
Show HN: Screen – screen sharing for remote work, by the cofounder of Screenhero - jsherwani
https://screen.so
======
jsherwani
Hello HN!

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](https://screen.so), and there's a longer article at
[https://screen.so/about](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!

~~~
munro
> \- __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!

~~~
jsherwani
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.

~~~
yani
To my knowledge, Slack has always been an electron app. Did they use something
else initially that was unnoticed?

~~~
jsherwani
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.

------
jsherwani
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.

~~~
vntok
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.

~~~
tjoff
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.

------
beagle3
There is already a product for that use by that name (GNU Screen, installed on
millions of machines already).

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.

~~~
marcinzm
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.

------
xemoka
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.

~~~
jsherwani
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.

~~~
xemoka
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.

~~~
cdmoyer
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.

------
fooblat
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?"

~~~
pgt
We live in an HN bubble. Most people have no idea there exists a GNU utility
called `screen`.

~~~
rvz
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.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

~~~
blast
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.

~~~
rvz
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.

------
Cu3PO42
Everyone seems to be talking about the name, and for the life of me I can't
figure out why. I'm well aware of GNU screen, but it hadn't come to mind until
I saw all the comments. Keep the name—or don't; maybe ask someone who know
more about marketing than most engineers ;)

Now I've been doing it as well... What I really wanted to say is thank you for
launching this product in a time where it's desperately needed by many people
and making it free. You said elsewhere that you're bootstrapped and I really
don't want to think of the server costs coming your way, so I seriously do
commend you.

One thing I always do first with products like this is take a look at the
privacy policy: I probably care more than the average person, but I feel like
people, or at least companies and institutions, also care quite a lot in
Germany. The policy mentions that video data is transferred through third
parties and not stored, but as far as I can tell it doesn't say anything about
whether the data is analyzed in real time nor about the privacy policies of
the third parties applying (or not). I want to assume the best and I
understand that legalese can be a kind of a pain, but it would be wonderful to
get some clarification here.

~~~
jsherwani
It’s exactly as you described — no one in the chain is analyzing the content
of the data being transferred. Both our infrastructure providers (Daily is our
primary, Twilio is an opt-in secondary) care deeply about security, and both
are used even in healthcare settings.

If you have suggestions of what we can say and do to make this better, please
let me know. I will be looking into improving the language before we do our GA
launch.

~~~
Cu3PO42
Wonderful to hear, thank you for the reply! Given this I'll be sure to pitch
this at work, I think it looks like a wonderful solution.

While I do take a lot of interest in law, I am by no means a lawyer.
Personally, I would feel good about: "Neither Screen nor these third parties
store or record media data as part of the Service, nor process it other than
necessary to provide the Service to you."

I'm sure corporate will have opinions on this when I propose it, and I'll be
sure to pass those on. As an additional point of feedback, it would be
wonderful if you listed payment options somewhere. Although maybe it's an
artefact of your early launch or by design that you don't.

EDIT: changed "our Service" to "the Service" above for consistency

~~~
jsherwani
Thank you! I’ve just pushed the following change to the site (will be live in
<10 mins):

>Neither Screen nor these third parties store or record media data as part of
the Service, nor process it other than for the purpose of providing the
Service to you.

------
quartz
Just tried this out, really cool concept and something we want at our 100%
remote company. Sadly it didn't work out for us on the first test.

Here's our experience in case it's helpful:

Signup:

\- There's no concept of user provisioning or inviting users, so when I first
signed up and started a session in slack everyone was a little confused about
if they needed to individually sign up or if they should be expecting an
invite to their corp email.

\- I'd also like some degree of user management at a corp level if for no
other reaosn consolidated billing and basic auditing.

Screensharing:

\- One of our cofounders is on linux and tried to do a screenshare. He has 3
monitors hooked up and even though screen asked him which monitor to share, it
still shared all 3 at once.

\- On my side from a macbook as a viewer the app wedged all 3 of his monitors
into view on my tiny 13" monitor and this completely destroyed the aspect
ratio of each of his monitors (ha, it's really hard to write this without
using the word screen), also the resolution was super low, likely because one
of his monitors was showing a twitch video and the screen app was trying to
keep up.

\- I tried zooming in on the one monitor where he had code open and it was
super pixelated.

\- I tried drawing and there was a very noticeable delay for both of us even
though we're both on high speed connections.

\- I tried to take screenshots of all this but every screenshot I took just
resulted in a grey image (not sure if screen intentionally blocks screenshots
but they're pretty important for us).

...sadly there was no way for us to do anything like remote debugging under
these conditions. Will keep an eye out for updates since this is something we
really want!

Systems: Mac OS 10.15.2, Arch (Manjaro)

