Show HN: Presentations for your webcam, not a projector (cuecam-presenter.com)
Editing cards should feel natural to anybody used to Markdown.
I came to create CueCam as an "embedded entrepreneur". I had some success with my camera app "Shoot Pro Webcam" back in 2020 and built on this by creating squares.tv.
As I talked to more and more users, I discovered more opportunities to make their lives easier. I started with features in Shoot (camera options, pausing, drawing etc..).. Then I created Video Pencil (which connects to your computer and lets you draw on your webcam using your iPad). Then I created "Beat Sheet" which lets you run through "smart scripts", controlling Ecamm Live, OBS and mimoLive.
CueCam Presenter is how I'm connecting all these elements. It gives you a virtual webcam, virtual mic, and seamlessly connects to Shoot and Video Pencil running on other devices. There are various ways you can use it as a teleprompter while maintaining eye contact.
It's taken a lot to get it to this stage. The video pipeline has been through two major iterations and the audio pipeline even more. The UI has evolved and developed to cover the different ways it is understood by different people.
Educational discounts are a must for me, as I want to help improve the quality of remote teaching around the world. For other professionals, I believe it transforms the way you interact with people on video calls. It's useful for recording software demos and running live streams.
90 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadYou hit "Buy Now" and it's a Sign In With Apple prompt and you'r thinking "I don't see any pricing, am I going to get to see before the purchase?"
• I hope you're wildly successful with a subscription model, but the yearly cost for the full product is quite high for a "nice to have" even if I wasn't personally subscriptioned out.
• I typically present with PowerPoint, so the scenario where I'm speaking to slide notes is central. Although your introductory video is very good, it's unclear how this works with Presenter View.
• You emboldened "Eye Contact", so are you doing the "magic eye contact" thing that FaceTime does? Does CCP integrate with things like Stream Deck to help minimize the need to use the GUI?
> the scenario where I'm speaking to slide notes is central. Although your introductory video is very good, it's unclear how this works with Presenter View. * CueCam is built around the idea of cue cards. You write your notes on cards and then advance through them when presenting. You see your notes in a window on your teleprompter or using my companion app "Shoot's" built-in teleprompter
> You emboldened "Eye Contact", so are you doing the "magic eye contact" thing that FaceTime does? Not at all, it's all about your teleprompter - putting the text you're reading and the person you're talking to directly in front of your camera lens (or using Shoot, as close as possible to your camera lens!)
> Does CCP integrate with things like Stream Deck to help minimize the need to use the GUI? Absolutely. I have a fully-featured Stream Deck plugin. I have a Stream Deck Mini set up with a "next" button, an "aside" button and a couple more for screen sharing and quickly exiting a share. But it does a lot more, including allowing you select drawing tools on the iPad when you're drawing, with the correct drawing tool and colour being visible on the Stream Deck button (THAT was a lot of work to get right...)
This reasoning obscures the huge overhead of creating a distinct "version 2" next year. I can do a much better job on the software if I don't have to spend 70% of my time marketing the next version or sectioning off this or that feature for commercial reasons.
But I take your point, I don't love subscription software either, but most of my current users are pretty comfortable with these so it's good for now while I'm working alone. And my hosting / API access fees are not _zero_ so there is a vague justification there too.
It would be great if you also had more of a non-linear mode for content that is less structured and more suited to live events where anything can happen at any time.
For video meetings, podcasts/talk shows, etc. there is often content repeated between calls/presentations (theme song/intro, memes, sound effects etc) and also planned content from a topic list, but that content may be mentioned by anyone at anytime so it should be easy to trigger without too much scrolling.
Maybe it would look more like a sound effect board/stream deck/TV Mixer where there is a matrix of buttons to playback videos, add titles, show images, play sound effects, etc.
In the future, it would be awesome to have support for chroma key (green screen), data driven motion graphics (score board, live weather, live stock data, etc).
Basically, if you could dramatically simplify OBS, and it looks like you've already made some big steps in that direction, that would be highly valuable.
I've been thinking on how to do this "non-linear mode for content" but haven't been able to figure out the actual infrastructure for it.
The problem I see is accessing the content in real-time; how does one pull up content in real-time without materially affecting the flow of conversation? Of course, this assumes you know the location of the relevant piece of content. And don't even THINK about combining different pieces of content together in real-time!
> Maybe it would look more like a sound effect board/stream deck/TV Mixer where there is a matrix of buttons to playback videos, add titles, show images, play sound effects, etc. I think you're talking about a Stream Deck! CueCam gives you the other part of the Stream Deck puzzle when you do have structure, but lots of its features can be accessed with the Stream Deck plugin.
It's already possible to deep link to specific cards so you could set that up if you didn't feel like scrolling. But I'm usually fine to scroll (it's a pretty low friction interaction!) and it's less fiddling-about up front.
I have chroma key support already.
Other things may appear over time. If I find myself wanting to do some data-driven motion graphics you can bet that feature will appear within a week
Can CueCam eventually just work in full-screen and screensharing?
This solves pretty much every problem I encountered. I would buy this in a second.
But I have to ask, why a subscription? Why can't I download this software like I do with all my other presentation software? What value does a subscription buy me?
Whether $120/year is reasonable or not is debatable though. Seems steep for the casual user but for people that professionally do presentations, these sorts of things can be extremely pricey even on purchased licenses.
