I was the co-founder and CEO of Screenhero, and after its acquisition
by Slack in 2015, I led the team that built Slack Calls (voice, video
and screen sharing in Slack), and left Slack in 2018.
Today, we (myself and another engineer) are launching Screen, which is in
many ways a successor to Screenhero. Our goal is to help you work with
others like you’re in the same room.
Like Screenhero, it supports low-latency screen sharing with
multi-mouse control. How low? It has the lowest screen sharing latency
of any product we’ve tested: 30-50ms best-case end-to-end latency
between screen capture and render, vs. 100ms-150ms in regular WebRTC.
This means it’s great for remote pair programming, which was
Screenhero’s biggest use case.
We have voice, video, multiplayer drawing and control, and ephemeral
messaging, and we integrate with GCal and Slack.
We have native apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux (Screenhero’s
top-requested feature was Linux support). We use custom native code to
make multiplayer control work, and a heavily-modified custom fork of
Electron to minimize latency. It's WebRTC-compliant, so you can share
meeting links that anyone can join with a WebRTC-compliant desktop or
mobile browser — no download required. Daily.co is our primary
WebRTC-infrastructure provider (they’ve been amazing to work with!).
We're hoping Screen will be useful for engineers (pair programming,
live debugging), designers (review with stakeholders - they can draw
on your screen to give feedback), students and teachers, and anyone
collaborating remotely.
You can view a 1-minute demo video by clicking the
play button at https://screen.so, and there's a longer article
at https://screen.so/about, if anyone's interested.
I’ll be around to answer questions and welcome any feedback.
I hope you'll find Screen useful, especially during these times!
Today, we're launching Screen, which is in many ways a successor to Screenhero. Our goal is to help you work with others like you’re in the same room.
Question for clarity sake, have I read this properly that you all still are with Slack, does this mean Screen.so is "A Slack Company" or just leveraging that relationship for tightly coupled/efficient integration as a wholly separate company?
I left Slack in 2018, and Screen has no formal relationship with Slack outside of the fact that it uses the Slack API. Screen is a heavy user of Slack, though!
I was a paying customer of Screenhero, and disappointed that Slack left out so many features, so excited to see this.
Curious: I assume you can't just sell your company and rebuild it in most cases. Was there an embargo on the amount of time before you could build this?
We had a non-compete for 2 years (which expired in late 2016), and I left Slack in 2018. The reason I decided to re-enter the space was after Slack sunset interactive screen sharing, since my earlier hope was to see it thrive within Slack. Once that wasn’t possible, I decided to build it myself!
Congrats on the exit (money helps live life on easy mode), but after being left to hang out to dry with the acquisition and losing access to Screenhero (which was absolutely essential at the time at a fully remote org), I would never consider a non OSS solution again for this use case.
I would absolutely pay for any open source competitor to this type of product, preferably one that integrated with Jitsi (which itself is open source). Fool me once.
Do you perceive this to be a direct competitor to Tuple? I recall Ben Orenstein saying on his podcast that he reached out to you about creating a "successor" to Screenhero and you were all for it. (FWIW I think more competition in the space is good.)
I believe Ben spoke with my co-founder Faraz, not with me.
Screen’s goal is to support remote work of any kind — including engineering & pair programming, for sure, but extending to many other uses cases, such as creative review, education, and beyond. And yes, I agree competition is good! :)
> - Speed matters. The main reason why Screenhero was loved was because it was fast. We did a lot of work to reduce latency and increase responsiveness — which is critical when working remotely. We weren’t able to bring the speed improvements over to Slack (because of the constraints described in the previous point), which made it far less useful.
This resonates with me, and is definitely why I loved Screenhero so much, it felt VERY fast, and visually looked crisp. Even the initial connection speed was fast, while Slack takes about 3–8 seconds to connect. And also why I was so disappointed with Slack's product, now it's back to the same level as Google Hangouts.
It's surprising that having the same lead, and access to the same source code, that the product was unable to achieve the same level of quality & performance. What would you say the culprit is? And if I may lead the question... Bureaucracy inside Slack? Managing a new team? Having to rewrite on presumably a new language & software stack? Rushing to meet deadlines?
Anyways, awesome to see your back at it again, and that you have such care about latency, people do notice & care!
This is a really good question, and the simple answer is that Slack uses an unmodified version of Electron, and it’s not a good idea to make custom modifications to that project for such a small, niche feature. The cost/benefit just doesn’t make sense for Slack, neither to me, nor to Slack management. But Electron didn’t even exist when Screenhero was acquired, and so the constraints we eventually faced were not possible to predict when we got acquired.