~~~
jsherwani
Sorry about that!

Looks like a bug in our Linux multi-monitor code. I'm going to look into this
right now! It’s been a while since we touched that code, and it’s likely that
bugs may have crept in since then.

Also, corp level user management is something we’ve got in the works, but we
wanted to get the product out so that people could start using it, and then
add admin tools on top of that. For instance, if you’re on G Suite, everyone
should be able to OAuth in. But I hear you on the need for better tooling
around users.

Were you able to try screen sharing from your Mac to his Linux computer?

~~~
TsiCClawOfLight
I can confirm that linux allows selecting a monitor, and it will be correctly
highlighted, but all monitors will be shared.

Thanks for looking into this, the performance was amazing and I really want to
use this!

~~~
jsherwani
We’re looking into this: [https://screen.canny.io/bugs/p/linux-single-screen-
selection...](https://screen.canny.io/bugs/p/linux-single-screen-selection-
shares-all-3-monitors-squished-into-one-unreadable)

------
hashamali
How does this compare with Tuple ([https://tuple.app/](https://tuple.app/))?
Interestingly, Tuple was inspired by Screenhero and motivated by it’s closure.

~~~
frizkie
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.

~~~
mritchie712
why would they lower prices when people need the product more?

~~~
frizkie
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.

That's how I see it, at least.

------
jen20
I've just tried this, and by far the biggest issue I've found so far is a lack
of ability to turn off remote control while sharing. This is important for
lots of reasons - not least if you want to step away from a machine for a
second without signing everything out without remote users having the ability
to do whatever they like. Other than that, the experience is quite nice.

~~~
jsherwani
A simple fix for the specific issue you mentioned is to stop sharing your
screen for however long you want, while still staying in the meeting. You can
then turn it back on whenever you’d like.

Having said that, I’ve heard this request a few times now, and we will likely
get to this soon. But I am curious whether the workaround would work for you
for the time being.

~~~
jen20
Honestly, no, since that is not fail-safe. Ideally remote control could be set
to be disabled by default. Until that feature is available I'll probably
continue to use Zoom screen sharing.

~~~
vxNsr
Sounds like this isn't the app for you then... The whole purpose of this app
is working with someone else on the same screen. Why should you have to turn
on a feature that is the purpose of the app?

~~~
jen20
That might well be the case, in which case I'll keep using something else.

Suggesting the "whole purpose" of an app that does video, audio and screen
sharing is to let someone else control your computer seems strange though -
it's one of many features, not a purpose in and of itself.

------
Reubend
Looks good to me. The one thing is that the name is really confusing to talk
about.

~~~
jsherwani
If the name continues to be a source of confusion over time, we’ll happily
revisit it.

~~~
stratosgear
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?

~~~
jsherwani
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.

~~~
mritchie712
dude, don't worry about it.

------
scaredpelican
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

~~~
jsherwani
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.

~~~
scaredpelican
Real talk, tho. I'd sell a kidney and pay whatever you ask if it could suport
pen pressure from the Windows Ink API.

