Pop is one of my favorite founding stories. Slack acquihires a multi-cursor product, kills it, never builds the feature. Noncompete expires, original acquihire founders use their acquihire money to buy a $1.5M vanity domain, bootstrap a replica of their old acquihired product, feature freeze, and just provide a stable and reliable product - one that we use every day. Pop is amazing.
Is there a way to use Pop solo across multiple machines, so I can drive Xcode on my Mac from my PC, or drive Visual Studio on my PC from my Mac, and also sometimes have others join in?
Does that still work in a remote-style scenario (where the other machine isn't necessarily next to you and you want to remote join your own session without needing to manually click a button on the other machine)?
While it's likely not the answer you're looking for, I've had a colleague walk their in-law through starting Pop on their home machine while traveling, so they could remote in!
As someone who has been the primary support person for SSO, I’ve come to find the tax absolutely necessary.
It accounted for well over half of our company’s support tickets. The biggest problem is nobody on the customer end wants to champion getting it setup. When things go wrong, they just throw their hands up.
Not the GP, but from my personal experience and exposure to Kerberos and SAML, most customers have a very custom SSO setup, permissioning can be hell (especially if the company did it a long time ago, and they didn't onboard a new SSO-friendly vendor in a long time), and all in all any interaction with the SSO system typically requires long back and forths with IT and other kinds of red tape.
The core of SCIM/SAML is relatively simple, but there are tons of different ways companies can configure things.
* Younger companies tend to use a "modern" identity provider, Okta, Google Workplace, etc. However, the owner of SSO system doesn't tend to be an SSO expert. These setups normally work "out of the box", but require a bit more generic guidance since the person setting it up only deals with SSO occasionally.
* Older companies have the internal expertise, but often use legacy configurations. Many time, this is just a matter of figuring out what the two different system call various fields. However, the range of errors can be huge, so you have to explore a bunch of stuff.
I've used this product for a couple years (my company was early access) and I enjoy it quite a bit. I can't say I've tried a while lot of comparable products, but it's nice to just be able to call someone, which is a big step up from Slacking a Zoom link. I also find it a more polished product than Slack huddle. I'm super greatful that the team at Multi and other like them are pushing the boundaries to make remote work feel a little more personal.
Web dev? I’ve met many 3-5 dev companies even who have a mix of OS’s but mainly if they do client and backend dev too, I can see a small web dev team being Mac only.
I think it really depends on the company culture as well as the product. My company is in the 25-50 range, but I've been part of one that hit 200 employees and everyone was on Mac except for one or two accountants who (understandably) wanted their Microsoft Excel on windows.
Wild. I’ve worked with a bunch of dev teams across FAANGs and smaller companies and never had a whole team of people on Mac even with a small 5 person team.
Hey CitrusFruits, thanks for the plug!
(Haha I agree with the dead comment that this reads like a paid ad. I'm grateful you took the time to post this... before I even realized we were on HN!)
Of course! And no, not a paid plug. There were just a couple comments here when this was first posted and I wanted to chime in as someone who's used the product.
Likewise. The ambient rooms and post-meeting summaries with ide files, links, and now todos/transcript is super useful! A company like Notion should buy them up. The only missing feature for me is browser participation or a Windows client, but most of my teammates are Mac.
We're building so that you're (hopefully) both right:
- The focus is on code, especially macOS/iOS devs in Xcode.
- We want working together to feel as intuitive as Figma/Miro.
Would really love to see a comparison between this, Pop, Drovio, Tuple, and similar.
I've been using Drovio (formerly UseTogether) for a few years, mostly on inertia, as they were the "best" I found when looking originally. It suits my needs, but feels a little kludgy at times.
One of the killer features, imo, is that Drovio can be run from the browser, at least for the clients. This lets you get a teammate pairing with you super fast, without having to make them download/install something.
As far as I can tell, so far, Multi doesn't have that ability
That’s really interesting to hear. I did a bunch of interviews with devs around real time multiplayer collab since I wanted some improvements there to things like screenheroand was surprised at how infrequently they actually did it. We focused on async sharing instead because of that. Would love to share what we have to get your thoughts, you sound like someone who might like what we’re doing too for sharing your knowledge and expertise to others in your dev team, if you were up for a quick chat, lmk or email me diamond@augmend.com.
Multi is typically used for long-term teammates. That's when, the extra features we get from being native, as well as the command palette to reach someone, are more useful.
Why does most startup comes with a shitty pricing ramp nowadays?
Free plan : Because everybody does that and we don't give a crap if we are loosing money
Personal plan : More than 6x the monthly price of the personal plan of GitHub because our solution clearly worth that, trust us (also we need paying customers to sustain the free plan, that thing cost us like A LOt)
Enterprise plan : Yeah you know what that personal plan we totally get that it's too much so call us and we can arrange something. It's business after all it's not like you are a struggling indie dev or a startup hahaha.
Because the high price scares everyone away except for the customers you really want to focus on. That’s at least the theory you hear in many Ycombinator lectures.
Link expires in 6 days. Most of the discussion is in the comments.
For anyone who doesn't want to load a ton of JS, in short:
# Free
Mostly pairing features. Free because we think that collaborative pairing functionality should be available to everyone, whether or not you can pay.
If you're an individual contributor, you should just be able to sign up. Our closest competitor charges $30 a month for just pairing functionality, and as a result many small teams can't afford to use it.