In 2015, when we joined, Slack’s Mac app was using "MacGap" (i.e. the PhoneGap/Cordova model but for Mac). Electron was being used for Windows only, and it was a lot later that it became the platform for Slack’s Mac, Windows and Linux apps.
The specifics of the speed gains are our secret sauce, I’m afraid! But at a high level, we reduced the time taken in every step of the pipeline between capture > encode > send > receive > decode > render that we could, while still remaining WebRTC compliant.
The HN crowd is not a representative sample of the market. People here on HN will hate for a day or two, then they will turn their anger and cynicism to another cause, therefore that name will stop being a source of confusion :) Seriously, a few days from now noone will complain anymore.
The HN crowd is a fairly representative sample of a significant portion of the product's potential users. Otherwise, this would not have been a Show HN.
No it's not.. I am a developer but my god it seems that 90% of the people here are of the extreme privacy + low level programmers who think that any programmer outside of a phd in computer science isn't doing it right because they doing dissertation type work everytime they code.
This is basically slashdot with a different color scheme..
Speaking from my own experience as a founder, it's hard to change your name once you have an ounce of traction. If you're just launching and anticipate a problem I would recommend considering taking advantage of the opportunity now.
It will also be very hard for you to trademark your name.
IANAL, but in most legislations you do not have to register a trademark for it to be valid. It is important that you defend you trademark, and you will lose your right to a trademark if you fail to do so.
I do agree with those saying that in the wider audience, GNU screen does not mean anything, including (probably) the large armies of Windows developers. Besides that you should use tmux anyway ;).
the issue is that you can't easily trademark a common word. It's possible (e.g. Apple for computers) but you run into problems. Apple ran into some notorious trademark problems.
Trademarks don't need to be officially filed to be real in common law -- you just have to use a distinguishing mark for a certain period of time. so the GNU/FSF screen would have rights to Screen in the computer program industry even if they haven't officially filed. Filing just helps you defend a trademark, it's not strictly necessary.
I'm going to get downvoted for this but the corporate folks that will eventually pull out their credit cards and pay you for this service have never heard of the screen command much less used a command line interface. I think you should stick with the name.
The audience that you posted this at will never get over that unfortunate product name, as I bet they are heavy users of the real screen program, (or tmux)
Has there been no real research that your chosen name is already taken?
I’ve posted a top level comment addressing this issue since it’s probably best to have the discussion in one place.
But yes, we didn’t hear from anyone in our private beta that there was any confusion regarding our name, and we ourselves completely missed the fact that GNU Screen exists with this name. I’m sorry for the confusion, and we will revisit our naming decision.
There was a company we used that had to do a massive re-branding after they realized they couldn't trademark their company name. Doubt it helped their brand visibility to do such a switch.
I love this idea, this is a wonderful thing you're doing. Really clean design, great featureset. I genuinely think it has the potential to be a powerhouse.
I think it's perfect for businesses, and large companies, but might not be something suited towards somebody like me.
TeamViewer is the current tool of choice as I do volunteer work remote-teaching art to students and I'd just be a little worried about migrating everything over while it's free, only to suddenly not be able to afford it.
This is of course no fault on your end, and I just think while this is aimed at a certain demographic, others might be more suited to working elsewhere as 'Free' and 'Free for a period of time until we decide to start charging' is a little intimidating.
Brilliant program, brilliant work, and I wish you the absolute best of luck <3
Our plan is to charge $10/u/mo for unlimited use. If you’re using Screen for educational purposes, we’ll likely be able to work out a non-profit / educational discount down the line too.
Could you post this as a feature request on https://support.screen.so, along with some context to your use? That way we can follow up with more questions, others can vote for it, and we can update you on our progress. Thanks!
Thank you for putting this out there. 10 a month per user puts me in the 'likely never' category.
I suppose people that use it a lot will benefit and those who have big budgets won't think about the price.
I loved screenhero and bemoaned it's disappearance into the slack neververse. Glad to see you are able to bring something back that was good before an aquihire gone blank.
If there's ever a version where I could pay a hundred bucks to use the code on my own servers for as much as the servers can handle, I would jump on it.
I like the way the privacy policy it put together. With my bit of research into webrtc, am I assuming that "In 1:1 meetings with two participants, media data is sent peer-to-peer" - would mean a direct connect shares each person's ip address with the other person's system - and this does not happen when going through the third party servers(?)
No big deal when screen sharing with friends, creates an issue for some people who don't know about these things and they get stalked by someone who suddenly knows what city and internet provider you are using, for some people.
We worked REALLY hard to make sure we had Linux support this time around! It’s in beta, and there will likely be issues. Please report them to us, and I promise we will try to solve them asap!
I would seriously consider renaming this. Many of us have been using GNU screen for very similar tasks of terminal sharing and pair programming.
