
Show HN: Frop.io, instant remote presentations. In your Browser - derwildemomo
https://frop.io
======
derwildemomo
Hi HN!

[https://frop.io](https://frop.io) is a simple application that allows you to
present content (PDF presentations, Images, Text, YouTube videos) on a remote
screen without installing any software. It's completely based on web standards
(Websockets, JS) and runs in most modern browsers.

Simply start a session by calling frop.io/[yoursessionname]

I posted this two weeks ago. Since then I've completely overhauled the design
and built a native tvOS and Fire TV viewer app (both free and publicly
available).

Once again, looking forward to your comments, suggestions and criticism.

Thanks!

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CDillinger
I love this concept, and it's great to see the current support for dragging
and dropping images and PDFs.

I was checking out the functionality and tried dropping a couple different
formats into the host screen (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, .txt files),
and the host screen would either do nothing or get stuck on the validating
screen. I'm guessing this is because these aren't currently supported types.
If this is the case, I'd suggest notifying the host that the file type is not
supported.

~~~
derwildemomo
Hi, thank you for your feedback!

You are right, the current feedback mechanics need some love. I'm working on
that ;)

Supporting Word, Excel, PPT is also an item on the list, but since we rely on
client-only processing, displaying documents consistently across platforms and
browsers needs some time and work. But: On it!

------
kpsychwave
Excellent.I was working on a similar personal project. I had these
functionalities in mind:

\- Gradient / Color full screen mode \- Keep remote screen awake \- Screenshot
preview of remote screens (html5 canvas)

\+ Visualizations

It is nice to have a TV/monitor on to use as a light, clock... without having
to deal with Chromecast

~~~
derwildemomo
I like the gradient/Color-Mode Idea very much. Going to integrate that (with
attribution if you don't mind).

Do you have any example regarding the Visualizations? I'm keen to learn more
about that and to see if it fits in well.

~~~
kpsychwave
Looking forward to seeing it. :)

I don't have examples. I am thinking loop videos, GIFs, or CSS3 animations.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27XvZReW_cs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27XvZReW_cs)
[http://likethemammal.github.io/css-
visualizer/](http://likethemammal.github.io/css-visualizer/)

------
moondev
Looks cool. Would be nice to be able to drag a pptx or google slides link
which would unpack the images or slides automatically. Then you could use
arrow keys to easily advance the stream. May be outside the scope for
simplicity though

~~~
derwildemomo
Ha, I'd actually love that. Google Slides should be in the realm of possible
things, PPTX could get more complicated.

What I suggest you try is to upload a PDF. I've built a moderator mode on the
presenting screen, there you can do exactly what you want (just not with a PPT
but with a PDF-Presentation).

The reason is that PDF can be rendered very consistently across platforms,
this is more problematic with Powerpoint and friends.

------
detritus
Does this only allow for one viewer per presentation?

I can imagine a lot of use-case scenarios with multiple viewers enabled, if at
all possible?

Nice work though, I can see some uses for this already!

~~~
derwildemomo
At the moment it's one viewer per presentation, though that limit is quite
arbitrary and could be changed in the future.

I thought or considered this to be a nice-to-have but not mandatory feature,
but more people keep asking for that. Always good to have some external
feedback – thank you!

------
david90
Great work! Supporting multi-page PDF is a good feature there.

~~~
derwildemomo
Thank you!

------
avi02
I tried it and it looks good to me, my only concern was how will be the
session name collision is handled?

~~~
derwildemomo
Sessions are ephemeral – once you close the tab or browser window, the session
is gone (and the viewer will go back to the 'waiting for content' screen).
This is by design – frop is meant for realtime collaboration or presentations,
so having something stick around forever is not really the use case (in my
head).

------
nojvek
This is great. Does it do any screensharing?

~~~
derwildemomo
Not really, I think there are better and more mature tools for doing that
(like appear.in or Skype) out there. frop.io is quite special in that it does
not do screensharing at all, but just transmits the content, being super
bandwidth-conserving.

