing the prices to keep the lights on. Business-wise this is not a very good idea. Also as a customer I have the feeling that this is a stupid idea. If the costs increase, you have to increase prices. If I like something and want to keep using it, that's the only way.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoAs a rambling CTO myself, I admire your nick name.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoI assume all the downvotes because you are envy of the nick name too.
- fwip 2y agoI think rambling is a job requirement for CTOs.
- RamblingCTO 2y agohaha cheers
- aranibatta 2y agoLess aggressively, pricing is a historically bad way to create urgency in software
- stevenicr 2y agoSimilar thought, but also thought this is setup for a lawsuit - I mean, I get lifetime unlimited video storage for $9 a month? I can already think of several ways to abuse that and then complain.
- b20000 2y agoI thought this was about the adventure game Loom but no.
- cco 2y agoThe key innovation of Loom, and of course I'm using that term loosely, was the inclusion of a human face in a circle at the bottom left of your video. We're monkeys, and monkeys like to see another monkey's face while they're hearing someone talk. It helps with communication all around, nuance, recall etc This is the same "killer feature" of Twitch (or more generally video game streaming). So that's all to say, I really recommend you include that in your landing page somehow. Screen sharing is frankly meh, a slide deck is fine, you can use Quicktime or similar to share. But the key is automatically overlaying a circle of your webcam on top of whatever you're recording to share. I suppose the other feature of importance is a simple URL to share it. I don't see if that's possible via Cap. How do I share these videos to my colleagues?
- j45 2y agoThe simple URL is valuable. Loom still came up short against a predecessor, Jing, which would also copy the url into your clipboard. You hit stop recording, open an email, paste, and write your message and send. No need to wait while it was uploading, etc.
- 4star3star 2y agoSome feedback on your site's UX - on desktop, I don't expect hovering on a menu item to open a new context, so by habit I click on it. You're opening on hover, though, and my click is closing the context immediately.
- mcilroy 2y agothanks for this! agreed, will fix.
- memset 2y agoFeedback: can there be a big “loom” on the homepage showing how it works or what differentiates it? Right now we only see tweets but nothing that gives me the “aha” moment to want to try it out. Make me remember the pain, and show me really clearly how your software will fix it right now. Screen studio does a good job of this.
- j45 2y agoAn animated gif video with a ticker on the side going through each step would be great. Also being able to launch recording it without an account would be a great way to get someone to create a video, invest enough to create an account instead of come back to it later. Veed.io seems to have used this approach to great success.
- clan 2y agoThat is a really dark pattern which I personally hate. Sucker me in and then raise the barrier. It is on the same level as those "create free account" but nothing is actually free except for the account creation process. We have word for this: Demos. It could be a "free demo" account or an "account free" demo. Two different but easily understandable things which clearly communicates intent and value. Nothing Sneaky and no hiding weasels. It just triggered me that this marketing funneling newspeak actually has become commonplace and generally accepted. Change the wording to "launch demo (recording)" and communicate it clearly will make this grumpy fart happy. And yes: There is a subtle difference and therein lies the darkness. The video and ticker are however great ideas as-is without me complaining.
- j45 2y agoSince I hate dark patterns, I likely did not do a good job of explaining. I am saying to show someone a quick summary of what a demo would have (in seconds to earn more seconds to invite them to demo. From an onboarding perspective, the goal is to remove friction for the user. First at a feature, cognitive, and then emotional level. How to do this can be used for good an bad. Demos are great. What I'm talking about is the thing that compels them to try it out, rather than "I don't really get what this does, an I'm not sure if I want to invest my time in yet another thing to be dissapointed", for example. Demos take more time than a quick animation that shows step 1,2,3. Conveying the ease of how it can work for them, to help them understand how the features can help hem, as well as address any existing is a simple call to action to get the features in front of them in the precious first few secons an ensure that communication is being improved
- kaiwenwang 2y agoI like your buttons!
- api_or_ipa 2y agoLove it. I hate loom. Dark patterns abound. Its time we have a better orientated replay alternative (but I’m still waiting for a widely adopted true session replay alternative)
- bobse 2y ago[dead]
- humanlity 2y agofrankly, if a util needs login first, it may not be worth trying
- tylerlaws0n 2y agoIsn't this just the same thing as kap getkap.co except that this cap is not free?
- 8mobile 2y agohi, it's open source and not free. the Lite plan allows you to do the same things as Loom it seems. I would have preferred a video showing the app.