The name you have chosen requires an explanation just to discuss this with my coworkers. Perhaps it is a generational thing, but in a quick survey asking around "Have you heard of the new tool screen?" the response was 100% "screen isn't new and yes I've heard of it... have you heard of tmux?"
This is the same reason why HNers at the time failed to see why Dropbox succeeded and curl + git + sftp on Linux isn't sufficient for end users to solve their problem [0]. They just don't care about your GNU tools, even if it does better at SEO.
That analogy doesn't hold. People aren't saying that you should just use GNU Screen instead, they're saying that the name creates confusion. Totally different.
"People here are saying..." is the parent's argument. The situation is very similar: people here, on this forum, aren't a representative sample of the market, outside. That statement holds even when said market is comprised of developers.
Well that 'confusion' is between developers and there are many other business tools out there with similar names which from the perspective of an average customer, they will still use it and won't care about a name clash with a decades old developer tool used only by software engineers.
For the majority of businesses looking at 'Screen' now, they won't bat an eyelid and will use it along as it 'just works' no matter the name conflict. If they saw GNU Screen they'll just say 'What's that' and forget about it.
One of the main audiences he's pitching this to is developers (for pair programming etc.) so it's more of an issue than it would be for a pure consumer tool.
We’re a 2 person team, and neither of us uses Screen (the last time I used it was more than 5 years ago, and until HN’s response, had completely forgotten about it).
Also, nobody in our private beta mentioned GNU Screen.
A public beta helps us get feedback on issues that we have missed before, and this is one of them!
I'll throw my voice in that "screen" 100% refers to GNU screen in my friend circle. Tmux and dtach still don't quite supplant the specific slot that screen has occupied for decades.
> I'll throw my voice in that "screen" 100% refers to GNU screen in my friend circle.
> 1M Developers: GNU Screen exists you know.
> 90M+ Customers and Businesses: Take my money now! Let's use 'Screen' to screen share!, Yay!
I'm pretty sure that 'Screen' would appeal to businesses and customers who really just want to get on and instantly collaborate with who ever rather than to know that something called GNU Screen exists and would be less likely to be confused by the conflict anyway.
Yeah, I can totally see how in some circles, "screen" is synonymous with GNU Screen, and that our choice of name would be confusing. Sorry about that! I’ve posted a top-level comment about the naming issue, in case more context is helpful.
I think it's generational, knowledge domain, and probably also sort of being jerks in that if their response is "screen isn't new and yes I've heard of it... have you heard of tmux?"
it sounds like typical programmer one-upmanship.
I mean either they think you are significantly less informed than them and you actually think GNU screen is new, or they are using the chance to make a quick joke of not particularly startling originality.
Because if they do think you know what GNU screen is then they must think this new tools you're referring to isn't it.
In our department everyone has had the debate of tmux vs screen with just about everyone else (most of us have moved to tmux). The question was interpreted more like "(hey tmux user) have you heard of the new tool screen?"
yes, but, that means your quick impromptu survey of what people thought of the new tool Screen wasn't that useful for determining if another name would be better.
Unless Screen hopes to build a business targeting clients that are unique.
I think there are the common places: most places you can work on software and systems engineering, and the special places: highly experienced and deeply capable teams in a fun and nurturing environment.
I don't think we are unique but I like to think we are the kind of place where most people would prefer to work. Uncommon but hardly unique and definitely in the target market for this tool.
Hey, so I can’t imagine you’ve never used or heard of GNU’s Screen: why did you choose to use a conflicting name for software that’s essentially in the same space?
PS edit: this isn’t glib. I’m genuinely curious why, who and how this choice was made.
Until this post, I hadn’t thought of GNU Screen at all. It isn’t a tool that I’ve used in more than 5 years, and is not top of mind for me at all.
Also, no one in our private beta ever raised this concern.
Screen just switched to public beta today, and the idea is for us to get feedback on issues we may not have seen before. This is a great example of such an issue! And as I’ve said elsewhere, if this continues to be an issue, we will change it. It’s not in our interest to have customer confusion either.
Thanks for the reply. What kind of market analysis did you do before building this, err, again (and better)?
You support Linux (well!), I’m surprised your beta testers didn’t say anything. That’s an interesting problem —I wonder what other blind spots like this can be avoided.
Heh. I use gnu screen daily. Saw this and immediate downloaded it (I missed screenhero so much) and got coworkers to use it with me, and never considered the name collision. I'm surprised by the number of comments about it.
Why would it "stop" being an issue? GNU screen is not going anywhere. Maybe you'll stop hearing complaints once all initial grievances are aired and it's obvious that you don't care, but it will continue to cause confusion in the workplace.
