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Show HN: Watercooler – macOS Zoom alternative (no Electron, hi-res video)

getwatercooler.io

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Re: Show HN: Watercooler – macOS Zoom alternative (no Electron, hi-res video)

#21

Post by Terretta »

hiphipjorge wrote: post #5
rusinov wrote: post #4

Honest question: why use this and not FaceTime?

The two mains reason right now would be because you can do screensharing and because this is not tied to your iCloud account in any way. In the future, we will probalby have other clients other than the macOS one.

Regularly escalate FaceTime calls to screen sharing for remote support. Works very well.

Does anyone with a Mac not have an iMessage account, leaving their texts green instead of blue? That audience seems small.

To keep work separate from personal, I originate work texts and FaceTime from the work # on my dual number iPhone. This is also settable per Contact.

Re: Show HN: Watercooler – macOS Zoom alternative (no Electron, hi-res video)

#22

Post by dvlat »

mjshiggins wrote: post #20

Wow, there is an incredible amount of hate for Electron. I understand the desire to avoid it with consumer apps and it feels strange to have large companies using it, but I'm honestly a huge fan of what they've been able to do with it for GUI design. I'm a roboticist who has been stuck in the 90s with tools like tkinter / qt / whatever, and electron has finally enabled me to build something modern for control and mon…

As a user I don't mind Electron when the main running app (which I define as the app that is in focus > 50% of the time) is written in it. For me this application is VS Code and I'm happy with it. However, I'm concerned that larger and larger count of apps running in background move to Electron platform, mainly because that requires more and more memory (eventually surpassing memory available on my machine).

Re: Show HN: Watercooler – macOS Zoom alternative (no Electron, hi-res video)

#23

Post by hiphipjorge »

mjshiggins wrote: post #20

Wow, there is an incredible amount of hate for Electron. I understand the desire to avoid it with consumer apps and it feels strange to have large companies using it, but I'm honestly a huge fan of what they've been able to do with it for GUI design. I'm a roboticist who has been stuck in the 90s with tools like tkinter / qt / whatever, and electron has finally enabled me to build something modern for control and mon…

Creator of Watercooler here.

I do agree with you that Electron is an amazing platform and definitely has a lot of cool, solid use cases, but that doesn't mean that every single app we use _should_ be written in Electron. Recently, it feels like every app uses Electron. Even the ones that shouldn't.

Video Conferencing is one of those apps that in my opinion should definitely be native for two important reasons: 1. Performance: Video conferencing needs great performance. As a user, you want the best video possible at the best FPS possible. Mostly Electron/JS video conferncing apps are not bad (Facebook Messenger, Google Meet) because Chrommium just provides a JS wrapper for native APIs implemented in C++. But, if you want to do anything outside of that you're screwed. You will eventually run into the limitation of what Chromium gives you and this gives you an upper limit to what you can do to optimize this. 2. Memory Usage: Video conferencing is usually used alongside other apps (while sharing your screen for example). For that reason, you want to minimize memory usage as much as possible to make it easier for the user to have the app open while using as many apps as they can. Electron uses a lot of memory.

A third reason is that the human interaction guidelines provided by Apple for their UIs (and embedded into their APIs) is very, very good. It keeps the user experience consistent across your platform and makes your app easier to understand. And this is coming from someone who is not really an Apple fanboy. What you see with Electron apps is a steeper learning curve for having to learn how to use every new app you install.

Re: Show HN: Watercooler – macOS Zoom alternative (no Electron, hi-res video)

#24

Post by hiphipjorge »

car wrote: post #18

Looks great, now just have to find a counterpart to test it out with. I love the fact that it's native, props for that. I had no idea that people are putting Electron/browser apps out there, yuck. How does signaling between clients work? Is this going to a server you control? And what about encryption, is that enforced by WebRTC per se? Lastly, are you routing calls through TURN servers if NAT tunneling with STUN/ICE…

> How does signaling between clients work? Is this going to a server you control?

Yes, this is going to my own signaling server. No way around that. The signalling logic is very minimal though and no audio or video data touches the signalling server.

> And what about encryption, is that enforced by WebRTC per se?

In WebRTC, all communication between peers is encrypted once the connection has been established.

> Lastly, are you routing calls through TURN servers if NAT tunneling with STUN/ICE fails, or always?

I do have one TURN server based in SF in case STUN/ICE fails , yes. If I see a lot of usage in other geographies, we'll probably deploy more in different regions.

Re: Show HN: Watercooler – macOS Zoom alternative (no Electron, hi-res video)

#25

Post by hiphipjorge »

mft_ wrote: post #19
hiphipjorge wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The screenshot does show slightly higher CPU. We wanted to remain honest in that way. Strictly speaking, CPU usage is lower if you use Watercooler over having to open your browser to do a video call (if you add up all processes) and it's comparable to Zoom. Will work on maybe changing the phrasing on this. Thanks for the feedback! Edit: Changed the copy to just "Watercooler uses less memory and than any other video c…

While this might be interesting and relevant to the HN audience, I doubt that this is a differentiating factor for 99% of today’s video call users. And of the two, I’d argue processor would be more important than memory: high processor usage makes your lap hot and the fans kick in; whereas in today’s world of multi-GB memory as standard, 100 vs. 200 vs. 300 MB memory usage is effectively invisible.

I think that's a valid opinion.

But, I do think that users do notice the difference. I think you're right that they'll "feel" an application hogging their CPU more than they'll feel one doing so with memory, but they can tell when an application is faster/slower. I think this is especially true with video calling.

So the bet is not su much that you're open up Activity Monitor and track CPU or memory, but rather that you'll "feel" how the app does perform better. And yes, I could be totally wrong about it!

All that being said, Watercooler definitely has a long way to go when it comes to this. There's a bunch of stuff I plan to do in order to improve performance.

Re: Show HN: Watercooler – macOS Zoom alternative (no Electron, hi-res video)

#26

Post by car »

hiphipjorge wrote: post #24
car wrote: post #18

Looks great, now just have to find a counterpart to test it out with. I love the fact that it's native, props for that. I had no idea that people are putting Electron/browser apps out there, yuck. How does signaling between clients work? Is this going to a server you control? And what about encryption, is that enforced by WebRTC per se? Lastly, are you routing calls through TURN servers if NAT tunneling with STUN/ICE…

> How does signaling between clients work? Is this going to a server you control? Yes, this is going to my own signaling server. No way around that. The signalling logic is very minimal though and no audio or video data touches the signalling server. > And what about encryption, is that enforced by WebRTC per se? In WebRTC, all communication between peers is encrypted once the connection has been established. > Lastl…

Thanks for the response.
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