~~~
jsherwani
No need to sell kidneys... :)

Could you post this as a feature request on
[https://support.screen.so](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!

------
incog_nit0
Congrats on reinventing your baby (again) and props for making it free during
this pandemic.

Can you shed any light on what WebRTC server you use? ie. Jitsi, Janus, etc.

This is HN after all - be great to get a nutshell description of the tech
stack and after all your experience at iTeleport, Screenhero, Slack, etc. the
things you've learned from a technology and even bootstrapping/product market
fit standpoint?

~~~
jsherwani
Sure!

WebRTC server: Daily (primary), and Twilio (secondary)

There’s no shortcut to the performance side of things, so we had to do a lot
of custom work on Mac, Windows and Linux to get screen sharing to be super
fast. The high level bit there is the boring-but-correct advice: measure
everything, start with the biggest bottleneck, optimize, repeat.

The desktop apps follow a Slack approach (with a slight twist). Like Slack, we
use Electron, but in our case, we’ve heavily modified it to make screen
sharing super fast. We then use the standard Electron model to have main &
renderer processes. The renderer process fetches the UI from our website
(hosted on Firebase).

Almost everything (other than our custom node module) is in a monorepo. Even
our modifications to Electron are stored as patch files, which just makes it
easy to keep things aligned between our app and our modifications to Electron.

Our website/webapp (they are one and the same) are built on Ionic/Angular (we
started before Ionic supported React). We used Ionic because I didn’t want to
have to create new different UIs for each platform — I think the user is
served by having a low cost product where the effort is spent mainly on
performance and quality, rather than a slightly different UI for each
different platform (which has significant cost). We’ve tried to maximize code
re-use wherever possible, which is how a 2 person engineering team was able to
build this product (granted, it took almost an entire year, or more if you
count the project we pivoted from).

Happy to dive into details if you’d like!

------
harrisonjackson
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...

~~~
jsherwani
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.

------
droopyEyelids
Hey, LOVE to see it! Screenhero was an amazing tool, and I absolutely loved
using it for pair programming and desktop support.

I waited with bated breath for the features to show up in Slack, and when they
did I was basically satisfied until they shut it down, where I was crushed
again.

Here's hoping the lawyers don't beat you up!

Guess what color I'd paint a bike shed? Any color at all if it worked!

~~~
jsherwani
I felt the same way, and then decided to build Screen!

Your bike shedding comment made me laugh out loud :D

------
ShakataGaNai
Very cool. Obviously your website is getting the HN hug-of-death right now,
but still got signed up and poked at it a bit.

Suggestion: (rather than complaint about the name), it'd be nice to have a
little faster/easier method of changing the audio/video devices. Like the
device arrows in zoom. I happen to have multiple of both devices (on my
desktop) and sometimes apps get confused on which to use - so a quick way to
change it back is always preferred.

Suggestion #2: Everyone seems to be killing for their whiteboards back right
now. So a mode to have more strictly a digital multiplayer whiteboard would be
cool.

Bug (Windows 10 x64): When I left my first meeting, the app didn't release the
camera (light stayed on) & microphone (windows said it was in use) until I
exited the application (from the tray). Relaunched the app and created a new
meeting and it didn't happen again, so I'm not sure why. Just fyi.

~~~
jsherwani
A/V set up: good point. We can definitely improve this, although we’d need to
be mindful to not add too much clutter to the already-dense minipanel.

Digital multiplayer whiteboard: we sort of do. You can draw even outside of a
screen share — just draw during a video call (or even voice (or even no media
at all!)). But I’m curious if you meant something else? There are a number of
websites that do digital whiteboards, and we didn’t want to reinvent the
wheel.

Bug: this is an intermittent bug we’ve heard about from some users but have
had a hard time reproducing. Thank you for letting me know — we’ll try to
figure out a better way to log the error to help us reproduce and solve it.