Just today I was recommending (GNU) screen to a coworker to address transient outages with a remote connection. It would get pretty annoying to constantly clarify which screen I mean, as they are both used in the same circumstances.
Probably 99% of their users will either have never heard of gnu screen, or don’t care. It’s such a common word that it’s silly to think one thing “owns” it any more than the next.
That's a little bizzare, but ok. Gnu screen has low latency, works well on Linux and bsds, works well with vim and emacs, works well for pair programming? I'm not sure how good the mouse support/sharing is - but I think selection and cursor is shared fine?
Don't get me wrong, I've got lots of colleagues who use various other editors, like vs code - but... This isn't just a case of pre-existing software with a similar name - combined with ssh, gnu screen is arguably superior for pair bugfixing in production, for example (multiple ppl can ssh into the same server).
I get that this is "like gnu screen, but for xorg/Wayland - and without any support for resuming remote sessions" - just sounds like an odd pitch - as you say you especially want to target Linux support...
I honestly don't get why people are getting so caught up on the name. The number of people who use screen is so small compared to the target market (which encompasses anyone doing work on a computer) that I highly doubt any significant number of people will be confused.
If you're intelligent enough to use screen, surely you're intelligent enough to understand the difference between a terminal app and an app that shares your screen.
Because it sticks out like a sore thumb, and has trademark problems irrespective of its reuse. And you know, everyone deals with naming things, so we can all relate and pull from our own experiences.
Again, the number of people who this impacts is so small that it's hardly significant. Sure, here on HN I'm sure it seems that everyone is confused, but we're hardly a representative sample here.
> has trademark problems
Honestly I don't buy this. When you trademark something, you do so in a very specific manner, and I think Screen's market is specific enough as to defend a trademark in the screen sharing/collaboration segment _should they even choose to trademark the name_, which they can easily choose not to do.
To be honest, I’ve never considered trademarking the name. We just want to build a product that works and is loved by its users. It’s really quite simple! :)
This was my immediate thought as well. The obvious benefit, and the thing that I think holds Tuple back the most - is that Tuple only supports macOS. That, and they don't seem to have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to lower prices at all.
Because when the barrier to entry is getting your company to spend more money to try a product that you've never used before, it might help to sacrifice a little bit of revenue up front in order to keep them as a customer in the future.
I can’t speak to other products and their performance, but we’ve worked hard on performance and wide platform support (Mac, Windows, Linux apps to host screen shares, and web support for joining meetings). Do try Screen and let us know what you think!
At work we use USE Together but it's not too tolerant of intermittent internet connection issues (ie: WiFi in any congested area). I wonder if Screen is any better on that front.
Screen has worked really well for us and a handful of companies that use us daily in our private beta. If you do have any issues, let us know and we’ll fix them asap!
1) GNU Screen exists and people use it everyday to do something similar.
2) Why do you mention that started Screenhero and that Slack acquired that company in the banner? That’s great for you, it just comes off a little haughty, because it’s pretty irrelevant to a new user reading about this product imo
This is day 1 of our public beta, and we’re looking for feedback on things we may not have considered. The name is one such thing — based on the response, we’ll think about changing it.
The point of the intro is to convey that I’ve built a similar product before, and have experience in the videoconferencing space, and that this product builds upon the ideas of the previous products I‘ve worked on. Sorry if it came across as haughty, I didn’t mean it that way.
I’ve been wishing for a ScreenHero replacement for years. It seems odd to me that no one came out with a replacement earlier, but I’m super excited to try this out now!
This is really exciting. I loved screenhero and I thought the screenhero acquisition was going to play out differently at Slack. However, the features they adopted never worked as well in slack as they seemed to before the acquisition.
Were there any issues from slack corporate with you launching this? Seems like it competes pretty directly with the features they already bought from yall...
I only decided to re-enter this space after Slack announced it was sunsetting interactive screen sharing. It ended up being too expensive a feature for Slack to support for a niche audience.
I can’t speak for the company, but I imagine they’d be happy that another collaboration tool has launched that integrates with their platform to give their customers even more choice in how they work.
We’ll look into this! Please post a bug report on https://support.screen.so so we can follow up with you with questions and update you on our progress to fix it.
> *Free, so you can stay healthy & productive during the coronavirus outbreak
As a former and early Screenhero adopter, I'm not sure why they had sold to Slack and have now come back with the same, if not a worse reincarnation of Screenhero.
At least they have Linux support this time since Screenhero and Slack repeatedly refused to port Screenhero to Linux. But again, having no web support would reduce the friction for new users having to install something rather than downloading a specific electron app.
Could you elaborate on why you think this is a worse reincarnation of Screenhero? Are there specific features we’re missing?
Also, there is no way to make a web app that does what Screen does. If there were, we’d have built a purely web-based app.
