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PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing
- rockyj 14y agoLooks nice! I wish it gives support for Linux as well. Good screen sharing tools for Linux are virtually non-existent (and I am often ridiculed for it).
- crazysim 14y agoTeamviewer supports Linux but I'm interested to see if this does the sharing the screen and pointing thing better.
- MikeCodeAwesome 14y agoI kind of hate to say this but I'm glad there's at least one other person out there who has troubles with TeamViewer on Linux. My remote coworker uses Ubuntu with two screens and we're unable to make the mouse work on the correct screen consistently. That and the screen won't update properly.
- crazysim 14y agoHonestly I'm amazed it works at all. They run it in WINE.
- ebiester 14y agoIt has always worked pretty well for me but I only share one screen.
- eric_bullington 14y agoI've never had a problem with TeamViewer on Linux and I'm grateful that they made a Linux version.
- hippich 14y agoJust to be clear - their Linux version is really windows one running under wine.
- Argorak 14y agoI am constantly surprised by that. http://dozeo.com http://dozeo.com has screen export (we don't do screen sharing) support for Linux and its been the easiest implementation of all three. It is not official, as in "not our main business", but we do have CI for it and it should work in the future.
- rogerbinns 14y agoHave you tried Chrome Remote Desktop? https://chrome.google.com/remotedesktop https://chrome.google.com/remotedesktop It has two modes of operation. One is where you work with a different person - whoever shares their screen starts Chrome and it generates a random access number which the other party enters. The other mode is accessing your own machines which means there is no other party and chrome doesn't need to be running (the desktop is exported as a daemon/service). It works really well in both modes, and supports Linux (which I use), Mac (also have one of them) and Windows. The viewer and sharer can both interact. The viewer is a tab within Chrome which you can also make fullscreen. If you don't need to remotely interact then Skype works just fine and again has cross platform support.
- rogerbinns 14y agoOne clarification - CRD turns out not to support exporting a Linux machine that is your own (unattended). They do not have the daemon/service code for that. Sharing with other people works fine.
- beagle3 14y agoWhile I have no experience with screen sharing, letting other people on a skype conversation see your screen works quite well even with the old Skype 2 client on Linux. (Well, at least it used to - the last couple of weeks had Skype conference quality deteriorate horribly, on all of Linux, Windows and Mac.
- semiquaver 14y agoGoogle hangout's built-in screen sharing actually works perfectly for me. (Ubuntu 12.10)
- propercoil 14y agoany version for ubuntu/other debian derivatives?
- mparlane 14y agoTwo mice but surely not two cursors?
- solox3 14y agoTwo cursors. However, only one application can be active at any one time, so two people can't type at the same time.
- Ganthor 14y agoDoes this differ from Goinstant (http://www.goinstant.com/ http://www.goinstant.com/ )? It was aquired by Salesforce in July 2012 for $70MM.
- RaphiePS 14y agoAbsolutely. GoInstant is for the web only, and is meant for tech support rather than collaboration.
- jonny_eh 14y agoI thought GoInstant was for sales mainly.
- jsherwani 14y agoI'm one of the co-founders of PowWow. We're a lot like GoInstant — in fact their demo video does an even better job than ours does of explaining the concept to a layperson. It's interesting that while their product and ours have very similar use cases, the technology stack is completely different. They have a browser-within-the-browser, while we have an interaction layer over the OS — and we both do crazy hacks to make multiple-mouse live collaboration work. We've met the GoInstant guys, and they're an awesome team with a great product, and we're definitely fans of theirs.
- tabulatouch 14y agoThat's great hacking guys. I am waiting for the Windows version, where i think you'll have a hard time escaping the "only one window has focus" dogma. Btw, if you need beta testers i am here.
- fireballer 14y agoIt looks like a total copy of the concept/interactions to be honest. Hopefully for Powwow GoInstant hasn't patented this stuff... Good artists copy, great artists steal perhaps?
