Show HN: CoScreen 1.0 – radically different pair/team programming

Check it out here: https://coscreen.co [1]

Problem:

Today's video chat solutions are great if you enjoy awkward full-screen conversations, but are a productivity killer for development teams. The pandemic has turned endless, boring in-office meetings into endless, boring video calls. It’s also just too painful for engineering teams to wrangle with complex pull requests using a brittle string of tools like Zoom, Skype, Tmux, GNU screen, and a variety of IDEs.

Solution:

CoScreen enables pair/mob/team programming like no other solution and we believe it can reduce the cost of context switching by up to 80% [2] so you can focus on what actually matters - reviewing code, troubleshooting bugs, or building major new features.

CoScreen is a desktop app that enables multiple users to share application windows with each other at the same time. You can think of it like a shared desktop where any user can interact with any shared window as if it were their own via remote mouse and keyboard to allow them to collaborate like never before (they can even copy and paste code across windows of different users). In addition to built-in video chat, and remote control, we're also launching a Slack integration so that you can embed CoScreen into your daily workflow. Integrations with VS Code and other IDEs will follow soon.

Our progress since our HN Show post last year:

After CoScreen went to the front page in November 2019 [3], we saw a huge interest in this entirely new way to collaborate and to get things done as a team. We’re incredibly thankful, as it helped us transition from a weekend and late-night project to a full-time undertaking with a stellar, globally distributed team. We've engineered the new app from scratch and we give you more control over what you share than any other tool.

CoScreen uses P2P whenever you and a second participant can connect directly (e.g. when no corporate firewalls or proxies are between the two of you) so none of your window and control data touches our servers. Otherwise, up to a dozen participants can collaborate using our enterprise-grade, HIPAA-compatible video infrastructure with hundreds of servers around the globe that run the awesome open-source framework Jitsi. All video data is encrypted using DTLS-SRTP during transmission and in addition, we’re planning to support end-to-end encryption soon.

With the help of UX experts who originally designed Slack, we've also created a new, minimalistic UI that never gets in your way and have done hundreds of evaluation sessions with testers of our private beta. We're making our new macOS version publicly available today for free [1]. The Windows alpha is already in final internal testing and you can sign up for early access for it and our future Linux and web clients [4]. Can’t wait? See for yourself how CoScreen works [5, 6].

What happens next:

A few hundred early-adopters, and our own internal team have used CoScreen for the last six months.These early insights have been instrumental to our code and design reviews, bug fixing, standups, and feature development since the pandemic hit. Now we want more teams to benefit from CoScreen and are therefore offering CoScreen entirely for free for the next six months. We’ll keep sign-ups open as long as our infrastructure allows. We’re working hard to support other platforms, offer the best performance in terms of latency and quality (it's already much better than Zoom’s), and further reduce CPU and memory usage.

Thanks again to the HN community for helping us to get to this point. Keep telling us what you think via the built-in feedback feature in CoScreen, comments on this post, or e-mails to hello@coscreen.co! Till & the CoScreen team

Early feedback:

- "CoScreen makes coding, pairing and video chatting as easy as a single click while keeping all our existing dev tools."

- Michaël Ohayon, Development Manager at Publicis Sapient - "I am full time pairing with a teammate, and CoScreen is the best pairing tool we’ve used so far.” - Camille Neuner, Software Engineer at a large insurance provider - “CoScreen makes developing and debugging mobile apps much easier as a team than any other tool we've tried” - Kevin Zhang, Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce - "CoScreen has turned 'meetings' into 'doings.'" - Brett Bertola, UX Engineer at InMoment - "@getCoScreen is making remote better than in person" - Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab

Links:

[1] Get CoScreen for macOS: https://coscreen.co

[2] More on the cost of context switching: https://blog.rescuetime.com/context-switching

[3] Our post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21639525

[4] Sign up for Windows alpha and future Linux support: https://form.typeform.com/to/tWKFDe

[5] Explainer video: https://vimeo.com/481001206

[6] Live demo: https://youtu.be/054wVitjVJ0

1. With CoScreen, more than one user can share their windows with each other at the same time, side by side on the same share desktop - not just one.

2. Up to 12 participants can interact with any shared window using mouse & keyboard across multiple users.

3. You can even copy & paste code between windows shared by different users.

4. We are about to launch our Windows beta so users that aren't on macOS will be able to pair/team program too (and e.g. simultaneously share & interact with macOS AND Windows windows).