With Screen’s desktop app, you can share your screen TO someone on the web, but they need the app to share their screen, since multiplayer drawing and control can’t be done otherwise.
As a freelancer on Upwork I share my screen to my customers and they share their screen to me in parallel solely using Upwork web based application. Allows us to view each other screens, talk and share camera - all of this just by web. So there is a way to do that, you might want to look at them to see this is possible from web
It’s built on a private fork of Electron, but the UI is all web-based. Electron handles most of our native needs, and where it doesn’t, we have a node module to connect into the OS. A lot of our secret sauce is on the native side, but honestly, there’s a lot of complexity across the product.
Just to address the naming issue — we (myself and the other engineer, that comprise the entire Screen team) honestly have not used GNU Screen for more than 5 years, and didn’t even remember it existed until today’s post. I’m sorry for the oversight, but this is the point of a public beta — to help us unearth issues we may have overlooked ourselves!
I’m open to finding a new name — in fact, a few days ago, I had reached out to Slack to see if they’d be open to letting us use the Screenhero name since they’re not using it. If that doesn’t work out, and and there’s still significant distaste for the name, we’ll change it. 99.9% of the time we’ve spent to get here has been on the product, getting it to work on all the platforms it supports, and making sure it’s performant and fast. The 0.01% of time we’ve spent on getting our name and domain is something I’m happy to revisit before our GA release.
Don't bother, the people who you are going to sell this product to have never heard of the GNU utility and they do not care the least about it. You'll be just fine.
You are right, it is odd (at least I think of it is), people don't really care about the name, though to be fair some people really think it is important, .com is so important, ok it is true for you, but reality is nobody cares, just focus on the product capabilties.
One thing I hated with GNU screen was how hard it was to google. I knew there was a certain fix for a special edge-case but the generic name made it hard to search for.
This project don't even have the GNU keyword to help.
I guess this is an aspect where search engines are much better today, to get the context. But still, the issue remains.
The name is great, as is the slack command /screen, just keep using it. Saying this as a user of GNU Screen. It's OK, approximately nobody is going to be confused by this in the real world.
I first expected a "screen -x" tutorial (which attaches multiple clients to the same session; screen sharing, if you will) when skimming HN titles, but yeah the "by the cofounder of X" tipped me off when I read a little closer. Going to be hard to google, though. For reasons unrelated to GNU screen, I dislike product names that appear in a dictionary with the most common words. Not saying that /screen would be a bad Slack alias or whatever, so long as that isn't taken why not, but as a product name there might be a nice thing to tack on that you can abbreviate to Screen but still allows you to google for the right thing or clarify when someone is confused.
I don't know if I'm a weirdo but I am so interested in learning about TurboScreenMaster 3000, but it needs to be inherently at least as good as BattleChess 3000 and Class of 3000
When I have issues like this when searching my next search is usually "slack chat" or "zoom video." Now that they're popular, you don't need these qualifiers. What would someone add to "screen"? "screen sharing"?
It’s a common and disappointing trope on HN to complain about the name of something when someone shares something new here. Take note and move on and if it becomes an issue later, address it then.
Congratulations on the launch! The product page looks great as does the native Mac app.
Regarding the name / domain name i wanted to let you know that www.BrowserMeeting.com is available.
I was holding on to this domain for a future screen sharing & web browser based virtual meeting project.
If you or any HN readers are looking for a category killer keyword rich premium .com that is PERFECT for a "Browser Meeting" project please send an email to:
sales AT browsermeeting.com
We’d ideally like to create one or two distributions that are most widely useful, instead of having to support every single option out there — we picked Snap for this reason. Slack also supports Snap + Debian as their only two options, from what I understand.
Could you please post this as a feature request on https://support.screen.so so we can follow up with you and update you on our progress?
I have the same problem and my colleages share these worries as well. Any tips for open-source alternatives? We tried a couple of WebRTC things with screen sharing but the image quality is bad (which is expected when using a lossy codec meant for photos/movies to compress screen with tiny details like fonts etc.). Now we're using VNC tunneled through SSH but the setup is a little difficult.
I'd love to try something better but running a closed-source app with complete access to my screen, mouse and keyboard connected to the Internet is really not an option. And it's really difficult for me to understand how so many people have no problem trusting it. What am I missing?
I don't think you're missing anything, except maybe just that closed-source is the default on macOS and Windows so the marginal loss of safety from one more closed-source privileged app isn't so high there.
For the moment maybe the best we can do is trying to use apps with screen sharing support included, e.g. Visual Studio Code's sharing.
Tried it out - really good! It's fast enough that it may actually work for pair programming and was super easy to use. Thanks and can't wait to test this with my team mates this week.