- mgillett 14y agoReally like the concept and the product feels great. I'm curious as to why voice chat was not included though. Is that planned in an upcoming release, because it seems like a pretty big setback. You may not be fighting over a single cursor anymore, but you're still fighting for control, and it's hard to coordinate that without talking to one another. I don't want to have to use up additional resources by entering a Skype chat either.
- salman89 14y agoI'd guess that voice chat is a completely different expertise than this.
- hayksaakian 14y agoAdditional resource would go to their homebrew implementation as well. Not worth developing for an MVP, in my opinion.
- frk1206 14y agoI'm a co-founder/dev at PowWow. VoiceChat is going to be in the next major release. We already have system audio being ogg/vorbis'ed to you so its not a question of expertise but simply time allocation. I completely agree that whenever we have PowWow'ed, we would have a active skype session since that's much easier than chat. That's also what a alpha release is supposed to be - to gather your inputs! So if everyone agrees that Voice chat is a must have it'll definitely be there in the general release!
- Scaevolus 14y agoHave a look at Opus, another free audio codec that provides lower latency (~22ms) and better quality than Vorbis. It also scales down to low-bitrate speech, but I doubt you need that for your application.
- zapu 14y agoDo you have experience in using Opus for something else than speech? I'm currently in a project that deals with audio streaming and I've been exploring my options. Would love to hear about your thoughts!
- shravan 14y agoThis is super slick. Just played around with it with a friend and there's almost no lag. My CPU spun up quite a bit but nevertheless color me impressed. I'm curious how this is implemented though?
- Wump 14y agoThe networking is P2P (most of the time). The screen sharing is VP8 video compression. Presence is XMPP. The multiple mice, separate dock icon, and a lot of other little things are the result of a lot of hacking :) We're going to be working on making the encoding more CPU efficient. (btw if anyone has any expertise in real-time video codecs we'd love to talk to you)
- vdm 14y ago> P2P, VP8 So is Chromium Remoting. http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=tree;f=remoting http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=tree;f=remo...
- saiko-chriskun 14y agoawesome!!! been wanting something like this ;)
- warmwaffles 14y agopair programming with this has the potential to be awesome
- wooster 14y agoI remember the PowWow McAfee founded that did collaborative web browsing.… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)
- trimes 14y agoThat was my thought, is this a renewal of a 90s brand? The original PowWow was something that our QA people used for reasons I can't recall.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoProbably because it had the PowWow Robot Voice to read your chats for you. Not that it was super useful, it just sounded funny.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Gormo 14y agoI think this was also one of the first applications that could qualify as an instant messaging tool. I remember it coming out well before ICQ and AIM. I hope the guys working on this project don't end up mired in trademark issues.
- alephnil 14y ago> I think this was also one of the first applications that could qualify as an instant messaging tool I would certainly consider IRC to be an instant messagig tool, and that has been around since around 1988, while the orginal PowWow seems to be from 1994, which would make it 6 years late to be first. The most well known networks like ICQ and MSN came some years later, so they were still early.
- Gormo 14y agoI suppose you could consider IRC and IM to have some significant feature overlap, but I'd still regard them as essentially different things. IRC's core feature is larger-scale many-to-many conversations, and IM's core feature is one-to-one conversation, and this in turn leads to significant differences usage patterns, interface conventions, network protocols etc. that even further differentiate them.
- jsherwani 14y agoHey all! I'm one of the co-founders of PowWow. This has caught us all by surprise, but we're thrilled to see the response we've been getting so far. If you guys run into any issues, please let us know. We're in very early beta right now, so your feedback is very important. Feel free to reply in the comments here, or email us at everyone@powwow.cc. Happy PowWow-ing :)
- jordo37 14y agoGreat looking product guys! My old life was as a Collaboration Researcher and this is far better than many of the enterprise tools I saw in my day. The get-started quick aspect is great and a tremendous decider in which, if any, of these kinds of tools actually get used.
- 666_howitzer 14y agoI wish someone thought me code with this.