------
bluebur
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.

~~~
jsherwani
We’ve heard this feature request a few times, so it’ll likely make its way
into the product soon.

------
chairmanwow1
Two things:

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

~~~
jsherwani
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.

------
vietjtnguyen
Something I've done before to share a screen with coworkers is to work in tmux
and start a web tty service like gotty
([https://github.com/yudai/gotty](https://github.com/yudai/gotty)). After you
resolve the standard network issues (port visibility and whatnot) you just
need to configure it with `tmux attach` as the starting command. tmux already
supports shared sessions if multiple terminals attach to the same session, the
session window size simply shrinks to the minimum of all clients. If you've
established trust then you can use --permit-write with gotty to actually work
in the same terminal. Hop into a voice chat and you've got pair programming.

~~~
jsherwani
If text editing is all you need, and both sides are comfortable with the
tools, then what you’ve suggested is definitely faster than Screen (tmux sends
text, we send pixels).

But if the guest needs to see something else on the host’s computer (if you’re
working together on a webpage, or a desktop app), then whole-desktop screen
sharing is the best approach.

Screen definitely isn’t the best tool for every job. But it’s great for when
you want everyone on the same page, seeing the same thing, and able to talk
about the content of your screen and even control it together.

~~~
vietjtnguyen
I guess I should have qualified my post, I did look at Screen (OP) and it
definitely does more than just sharing a terminal. It also just reminded me of
something I've done before (Screen -> screen -> tmux -> gotty, the mind is so
good at connections) which I thought was apropos and worth sharing.

------
evolve2k
Can you please update the default keyboard shortcut to change between pointer
and pencil.

Ctrl + Opt + Command, commonly known as "mash" are three keys commonly set by
devs. In my case used for moving my displays around using SizeUp. Mash + left
arrow (move window to left) etc.

Command + Options + some letter would be fine.

It's making the app unusable for pairing right when I want to be able to use
it without issue, as you're not affecting just one keyboard shortcut BUT ALL
shortcuts that use Mash as a base.

Better yet, option to set keyboard shortcuts, but Im sure that's low on your
priorities right now. Or maybe just add.. turn on/off keyboard shortcuts, this
would also solve it.

Thx

~~~
jsherwani
You can disable global shortcuts from the Settings menu (when you're not in a
call). But yes, we'll be improving this!

------
dguo
I'm looking forward to trying it out!

I'm surprised by how much attention the name is getting. I don't think I
personally know anyone who would use GNU Screen over tmux. And disambiguation
doesn't seem hard in this case anyway.

One thing that does mildly concern me is the prospect of Screen just turning
out to be another Screenhero in terms of being acquired and then neglected or
discontinued. But hopefully that won't happen based on the lessons learned in
the founder's post[1].

[1]: [https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-
Work-57df16351a884bc...](https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-
Work-57df16351a884bca8027f049698eb2ce)

~~~
jsherwani
FWIW, I believe life’s too short to be doing the same thing over again. I’m
building Screen because I want to see where we can take it independently, as I
think we had some great ideas that weren’t able to see the light of day.
Screen is already a far more useful product IMO than Screenhero was.

Having experienced an acquisition, there’s not much value in going through the
same experience again.

What’s personally interesting to me is: can we make something that helps all
knowledge workers work together remotely in a way that they couldn’t before?
We were onto something with Screenhero, and I’m excited at the chance of
following that thread again, and seeing where it takes us!

Having said that, I know trust takes time to build, and I hope to prove this
to you with actions rather than words.

~~~
dguo
Thanks for the reply, and good luck! I'm particularly excited about trying it
out since you've already implemented cross-platform support.

------
threedots
This is cool. I've been searching for a better screensharing tool but it
always seems to be an afterthought in the conferencing tools we've tried so
far. I usually couldn't care less about seeing the other person/people on the
call but i usually care a lot about being able to see their screen.

Gave it a quick spin immediately and looking forward to using it more in
future. Pricing looks about right for us too.

My feature request would be to make it easier to have it always on. For us
friction to initiate is one of our biggest annoyances, if the whole team can
have it on then knock (like sneek) to get the attention of the other(s) that
would be great.

