Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls • Hacker News Board

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#151

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Wed, May 17, 2017, 12:35 PM UTC

npolet wrote: post #136

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple tabs in a web browser flat out sucks for multi-tasking. macOS, Windows and many flavors of window managers for Linux provide many ways for switching between windows, seeing what's open, hiding things, etc. In a browser they're just straight tabs. Have you ever need to switch between multiple tabs semi regularly while keeping other tabs open? Have you ever wanted two tabs to be side-by-side? It's a usability…

I wouldn't call tabs a usability horror show with the reason you stated. Surely you can just drag a tab off the tab line and then you have it in its own window. Ready for you position however you want, in the full control of the window manager. It's so easy to separate tabs into their own window and utilise the window managers control.

Unless you explicitly enable separate tasbar buttons in Windows you still have all of your browser windows accessible only through a single 32px-wide button on your screen. And the default thumbnail preview delay is also equally frustrating.

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#152

Post by cyphar » Wed, May 17, 2017, 1:00 PM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #105

izacus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most devices DO support H.264 encoding. Hangouts however uses VP9 in Chrome and that's not HW accelerated. If you use Safari on Mac it'll switch to H264 and that will stress CPU less.

I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees. I've tried to run 4K60 VP9 (and h.265 for that matter) video from youtube on the latest top spec MacBook Pro and it's completely impossible to watch. Transcoded to h.264 and computer barely gets warm.

> I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.

It would definitely be an interesting way to look at how bad software patents are for our society. It's not Google's fault (though they do participate in this system) that good technology had been locked away only to be used by proprietary software.

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#153

Post by throwaway77662 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 1:22 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #135

abrowne wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Can't you just open a new browser window then?

Not really. It doesn't function the same. Doing Command + Tab on a Mac shows them as the same application so you can't switch that way, you still have to use Command + ~ which is unlike all other apps in function as well as key combo. Also features like expose show the same framing around each website so if you have enough things open the only visual queue is a very tiny preview of the website which, depending on wha…

So basically because MacOS usabillity is not good on multi window desktop apps and the browser doesn't sandbox correctly tabs.

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#154

Post by amorphid » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:02 PM UTC

hobarrera wrote: post #129

amorphid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No keyboard & mouse sharing. And to a lesser extent, not everyone wants a Google account. My employer also blocks some Google services. For example, I can't access Gmail. Trying to use Hangouts without Gmail is swimming upstream a bit.

> Trying to use Hangouts without Gmail How are these two related (usage-wise, I mean)? Also, is your employer paying a Google Apps subscription, but blocking email? WTF.

Employer blocks Gmail (and other sites) via the corporate firewall. They are not paying for Google Apps (at least not for me). Get a job at any large enterprise and you'll experience some restrictions you wouldn't find at a smaller company.

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#155

Post by djhworld » Wed, May 17, 2017, 2:29 PM UTC

Have never been able to get Slack calls working behind our corporate proxy, gave up after many attempts, changing network settings, "noproxy" settings etc.

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#156

Post by dy » Wed, May 17, 2017, 3:20 PM UTC

Curious if anyone has an idea how the multi-mouse system worked. My guess is that on the screen being shared, a transparent full-screen window is overlaid that just draws in the second mouse and that when this proxy mouse is clicked the event gets simulated on the sharer's side.

This effect was so cool and would love to see an open-source library that shows the effect over WebRTC. Curious if it's anything more complicated than that and why it's never been replicated by other packages.

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#157

Post by dy » Wed, May 17, 2017, 3:20 PM UTC

Curious if anyone has an idea how the multi-mouse system worked. My guess is that on the screen being shared, a transparent full-screen window is overlaid that just draws in the second mouse and that when this proxy mouse is clicked the event gets simulated on the sharer's side.

This effect was so cool and would love to see an open-source library that shows the effect over WebRTC. Curious if it's anything more complicated than that and why it's never been replicated by other packages.

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#158

Post by mcintyre1994 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 3:38 PM UTC

mrmondo wrote: post #139

Uhhrrr wrote: post #4

I worry that this could cause Slack to use a lot of memory.

I wonder if their app is just a bunch of javascript wrapped in a web frame? That's how other 'apps' of such design seem to perform (atom etc...)

It is, with that web frame being Electron (Chromium + node.js): https://slack.engineering/building-hybrid-applications-with-...

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#159

Post by twothamendment » Wed, May 17, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #145

twothamendment wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't what is wrong with Hangouts so much as it is a list of things we like about Slack: 1) Channels - each message has a home. Notifications can be set to the correct level. 2) APIs/Integrations - We hook it up to github, pivotal, new relic, AWS and some of our own custom hooks. Reminders, alerts, messages - whatever we dream up that needs to be done and it is open enough to do it. 3) History 4) Past an image rig…

Hangouts Chat / Meet [0] brings a lot, if not all, of this when it comes out. Meet keeps most of what hangouts video has today, but a better UI and uses hardware codecs when it chan. Hangout Chat is really a rework of the idea of hangouts. It brings a lot of functionality that people like from Slack (everything you mention I believe). Note that Hangouts today does have search sorta (it ain't great). If conversation h…

Are there any plans to have a decent API? Getting a script to post to Slack is trivial. Same with having a bot read all the messages in realtime.

Re: Screen sharing comes to Slack video calls

#160

Post by zeptomu » Wed, May 17, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #130

zeptomu wrote: post #106

I always wonder if people would be interested in a small SAAS providing a terminal demonstration and sharing service with web and terminal client. Users could on one hand share step-by-step demos for common tasks on the terminal (say "Let's build $foobar on Ubuntu 16.04 optimized for the following infrastructure") similar to asciinema.org and on the other hand share there terminal read-only to demonstrate live-debugg…

So, you want tmate[0] with a web interface? [0] https://tmate.io/

In essence, yes. Furthermore I guess that it could be a feature to not have the ability to write to the terminal and/or accompany recorded sessions with additional documentation.