- jczhang 14y agothis is awesome, any chances for a PC version?
- jsherwani 14y agoIt's in the pipeline :)
- joshchan 14y agohttp://i.imgur.com/RbPQ8.jpg http://i.imgur.com/RbPQ8.jpg PowWow is trippy.
- bahman2000 14y agofavicon.ico for my label-less bookmarks please :)
- jsherwani 14y agoFixed :) Thanks for pointing that out!
- zillwc 14y agoVery cool.
- yeet 14y agoI've been using powwow since early development days. It is a great product, been useful to me many many times. it is good to fix your mom's computer or to help your peer programmer across the sea.
- georgespencer 14y agoLooks great. There's a UK company with similar branding doing conference calling (they advertise all over the tube with really terrible posters). Called PowWowNow.
- equator 14y agoVery impressive! I can see myself using this someday!
- davidcollantes 14y agoInteresting on how no replies have been received on how it works. Mind it, I have not installed it, but, is there a server(s) to connect to, is it peer-to-peer? Care to provide more details? Thanks!
- elsif1 14y agoIt is peer to peer when possible (>90% of the time). Otherwise it is relayed.
- watty 14y ago> It's like Google Docs for any application Isn't this a bit too misleading? The appeal of Google Docs is that two people can work on a spreadsheet at the same time. They can be working on different cells or even different sheets of a workbook. PowWow allows one person to work on a spreadsheet at a time but allows you to quickly and seamlessly switch who is working on it. In other words, only one person can type.
- intelliot 14y agoI agree, it's not a perfect comparison. It's appropriate, though: I can quickly understand what it's about. And they do use the word "like" - it's not exactly Google Docs, but it's LIKE Google Docs and can (for certain apps) be a great alternative.
- king_jester 14y agoCool product, not so great name. Using pow wow like this can be considered offensive to native peoples.
- nXqd 14y agoWe cannot work parallel with this screen sharing right ? So it just looks juicy with cursor look like google docs :D
- Wump 14y agoThat's correct, two people can't be doing 2 different things at the same time (i.e., there is one keyboard). However you do have 2 mouse pointers and you can move/point/click with them independently. We found that in practice we actually preferred this because it's valuable to know that everyone is looking at the same thing at the same time.
- nXqd 14y agoyeah, that's why I say it just looks juicy because when using teamviewer or another screen sharing, we still talk discuss. Then knowing each other mouse is not necessary anymore :)
- kstenson 14y agoAre you guys aware of powwownow? it's has voice/video conferencing. Although not exactly like your product, it does share some similarities. http://www.powwownow.co.uk/ http://www.powwownow.co.uk/
- the1 14y agono linux, android, ipad support
- Wump 14y agoMobile support is on the horizon, though Windows is coming first.
- maskedinvader 14y agoI am glad its coming to windows first, I hope you mean windows 8 for touch ( read RT )
- protomyth 14y agoYou know, you probably could have chosen a better name. If for nothing else you are competing on searches with all of the actual Pow Wow websites that tribes and dancers have set up to catalog their events.
- mosfet9 14y agoLooks great! The two-cursor feature would also be extremely useful when two mice are connected to one computer. We do pair programming at work and I could see a tool that allows two people sitting at one machine to each have their own cursor totally transforming the way we work. Is this a feature you plan on developing?
- Wump 14y agoWe've found that since we've starting using PowWow, we don't need to sit at the same computer when we're working together. In fact, we prefer to stay at our computers, even if we're sitting next to each other :) Being able to use our own screen, with our own particular hardware setups is really nice. It also avoids having to reach over the other person to use the keyboard, or squint at the screen because it's too far.
- bosky101 14y agomixergy has a great interview with the founder talking about hitting $1M+/year for the product that started it all (ios), and a phd's journey from pakistan to the bay area. just search for "iteleport mixergy interview" very inspiring story. congrats to J & team. ~B
- 89a 14y ago"You are both always in control" First thing you see in the video is that this isn't true