~~~
jsherwani
Check out our roadmap, with the two items for virtual office. One has a small
screenshot, and the other has a Figma prototype that walks you through the
idea. Please post any feedback there so we can have it in one place, and so
you can be updated as we make progress.

[https://support.screen.so](https://support.screen.so)

------
multiplegeorges
Hey jsherwani! I just tried it out and it works amazingly well. Nice job.

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.

~~~
jsherwani
Sure!

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!

~~~
fareesh
How do you get the latency so low :D

------
orware
Does your solution allow for Administrator Escalation assistance on Windows?

Over the past few days we've been transitioning our higher ed staff to working
remotely and are able to use Microsoft Teams or Zoom already to see another
staff member's screen and walk them through basic things, but if the user
needs to install a program, which would normally require admin rights on the
machine, it appears that neither of those two solutions allow for that type of
assistance from our IT staff.

Does Screen provide a solution for that situation? If so, we can give it a
shot with our IT staff ;-).

~~~
jsherwani
You may be able to install and run Screen on Windows, although to be 100%
honest, we haven’t spent a lot of time outside the assumption that the user
has the access they need. If you can drop us an email at team@screen.so, one
of us will make sure to follow up with you once we try it out.

------
rvz
> *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.

~~~
jsherwani
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.

~~~
unnouinceput
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

------
cjbprime
I guess it's closed-source. That probably means I can't use it. Are there any
plans to open-source at least the client?

~~~
Liskni_si
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?

~~~
cjbprime
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.

Your mention of VNC reminded me of some work I did in 2008 :)
[https://blog.printf.net/articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-
re...](https://blog.printf.net/articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-remote-
desktop/)

------
mahmoudimus
Congrats on launching! I am a big fan of ScreenHero and sorely miss it in
Slack.

Question: I am looking to build a remote development environment and would
love to license this to see if possible to develop on a cloud machine to avoid
issues with rdp/nomachine etc. Any interest in that idea? Congrats again and
looking forward to trying it out!

------
jujodi
What do you mean by "Works with every IDE, text editor and app. Perfect for
remote pair programming, live debugging, and even code review."? I screen
share and pair program/design/etc. pretty much all day on Zoom without video,
so I'm tempted to try this and figure out what I might be missing.

------
hartator
Still sad that Slack killed ScreenHero. Why this time will be different?

I feel it’s like 1 step forward and 2 steps back kind of thing.

~~~
jsherwani
Short answer: we have no intention of ever getting acquired. We are 100%
bootstrapped, and we plan to become and stay sustainable, so we can be in it
for the long haul.

Also, regarding acquisitions, I’ve been there, done that, and I wouldn’t be
building this company just to do the same thing again (life’s too short for
that).

I love Slack as a company and as a product (I spend many hours in it daily).
However, in hindsight, it’s not possible to integrate one complex piece of
software into another complex piece of software. We ended up with a union of
two separate sets of constraints (from each product) which made it impossible
to make it all work. We didn’t know this when we started. I really value my
experience at Slack, and it was through that experience that I learnt this
lesson, along with many others, that have helped us make Screen what it is
today.

For Screenhero users, I feel that with Screen being publicly available today,
the Screenhero -> Slack -> Screen transition has been one step forward, two
steps back, and three steps forward again. I’m committed to continuing the
forward steps from here on in.

~~~
hartator
Ok, I will bet this is true! Sorry you weren't given more latitude in Slack.
Anyway you have my support. Starting tomorrow we will be giving a full try to
screen.so.

Why not making a Slack-like chat system as well? It seems a natural expansion.
(I am the CEO of SerpApi. Feel free to email me at julien at serpapi.com)

~~~
jsherwani
We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Slack is great for what it does! And if
you read through [https://screen.so/about](https://screen.so/about), I have
lived the experience that it’s impossible to do two things well. So in an
ideal world, Slack continues to innovate on the messaging side, we continue to
innovate on our side, and we mindfully integrate with each others’ platforms
to give our users the best possible experience.