Just tried it out and it works great! It seems to be fast enough so pair programming can work and gettinf started was straightforward. I would maybe like to see a feature where you could disable someone's access (kind ok f like silence, but for yhe multiplayer control). Can't wait to try it out for real this week.
I'm really glad to see you back in action! I was so sad when ScreenHero shuttered. May I ask what makes this time different from ScreenHero in terms of running a sustainable business?
Summary: we were sustainable ($1MM ARR), but chose to join Slack since we felt we could get to our goal (have everyone use our product) faster. We didn’t foresee our product getting dropped.
This time around, the company is 100% bootstrapped, and I have no intention of taking any investment. We just want to be able to keep our burn rate low, build a product people love, and stay independent forever. I believe we can do that as long as we continue to make something people want.
213 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadI was the co-founder and CEO of Screenhero, and after its acquisition by Slack in 2015, I led the team that built Slack Calls (voice, video and screen sharing in Slack), and left Slack in 2018.
Today, we (myself and another engineer) are launching Screen, which is in many ways a successor to Screenhero. Our goal is to help you work with others like you’re in the same room.
Like Screenhero, it supports low-latency screen sharing with multi-mouse control. How low? It has the lowest screen sharing latency of any product we’ve tested: 30-50ms best-case end-to-end latency between screen capture and render, vs. 100ms-150ms in regular WebRTC. This means it’s great for remote pair programming, which was Screenhero’s biggest use case.
We have voice, video, multiplayer drawing and control, and ephemeral messaging, and we integrate with GCal and Slack.
We have native apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux (Screenhero’s top-requested feature was Linux support). We use custom native code to make multiplayer control work, and a heavily-modified custom fork of Electron to minimize latency. It's WebRTC-compliant, so you can share meeting links that anyone can join with a WebRTC-compliant desktop or mobile browser — no download required. Daily.co is our primary WebRTC-infrastructure provider (they’ve been amazing to work with!).
We're hoping Screen will be useful for engineers (pair programming, live debugging), designers (review with stakeholders - they can draw on your screen to give feedback), students and teachers, and anyone collaborating remotely.
You can view a 1-minute demo video by clicking the play button at https://screen.so, and there's a longer article at https://screen.so/about, if anyone's interested.
I’ll be around to answer questions and welcome any feedback. I hope you'll find Screen useful, especially during these times!
Question for clarity sake, have I read this properly that you all still are with Slack, does this mean Screen.so is "A Slack Company" or just leveraging that relationship for tightly coupled/efficient integration as a wholly separate company?
Thanks!
But to echo other comments, you really need to change the name.
Curious: I assume you can't just sell your company and rebuild it in most cases. Was there an embargo on the amount of time before you could build this?
I would absolutely pay for any open source competitor to this type of product, preferably one that integrated with Jitsi (which itself is open source). Fool me once.
Screen’s goal is to support remote work of any kind — including engineering & pair programming, for sure, but extending to many other uses cases, such as creative review, education, and beyond. And yes, I agree competition is good! :)
This resonates with me, and is definitely why I loved Screenhero so much, it felt VERY fast, and visually looked crisp. Even the initial connection speed was fast, while Slack takes about 3–8 seconds to connect. And also why I was so disappointed with Slack's product, now it's back to the same level as Google Hangouts.
It's surprising that having the same lead, and access to the same source code, that the product was unable to achieve the same level of quality & performance. What would you say the culprit is? And if I may lead the question... Bureaucracy inside Slack? Managing a new team? Having to rewrite on presumably a new language & software stack? Rushing to meet deadlines?
Anyways, awesome to see your back at it again, and that you have such care about latency, people do notice & care!
Are you able to share further technical details on what you've had to do to get the speed gains you're describing?
Love that it is still blazing fast. Love that awesome features like multi cursor are still very much a thing.
Congrats on the re-launch!
For it not to "continue to be" a source of confusion, then it has to "stop" being a source of confusion. What makes you think it'll stop?
GNU screen won't stop being on millions of machines, nor will it suddenly stop being a popular tool.
I suggest a cute acronym, instead. How about "SSH", for "Screen SHaring"?
This is basically slashdot with a different color scheme..
It will also be very hard for you to trademark your name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Enforcing_rights
I do agree with those saying that in the wider audience, GNU screen does not mean anything, including (probably) the large armies of Windows developers. Besides that you should use tmux anyway ;).
Trademarks don't need to be officially filed to be real in common law -- you just have to use a distinguishing mark for a certain period of time. so the GNU/FSF screen would have rights to Screen in the computer program industry even if they haven't officially filed. Filing just helps you defend a trademark, it's not strictly necessary.
"Lets debug this over screen" - obviously the pairing screen.