# Standard
Mostly features to help with async communication and documentation. We think that distributed work in it's ideal is "Pair often, write a lot, and minimize meetings."
We think it makes sense to draw the paywall here because a/ The async features cost us more to run, and b/ This problem is something that team leaders or managers care about. And those are the people with credit cards.
We support teams having a mix of Free and Standard seats. Just pay for the power users.
# Enterprise
There are some features that cannot be per-seat: They have to be the whole team or nothing. For example, SSO (yes #ssoTax), API access, bespoke security review etc. For these, we can talk to the team about what their usage will look like in deciding the price.
Hope that helps. We're very open to feedback on this. DM's open at @embirico on Twitter if you have thoughts privately.
Coscreen does afaik. Works pretty well. You would think that a team focused application needs both to do well.
I did a bunch of interviews with engineering teams for a similar product idea that said as much. We built an alpha of one even with both a windows and Mac client to meet that need but our big finding from early feedback was that dev teams really didn’t seem to want to do synchronous real time multiplayer collaboration very frequently. They liked the idea of async (which we leaned into) but time and time again realtime multiplayer was called out as a nice idea but not something they do in practice much. It’s like pair programming in general, good idea, infrequently done except for unique teams from what we’ve seen.
Yes indeed, I'm looking more into a solution for training and tutoring (students, interns, ...), currently doing it with Team Viewer which is good but not perfect, doesn't provide highlighting, doesn't show keyboard shortcuts, ...
56 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadFor some options that work with PC, check out my other comment mentioning "Windows"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28223522
It accounted for well over half of our company’s support tickets. The biggest problem is nobody on the customer end wants to champion getting it setup. When things go wrong, they just throw their hands up.
The core of SCIM/SAML is relatively simple, but there are tons of different ways companies can configure things.
* Younger companies tend to use a "modern" identity provider, Okta, Google Workplace, etc. However, the owner of SSO system doesn't tend to be an SSO expert. These setups normally work "out of the box", but require a bit more generic guidance since the person setting it up only deals with SSO occasionally.
* Older companies have the internal expertise, but often use legacy configurations. Many time, this is just a matter of figuring out what the two different system call various fields. However, the range of errors can be huge, so you have to explore a bunch of stuff.
> Guide, annotate, or take control, in any app.
I've been using Drovio (formerly UseTogether) for a few years, mostly on inertia, as they were the "best" I found when looking originally. It suits my needs, but feels a little kludgy at times.
One of the killer features, imo, is that Drovio can be run from the browser, at least for the clients. This lets you get a teammate pairing with you super fast, without having to make them download/install something.
As far as I can tell, so far, Multi doesn't have that ability
I used (and loved) screenhero back in the day too
Another tool that supports streaming to a browser is [Coduo](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coduo-pair-coding-for-xcode/id...)... although I just noticed the single 1-star review :/
Multi is typically used for long-term teammates. That's when, the extra features we get from being native, as well as the command palette to reach someone, are more useful.
Wasn’t Zoom a privacy sheetshow?
Free plan : Because everybody does that and we don't give a crap if we are loosing money
Personal plan : More than 6x the monthly price of the personal plan of GitHub because our solution clearly worth that, trust us (also we need paying customers to sustain the free plan, that thing cost us like A LOt)
Enterprise plan : Yeah you know what that personal plan we totally get that it's too much so call us and we can arrange something. It's business after all it's not like you are a struggling indie dev or a startup hahaha.
When did it all go wrong?
Similar to local coffee shops charging more because they can’t afford bulk orders for 20mil cups.
Link expires in 6 days. Most of the discussion is in the comments.
For anyone who doesn't want to load a ton of JS, in short:
# Free
Mostly pairing features. Free because we think that collaborative pairing functionality should be available to everyone, whether or not you can pay. If you're an individual contributor, you should just be able to sign up. Our closest competitor charges $30 a month for just pairing functionality, and as a result many small teams can't afford to use it.
# Standard
Mostly features to help with async communication and documentation. We think that distributed work in it's ideal is "Pair often, write a lot, and minimize meetings."
We think it makes sense to draw the paywall here because a/ The async features cost us more to run, and b/ This problem is something that team leaders or managers care about. And those are the people with credit cards.
We support teams having a mix of Free and Standard seats. Just pay for the power users.
# Enterprise
There are some features that cannot be per-seat: They have to be the whole team or nothing. For example, SSO (yes #ssoTax), API access, bespoke security review etc. For these, we can talk to the team about what their usage will look like in deciding the price.
Hope that helps. We're very open to feedback on this. DM's open at @embirico on Twitter if you have thoughts privately.
I did a bunch of interviews with engineering teams for a similar product idea that said as much. We built an alpha of one even with both a windows and Mac client to meet that need but our big finding from early feedback was that dev teams really didn’t seem to want to do synchronous real time multiplayer collaboration very frequently. They liked the idea of async (which we leaned into) but time and time again realtime multiplayer was called out as a nice idea but not something they do in practice much. It’s like pair programming in general, good idea, infrequently done except for unique teams from what we’ve seen.
Yes indeed, I'm looking more into a solution for training and tutoring (students, interns, ...), currently doing it with Team Viewer which is good but not perfect, doesn't provide highlighting, doesn't show keyboard shortcuts, ...
For a more better experience on both macOS and Windows, check out CoScreen as mentioned, and Tuple too!
I'll be responding to the comments. LMK if you have any questions.