- brendonjohn 2y agoPrincipal engineer for Loom here: Congrats on the beta launch. Super cool, I’m looking forward to trying it out. Welcome to the Thunderdome.
- dbish 2y agos/Loom/Atlassian
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sureIy 2y agoSide question: can anyone tell me the point of Loom? My team uses it to record a screencast and then paste the link on Slack or GitHub. I do the same but I don’t need extra software because my OS already has the functionality and both services accept uploads.
- JasonSage 2y agoThe auto-transcription into text is the big thing. I personally find that most of the time when a coworker posts a video I don’t even need to watch it to get all the information I actually needed. One could argue that what you’re doing is inconveniencing your coworkers and ensuring anybody using a screen-reader can’t actually consume your videos.
- ascorbic 2y agoSome feedback: - You refer to it as "screen sharing", but that makes me think of live sharing like Zoom etc. Wouldn't "screen recording" be a better description? - The "get started for free" text in the header CTA flows onto a second line for me - It would be good to have an embedded demo video on the landing page
- rajdeep_das 2y agoReally nice
- jak2k 2y agoWhy just Mac and not Linux or NT?
- mavelikara 2y agoFrom https://github.com/CapSoftware/Cap https://github.com/CapSoftware/Cap: > Cap is currently in public beta, and is available for macOS and Web. Windows and Linux builds are in development. Join the Cap Discord (https://discord.gg/y8gdQ3WRN3 https://discord.gg/y8gdQ3WRN3) to help test future releases and join the community.
- jak2k 2y agoThe closed source platform Discord may not be the best place for an open source community, but this is probably a whole different discussion. https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- thepaulmcbride 2y agoIf you had a lifetime subscription of around $250, I’d buy it instantly.
- discordance 2y agoStill can't believe Atlassian paid $1B for Loom. Best of luck with your version!
- master-lincoln 2y agoI have no idea what Loom is and you don't really explain what your product can do upfront for people who don't know Loom. I'll pass
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoThen you might not be in the target audience, which is totally fine…
- triceratops 2y agoThey might well be the target audience. The "I'll pass" at the end was pretty negative but I agree with the rest of their sentiment. Advertising is just as much about showing people they have a problem as it is about telling them you have a solution. But by positioning the product as an "open-source Loom" you've immediately lost the first half of the benefit of advertising. Everyone knows what a Coke is so I can get away with calling my new beverage "a healthier cola". Loom isn't so well-known.
- bombcar 2y agoIt's also dangerous if you can only explain your product as a variation of an existing product; it means you're not able to sell your product "directly".
- toastal 2y agoIs the ‘free’ part of open source not a priority? There is an AGPL license, but it looks like future contributors will be required to use proprietary services for this helping this project with Discord & Microsoft GitHub as the only communication options. If FOSS is good enough for your project, it should be good enough for the tools used to build your community…
- mihaic 2y agoThat seems overy ideological. While the software itself might be good enough (it often isn't, as that's why these products are being developed), hosting it is a work that can be better spent on the project itself.
- toastal 2y agoFor small projects, there are community & non-profit options that don’t require self-hosting. Alternatively, if your tooling is actually decentralized, then you don’t need to become a massive host & a bedroom PC can ‘host’ a project.
- andrewaylett 2y agoThe home page does somewhat assume that the reader knows what "Loom" is -- if I'm not already a Loom user, that's pretty much instructing me to go look at Loom first because it's obviously the market leader in whatever-it-does. From context, I'm guessing it's not about textile manufacture?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- doubloon 2y agoYou mean its not the Lucas Arts game from the 80s/90s?
- TremendousJudge 2y agoI was 100% expecting to see a reimplementation of that game
- nottorp 2y agoI wonder how many people upvoted this without reading, assuming it's that Loom.
- JohnFen 2y agoI genuinely thought that's what the article was about before clicking.
- JoeyJooste 2y agoI was really excited for this. But I am largely disappointed. The flaws with Loom being closed source is that it's free tier is so horrible. Cap's free tier is just as bad. There is no reason why I would pay cap and not loom. The open source aspect is nice, but I also don't care about loom not being open source because whatever I post on loom is public anyway. It would be really nice if cap was client side and allowed you to save the video directly to your drive. That way you could remove the paid tier and make it free for everyone. Adding 1 or 2 more options for webcam shape etc could also be a good selling point.
- untech 2y agoQuick PSA: If you want to do a facecam-overlayed screen recording on a Mac, all you need is QuickTime. 1. QuickTime -> New Movie Recording 2. View -> Float on Top 3. Position face view where you want it to be. 4. Hit Cmd+Shift+5 to record the entire screen. Voilà!
