Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#141

Post by wichert » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 9:30 AM UTC

lima wrote: post #138

gfodor wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure that E2E encryption is impossible today if you are using a WebRTC SFU since there's no spec for it. The closest thing is PERC Lite [1] which no browsers support, though maybe you could cobble something together native. Is there some path I didn't know about? 1. https://www.meetecho.com/blog/meetecho-and-cosmo-strike-agai...

I don't know about browsers, but I know that Signal implements E2E-encrypted phone calls using WebRTC for signalling.

WebRTC does not do signalling - that is the one part that you always have to provide yourself. WebRTC provides the peer descriptions and ICE candidates that you need to transport to the other party/parties.

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#142

Post by aloer » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 9:30 AM UTC

coscreen wrote: post #68

aloer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean you use the JS Screen capture api to capture each and every window separately? I would’ve thought that’s too much for typical (laptop) cpus but have to admit I never tried this

We're capturing them natively and are working on another major performance improvement which should make it at least as efficient as other major solutions.

Are there other solutions that capture multiple windows at once? I’m only familiar with typical screensharing where the use case is either full screen or a single window.

The way I understand you, coscreen captures each window shown individually.

Doesn’t that also mean that overlapping windows are captured in full? I can’t try it out atm so perhaps if you could leave a comment on cpu usage for encoding as well as bandwidth (upload) compared to a typical Screen Sharing solution with a single screen that would be great.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a MacBook with cores > 4 for precisely that idea: capturing every single window, streaming them out to a separate machine for analysis of what’s happening in them and possibly making them accessible for collaboration as well, all without losing too much performance

I believe somewhere in this area is a lot of productivity waiting to be unlocked with better tools, not just for typical remote use cases but for any kind of office work

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#143

Post by vijaybritto » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 10:21 AM UTC

I don't know why it was decided to post in HN before explaining everything clearly in the text, but its good to see that the OP has been explaining as much as possible to everyone. Most of it is repeat questions about monitors, network security and OS compatibility(welcome to real world use cases :)). Adding this in the page beforehand would have changed the mood and tone in this comment section today :D Good luck with the product!

For the next update please explain things before hand in your page!

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#144

Post by softwarelimits » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

I wanted to know what this is but was not able to read the text because somebody had the idea that text on a website should be extremely thin and low contrast. The idea of making your text as hard as possible to read is a very bad one.

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#145

Post by ksahin » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

trpc wrote: post #3

coscreen wrote: post #2

OP here, we believe that the time has come to let remote workers and highly agile teams get stuff done together in a very different and much more natural way. CoScreen is a remote collaboration tool that enables exactly that. Problem: Pretty much anyone who has ever worked remotely knows it - today’s remote collaboration solutions provide much better screensharing quality and reliability (thanks, Zoom) compared to a…

How much does it take to pay a hunter on PH in order to be featured these days? asking for a friend.

What do you mean? You can hunt your own product on PH now!

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#146

Post by googleisevil6 » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 11:04 AM UTC

coscreen wrote: post #134

armadsen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not called a "machinetosh". It's Macintosh, or Mac for short. Named after the McIntosh variety of apple ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntosh_(apple) ). "Windows is used way more than [Macintosh] on developer machines." - Citation needed. Macs are extremely popular among web developers, and are required for iOS developers, both pretty major categories of "developer".

Thanks for the historic context ;) Edit: + Stats from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019 Windows: 47.5% MacOS: 26.8% Linux-based: 25.6% Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

You seem pretty grounded in facts, I hope you and your product go a long way. That said, this number isn't representative. Lots of enterprise devs (using Windows) are the kind of people who don't go to SO or fill surveys. I'd bet survey age group would be skewed towards younger crowd. In fact, I'd wager it's something like 75 15 10 Windows Mac Linux.

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#147

Post by TomMarius » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 12:14 PM UTC

omarchowdhury wrote: post #136

egfx wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t agree more. Yesterday I was browsing the top product of the day to see what future competition was like and the product was a color swatch that gave you similar colors for inspiration. It looked like they mashed together a codepen with a color swatch api I’ve starred but I won’t even bother linking to here. It’s sad for sure.

Could it be that there aren't that many exciting new products coming out? Or is that blasphemy?

But there are a lot of new exciting products.

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#148

Post by imglorp » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

lima wrote: post #72

Excellent idea, brilliantly executed. But as a CTO, I would be concerned about the security implications. It makes sense to route traffic via a central server because P2P does not scale to large numbers of participants (which is why things like the Jitsi Videobridge exist despite WebRTC P2P being a thing), but it means your customers have to trust you not to get hacked, be compelled to, or otherwise misplace/record s…

> P2P does not scale to large numbers of participants

I'm curious about this statement. Intuitively it seems there is already an algorithm to near-optimally distribute updates to a sparsely connected mesh network. You'd want two or three connections from each peer to another, not N:N. Optimal is not necessary as long as you have at-least-once semantics on message delivery; a node can just ignore messages it's seen already, as long as it's not too often. Is there a name for this existing algorithm?

On top of that you could overlay a symmetric session key and you'd have full E2E. Then central server would be session initiation only--which could still do authn/z to hand out session keys--and billing/metrics.

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#149

Post by nicoburns » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

coscreen wrote: post #90

JoeSmithson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so good! How does it work with selecting text and copy-pasting? In the Sublime Text example, can Bob overwrite Alice's clipboard.

We're still figuring this out and will probably get inspired from remote desktop solutions. But reach out to us if you have specific ideas

If everyone could have separate clipboards, but still copy from and paste into each other's windows, that would be ideal.

Also: this would be a major feature request from me. The ability for me to paste code into someone's else text editor (or copy out an error message) when I'm helping them would be a major productivity boost.

Re: Show HN: Coscreen.co – a radically different remote collaboration tool

#150

Post by greggman2 » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

coscreen wrote: post #111

thawkins wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up in fustration, the site has no real information, no system requirements, no installation information. does it run on linux? I like the idea but i have a department with 100 fedora workstations in it.

Thanks as well, it's macOS-only for but we're working on other OSes. It should work on anything that runs macOS Mojave and higher and at least on 5-6 year old Mac Books.

I'm curious how many Mac users have multiple monitors? I don't think I've ever seen a single one (I'm sure they exist). I see iMac users on one big monitor. I see MacBook/Air/Pro users either on their laptop or one monitor, usually with their laptop closed.

Where as pretty much all Windows users in game dev seem to have 2 or more monitors.

Are you expecting lots of mac users to buy a second monitor or use an iPad for this second monitor or is my experience just atypical and lots of mac users have 2 monitors?