------
noizwaves
Thanks for bringing Screenhero back! I loved using it back in the day (it made
high fidelity remote pair programming possible).

A while back I also tried to build a replacement called Tandem
([https://tandem.stream](https://tandem.stream)), so I really respect the
effort it takes!

------
jacobkg
I was a Screenhero customer for about 3 years. I used it daily for pair
programming and it was far and away the best screen sharing tool I have
experienced. Being able to have both people use the mouse and type on the same
screen was a game changer. I’m extremely excited to try out this new product.

------
ganstyles
Nice! I've been using screen for many years, switched to tmux though as I
thought it was easier to manage.

~~~
jsherwani
Zing! I see what you did there :D

------
futhey
Congrats on the launch! The user experience for this is amazing. Picture-in-
picture remote co-working is going to change the world.

We built a crappy version of this for our team about a year ago. This is the
first tool that solves all of our remote / distributed team pain-points in a
really elegant way.

------
gregwebs
On Ubuntu Linux using Xmonad my screen goes black. Other screen share programs
do work for me.

~~~
jsherwani
We’ll look into this! Please post a bug report on
[https://support.screen.so](https://support.screen.so) so we can follow up
with you with questions and update you on our progress to fix it.

------
bluebur
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.

~~~
jsherwani
Happy to hear that! :D

------
faitswulff
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?

~~~
jsherwani
Longer story here: [https://screen.so/about](https://screen.so/about)

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.

------
marcinzm
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.

~~~
jsherwani
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!

------
troquerre
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!

~~~
jsherwani
I hope we exceed your expectations!

------
enilsen16
Tried to install on Arch. Excited for to test the product(loved screenhero)
but the installation is a pain. Would be great if there was a AUR package.

~~~
jsherwani
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](https://support.screen.so) so we can follow up
with you and update you on our progress?

~~~
Liskni_si
Supporting multiple distributions would really be so much easier if your
product was open-source, BTW. :-))

------
tandav
btw there is default 'Screen Sharing.app' in macOS. You find it via spotlight
or via facetime/messages in menubar

------
dvduval
Do you know if you can share screens between China and the United States? Are
there some geographical limitations?

~~~
jsherwani
As long as you can make a network connection between the two hosts (either
directly or mediated via a server in the middle), you should be fine. We
haven’t tested specifically between China and the US, though.

------
maxired
Serioulsy it rocks ! happy to see it works without any problem on linux, and
can join a session in the browser.

~~~
jsherwani
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!

------
bdcravens
Is this product connected with Somalia?

~~~
CraftThatBlock
Seems like .so is the new .io. Another product using it is Notion (which is
pretty awesome)

~~~
jsherwani
Notion was what inspired me to get our domain!

------
SamBam
Will there be a free/lower price tier for open source or non-profits?

~~~
jsherwani
Yes! We’ve been laser focused on getting the product right, so the discount
model hasn’t been fully fleshed out, but you can expect something similar to
what other SaaS companies do in this space, but leaning to the more-generous
side of that spectrum. I don’t know exactly what other companies do just yet,
but that’s the philosophy we’ll use when we get to this. For now, it’s free
for everyone, of course.

------
mushufasa
`GNU Screen` I use every week for remote sessions on a server. Confusing
especially if you're targeting programmers.

~~~
rozab
Right. What were they thinking?

~~~
jsherwani
If the name continues to be a source of confusion over time, we’ll happily
revisit it.

~~~
mushufasa
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.

~~~
vntok
Is the GNU screen utility trademarked? In what capacity?

~~~
danieldk
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Enforcing_rights](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 ;).