- jasonjmcghee 2y agoThe number of products that can be successfully marketed due to small friction or non obvious UX is high. I think this will change as we shift to AI-assisted desktop / smart Siri.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Saulivar 2y agoI don't like the name "Cap". It implies a limit of some kind. Why would I sign up to get caped? I want unlimited video, not capped. I know you were going for capture, but now you're just cap.
- mcilroy 2y agohey everyone! Cap is still a little rough around the edges but we'll get there. Working as quick as possible on feedback / new features and fixes. Self hosting is coming soon, as well as the option to connect your own storage option (S3 for now). appreciate you taking the time to check it out, and happy Sunday!
- j45 2y agoKeep it up. Shipping is the hard part. If every commenter had to admit the last time they shipped the context and perspective of the comments migth surprise you. S3 Storage sounds amazing, especially if you can edit the URL and redirect it to backblaze or other s3 compatible stores. I'll be looking forward to trying out the self-hosting to be able to host links from my own domain.
- joshgermon 2y agoCongrats on the product - looks great! I'd love to hear more about your experience using Tauri for this? What are the pros/cons and do you feel like it was the right choice so far?
- codetrotter 2y agoHow does it compare to using either of the following on macOS - OBS - The built in screen recording functionality in macOS itself - ffmpeg (see http://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop http://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop for details on doing screen capture with it)
- sedatk 2y agoWindows also has built-in screen recording.
- j45 2y agoWay simpler and quicker than those options. Being able to reply to an email with a video quicker than typing is often a line I consider.
- mcilroy 2y agoWith any of those you need to upload the video directly into Slack, or something like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Plausible for short videos, but can become a pain if recording for more than a few mins. If you record with Cap, we'll auto handle the segmentation of the video so it can be played back efficiently (so the whole video doesn't have to be download in one go). You can also receive comments on your Cap link, reactions, and see the analytics data. It just makes it easier. Do your recording, then receive your shareable Cap link in just a few seconds.
- yencabulator 2y ago> If you record with Cap, we'll auto handle the segmentation of the video so it can be played back efficiently (so the whole video doesn't have to be download in one go). Playing an mp4 from a static file server buffers only the parts it consumes, including support for seeking. HTTP range requests work just fine.
- codetrotter 2y agoThat makes sense. How about if I already run a PeerTube instance. In that case I already have segmentation of videos so people can watch without downloading the whole file, and they could also comment on the video on my PeerTube instance if I allowed them to. How does Cap compare to using a PeerTube instance to host screen recordings?
- bcye 2y agoThe landing page only really highlights the video recording aspect, it would be interesting to see imo how it replaces loom in what comes after the recording (even if it's still WIP).
- mcilroy 2y agoGood point! Will work on this. After you stop recording you are instantly redirected to your shareable Cap.link. Working on some new points to the landing page now :)
- skinner927 2y agoI have no idea what loom is, so describing Cap as an open-source loom tells me nothing. There’s likely dozens of people like me, haha.
- mcilroy 2y agoYeah that's a good point. It's a good way for us to get started with people familiar of Loom, but it's not future proof for sure.
- geor9e 2y agoI love it. I forget why I quit using Loom but you're my new default now. One feature request: When I press "Start Recording" via the browser, I don't want it to immediately start recording that screen. Give me a 3…2…1…Go with a sound so I can minimize my browser and show what I want to record. I don't all my videos to start with me fumbling for the Start button.
- aitchnyu 2y agoWonder whats the status of AI which knows which durations can be edited out since you were fumbling with mouse movements and voice. Bonus points if it detects "takes" of the same scene. Around 2005, Linux users were recording TV on their PCs and detecting/skipping ads automatically and soon after, podcast apps were skipping lulls in the voice.
- mcilroy 2y agoThank you so much! 100%, this is a priority. Should have it done soon, as well as a "startover" button.
- pomtato 2y agoHeck make it even better by making that an option, so the user can set the countdown to their preference.
- genpfault 2y ago> open-source Loom alternative ...ScummVM[1]? [1]: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Loom https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Loom
- LegitShady 2y agoYour name will be cursed forever, son of cygna, loom child...BOBBIN THREADBARE!
- nevster 2y agoThat was my immediate thought....
- nevster 2y agoAsk me about Loom
- Enderboi 2y agoThis is the comment I came here for :)
- stevelacy 2y agoFollowing your build statuses for a while, congrats on the launch!
- mcilroy 2y agothank you Steve, appreciate that!