I would be extra upset if a feature changed or the interface changed between practicing and giving a presentation for example.
I want my presentation software to have a set of features and then never change until I make a very deliberate act of upgrading to a new version while still having the old one around in case I get stuck.
A subscription to auto-updating software is about the worst thing I can think of presentation software in particular.
By contrast usually, the publisher acts like they know better - all the way to auto-updating (with a new user interface, sure, why not) at the exact wrong moment. For example, you launch Zoom to join a meeting that started 3 minutes ago and what do you get: minutes of auto-update which you can't even override.
I don’t remember which online meeting software told me that once in the “oh shit I’m 5 minutes late” situation you’re describing but… man did that not sit well.
Note that I'm not using the App Store for distribution, I'm using Sparkle, which means that it never updates without you allowing it to.
Also , if it's a dealbreaker for a lot of people, it would be trivial for me to make older versions available for download! (I keep them all, and this has come in very useful on some recent support calls).
But it does benefit you in a very real way.
I work alone. I'm very good at spinning up features in a few hours. With a subscription model I can release these changes continuously, so you get new features and improvements on a weekly or monthly basis.
If I had to come up with a release schedule I'd have to make a lot of decisions about cordoning off different features, coming up with names, marketing materials, deciding what goes where. This is a huge mental and technical overhead. I'd be juggling git branches across multiple pieces of software, the website, and beyond. I'd be incentivised to put more and more things behind the next paywall and I'd be getting less and less real work done.
I don't have the marketing clout of Apple or Microsoft. They can take a different approach. I've tried a few and now I'm trying this!
One more thing, I do plan on adding some more cloud-based features as time goes on. I'm already managing a Chat GPT integration, and in future I'm picturing an online content library and search to let teams quickly access decks and slides for demos. But that's future stuff, so not relevant to your question just now.
Short answer: it lets me, as a solo developer, give you more cool stuff.
I have a single ultra wide screen and would like to share a virtual area that has a normal size (16:9) with people via Google Meets, Slack, etc. Otherwise I have to share a window, stop, share another one etc.
Really bad, especially during some on call emergency session.
So far I couldn't make it work, only Zoom had this feature at some point but nobody uses Zoom where I have worked.
- https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N4066W2R5Q4?hl=en-us&gl=U...
- https://github.com/tom-englert/RegionToShare
I haven't needed to do the same on a Mac yet, but if anyone knows of an app that does the same (i.e., define a "transparent" window that screen cap can then share in a call), do let me know (it's bound to be trickier on macOS due to window contexts, the compositor and privacy, but there might be an app out there for that)
Install OBS, add a 'Scene', add a 'Window Capture' to the scene, then right click it (in sources) and transform / scale / crop the scene dimensions. Then optionally in the 'controls' panel you can start a virtual webcam, then go to Chrome/Brave settings, go to Site & Shield settings, set the default Camera to your virtual one.
Not sure if OBS would solve your Mac issue.
I also have a single large screen. So I put the CueCam window on the right, top to bottom. And the windows I want to share in the bottom left quadrant. There I can make them smaller, with the correct aspect ratio, so that participants with smaller screens can see all the detail they need.
That leaves the top left quadrant for my meeting window where I can see the meeting participants.
I'm also experimenting with the two companion apps: Shoot to use my iPhone camera and control zoom from CCP; and Video Pencil to draw on my video.
Works fine. It's kind of a pain to configure, but it only needs done once and saved as a scene (which can then later be recalled with a keyboard macro or whatever, if one wishes).
(To receive bonus nachos, set the desktop background to include a 16:9 rectangle of the captured area for your own visual reference, and automate it so that this background is displayed when OBS is running. For fancy nachos, have more than one such area with one scene for each.)
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=display+emulator
[1] https://youtu.be/RA-XXvFHgEs
Can you put the stuff you need to share in a Virtual Machine? This, for me, has already solved pretty much everything this software offers.
Is it free for a limited trial period? How long? Are certain features free while others require payment?
This is sort of a pet peeve of mine, many tools offer a "free trial" but don't tell you what the limitations without installing it.
I have made the comparison table link a bit more prominent on the pricing page so hopefully it's less ambiguous now.
Also, on the comparison chart, you could just say something like "Cards per slide: 3 / Infinite / Infinite / Infinite" and do away with the hover text.
But if I share everything via a single "camera" channel, it's all or nothing. The only "in between" is "image is blurry, face is barely legible, text is illegible".
It only has the option of accepting cookies, and does not specify the kind of cookies.
But I think it's correct now?
That said, I'm still too scared to look at the damn hotjar data so I don't even know why I'm using it .
This looks super interesting, and might be a useful alternative to the OBS setup I currently have for work calls.
One thing I would really like is for there to be a clean preview feed rendered in a separate window, so I can screen share that window into Meet/Zoom/whatever. I've tried before to share content through the webcam feed to those systems, but generally the video quality sucks and the audio quality is even worse (since they all try to filter out anything that isn't voice).
CueCam has a "Teleprompter Window" that you could adapt to this purpose. You can "Include Camera Feed in Teleprompter Window" and then whatever you're sharing will come through. Although it does have window chrome so maybe not ideal. Another option is to fire up a QuickTime window and use "New Movie Recording" and use that as your sharing source window.
You definitely want "Original Sound for Musicians" switched on in Zoom if you're doing any audio sharing with CueCam.