"If your ssh connection keeps dropping out you should use screen" obviously gnu screen.
Has there been no real research that your chosen name is already taken?
But yes, we didn’t hear from anyone in our private beta that there was any confusion regarding our name, and we ourselves completely missed the fact that GNU Screen exists with this name. I’m sorry for the confusion, and we will revisit our naming decision.
You cannot get a trademark on it, or at least shouldn’t be able to if the USPTO observed its rules.
You really need to change the name.
I think it's perfect for businesses, and large companies, but might not be something suited towards somebody like me.
TeamViewer is the current tool of choice as I do volunteer work remote-teaching art to students and I'd just be a little worried about migrating everything over while it's free, only to suddenly not be able to afford it.
This is of course no fault on your end, and I just think while this is aimed at a certain demographic, others might be more suited to working elsewhere as 'Free' and 'Free for a period of time until we decide to start charging' is a little intimidating.
Brilliant program, brilliant work, and I wish you the absolute best of luck <3
Could you post this as a feature request on https://support.screen.so, along with some context to your use? That way we can follow up with more questions, others can vote for it, and we can update you on our progress. Thanks!
I suppose people that use it a lot will benefit and those who have big budgets won't think about the price.
I loved screenhero and bemoaned it's disappearance into the slack neververse. Glad to see you are able to bring something back that was good before an aquihire gone blank.
If there's ever a version where I could pay a hundred bucks to use the code on my own servers for as much as the servers can handle, I would jump on it.
I like the way the privacy policy it put together. With my bit of research into webrtc, am I assuming that "In 1:1 meetings with two participants, media data is sent peer-to-peer" - would mean a direct connect shares each person's ip address with the other person's system - and this does not happen when going through the third party servers(?)
No big deal when screen sharing with friends, creates an issue for some people who don't know about these things and they get stalked by someone who suddenly knows what city and internet provider you are using, for some people.
The name you have chosen requires an explanation just to discuss this with my coworkers. Perhaps it is a generational thing, but in a quick survey asking around "Have you heard of the new tool screen?" the response was 100% "screen isn't new and yes I've heard of it... have you heard of tmux?"
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
For the majority of businesses looking at 'Screen' now, they won't bat an eyelid and will use it along as it 'just works' no matter the name conflict. If they saw GNU Screen they'll just say 'What's that' and forget about it.
Also, nobody in our private beta mentioned GNU Screen.
A public beta helps us get feedback on issues that we have missed before, and this is one of them!
> 1M Developers: GNU Screen exists you know.
> 90M+ Customers and Businesses: Take my money now! Let's use 'Screen' to screen share!, Yay!
I'm pretty sure that 'Screen' would appeal to businesses and customers who really just want to get on and instantly collaborate with who ever rather than to know that something called GNU Screen exists and would be less likely to be confused by the conflict anyway.
I think what you've got looks great. And it's a great opportunity to claim a name of it's own!
I mean either they think you are significantly less informed than them and you actually think GNU screen is new, or they are using the chance to make a quick joke of not particularly startling originality.
Because if they do think you know what GNU screen is then they must think this new tools you're referring to isn't it.
I just posted a top-level comment on the naming issue, where we were coming from, and that I’m open to changing the name.
Unless Screen hopes to build a business targeting clients that are unique.
I don't think we are unique but I like to think we are the kind of place where most people would prefer to work. Uncommon but hardly unique and definitely in the target market for this tool.
PS edit: this isn’t glib. I’m genuinely curious why, who and how this choice was made.
Also, no one in our private beta ever raised this concern.
Screen just switched to public beta today, and the idea is for us to get feedback on issues we may not have seen before. This is a great example of such an issue! And as I’ve said elsewhere, if this continues to be an issue, we will change it. It’s not in our interest to have customer confusion either.
You support Linux (well!), I’m surprised your beta testers didn’t say anything. That’s an interesting problem —I wonder what other blind spots like this can be avoided.
Admittedly, we only had a handful of Linux users in our private beta, but still, none of them mentioned the GNU tool.
Just today I was recommending (GNU) screen to a coworker to address transient outages with a remote connection. It would get pretty annoying to constantly clarify which screen I mean, as they are both used in the same circumstances.
Don't get me wrong, I've got lots of colleagues who use various other editors, like vs code - but... This isn't just a case of pre-existing software with a similar name - combined with ssh, gnu screen is arguably superior for pair bugfixing in production, for example (multiple ppl can ssh into the same server).
I get that this is "like gnu screen, but for xorg/Wayland - and without any support for resuming remote sessions" - just sounds like an odd pitch - as you say you especially want to target Linux support...
If you're intelligent enough to use screen, surely you're intelligent enough to understand the difference between a terminal app and an app that shares your screen.
Again, the number of people who this impacts is so small that it's hardly significant. Sure, here on HN I'm sure it seems that everyone is confused, but we're hardly a representative sample here.
> has trademark problems
Honestly I don't buy this. When you trademark something, you do so in a very specific manner, and I think Screen's market is specific enough as to defend a trademark in the screen sharing/collaboration segment _should they even choose to trademark the name_, which they can easily choose not to do.
That's how I see it, at least.
USE Together CEO here - we’d be happy to help and get that fixed quickly, don’t hesitate to drop us an email at support@use-together.com :)
1) GNU Screen exists and people use it everyday to do something similar. 2) Why do you mention that started Screenhero and that Slack acquired that company in the banner? That’s great for you, it just comes off a little haughty, because it’s pretty irrelevant to a new user reading about this product imo
The point of the intro is to convey that I’ve built a similar product before, and have experience in the videoconferencing space, and that this product builds upon the ideas of the previous products I‘ve worked on. Sorry if it came across as haughty, I didn’t mean it that way.
Were there any issues from slack corporate with you launching this? Seems like it competes pretty directly with the features they already bought from yall...
I can’t speak for the company, but I imagine they’d be happy that another collaboration tool has launched that integrates with their platform to give their customers even more choice in how they work.
As a former and early Screenhero adopter, I'm not sure why they had sold to Slack and have now come back with the same, if not a worse reincarnation of Screenhero.
At least they have Linux support this time since Screenhero and Slack repeatedly refused to port Screenhero to Linux. But again, having no web support would reduce the friction for new users having to install something rather than downloading a specific electron app.
Also, there is no way to make a web app that does what Screen does. If there were, we’d have built a purely web-based app.
With Screen’s desktop app, you can share your screen TO someone on the web, but they need the app to share their screen, since multiplayer drawing and control can’t be done otherwise.
Can you go into some detail on the tech stack you used to make this?
The UI seems non-native, but there must be native layers for each platform in order to link into the accessibility features of each.
It’s built on a private fork of Electron, but the UI is all web-based. Electron handles most of our native needs, and where it doesn’t, we have a node module to connect into the OS. A lot of our secret sauce is on the native side, but honestly, there’s a lot of complexity across the product.
If you have any specific questions, ask away!
I’m open to finding a new name — in fact, a few days ago, I had reached out to Slack to see if they’d be open to letting us use the Screenhero name since they’re not using it. If that doesn’t work out, and and there’s still significant distaste for the name, we’ll change it. 99.9% of the time we’ve spent to get here has been on the product, getting it to work on all the platforms it supports, and making sure it’s performant and fast. The 0.01% of time we’ve spent on getting our name and domain is something I’m happy to revisit before our GA release.
This project don't even have the GNU keyword to help.
I guess this is an aspect where search engines are much better today, to get the context. But still, the issue remains.
Do you really think nobody is going to be confused when you tell them to use "Screen"?
"I'm staring at my screen right now, what do you mean?"
"It's the name of an app".
If people have to introduce your app as "use the app called Screen", then it's a bad name. Think Viber, Skype, Whatsapp, Colgate, Facebook.
https://videovillage.co/screen/
What was that product name? Screenmaster screenlord turboscreen are all more likely to get potential customers to remember and find you.
It’s a terrible name as is.
All your other suggestions are even more horrific, you might as well call it TurboScreenMaster 3000.
'Screen' and 'Screen Inc' is fine as it is.
Screend?
Scr33n?
Regarding the name / domain name i wanted to let you know that www.BrowserMeeting.com is available.
I was holding on to this domain for a future screen sharing & web browser based virtual meeting project.
If you or any HN readers are looking for a category killer keyword rich premium .com that is PERFECT for a "Browser Meeting" project please send an email to: sales AT browsermeeting.com
Could you please post this as a feature request on https://support.screen.so so we can follow up with you and update you on our progress?
I'd love to try something better but running a closed-source app with complete access to my screen, mouse and keyboard connected to the Internet is really not an option. And it's really difficult for me to understand how so many people have no problem trusting it. What am I missing?
For the moment maybe the best we can do is trying to use apps with screen sharing support included, e.g. Visual Studio Code's sharing.
Your mention of VNC reminded me of some work I did in 2008 :) https://blog.printf.net/articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-re...
Summary: we were sustainable ($1MM ARR), but chose to join Slack since we felt we could get to our goal (have everyone use our product) faster. We didn’t foresee our product getting dropped.
This time around, the company is 100% bootstrapped, and I have no intention of taking any investment. We just want to be able to keep our burn rate low, build a product people love, and stay independent forever. I believe we can do that as long as we continue to make something people want.