As someone else mentioned, they are finally doing some more with their purchase of Screen Hero most likely.
However, one major feature that Screen Hero had that I don't _THINK_ this new screen sharing built in Slack has, is the ability for the other person to control the mouse/keyboard on your screen. I could be wrong, but if that is the case it's a huge feature missing. That was one of my favorite things that Screen Hero had, being able to click for the other person or type while they were screen sharing to help them out on a task, if needed. If it's not in there for this release, I hope it gets added soon.
I love screenhero and use it all the time but the one feature I need the team to add is the ability to disable another people's control of my screen. I think this feature is useful, but sometimes I'm giving a demo and just dont need it (or want it). I have fucked up multiple demos because someone accidentally clicked off my browser tab while I was controlling the screen.
I loved using screenhero with my team... waited forever for a Linux build to come but was sad when Slack bought them out and the port was never brought to fruition.
That is really sad. I like SH waaaaaay more than I like slack (which to me is a passable but not great chat app.. it eats my RAM and CPU and sometimes the css formatting breaks....) and use it all the time for remote pair programming.
You can get rid of most of the ui, but it's not very intuitive.
First click on the little upwards arrow on the person who's sharing in the bottom right corner.
Then the toolbar (the thing that appears in the top center of the screen when moving the mouse) gains an extra icon on the left which collapses everything.
I wish ScreenHero would get open-sourced or at least fully supported as a separate piece of software. I actually think it's pretty perfect in it's current feature set.
I was blown away when it got axed so fast. The multi-mouse capability was the coolest thing and made the tool fit my needs like none had before. It's the best!
I get to use ScreenHero on the rare occasion these days, and it's still a joy every time. I want to use it for every screen share.
Having support for personal and Slack accounts within ScreenHero would be amazing.
I like Slack but I'm bit hesitant to have it the ability to control my mouse and keyboard all the time. Slack is so popular that there are certainly lot attacks against it and that could be one of the biggest exploits. I really hope operating system side sandboxing features mature and I'm able to control if and when software has access to such features.
We can finally replicate the way movies show "hacking" where the hacker starts controlling the kb + mouse and typing "HELLO MR SMITH. YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED" in 128px font.
> I really hope operating system side sandboxing features mature and I'm able to control if and when software has access to such features.
In macOS at least, Slack and/or ScreenHero gets an entry under "Privacy > Accessibility" settings panel (just like apps like Synergy), where it begins disabled, and you have to explicitly go to that panel and enable it before it can do anything with your mouse/keyboard. You can disable it again at any time.
I almost exclusively share single application windows. Sure, on Mac OS you can turn on "Do not disturb" while presenting, but it's too easy to have information from other customers, or internal, show up when you don't want it to.
Still no linux support for video and now no linux support for screen sharing. Here's to hoping Google ramps up whatever Slack competitor they're trying to roll hangouts into.
Yes! When it comes to screen share and video on Linux, we've had the best luck with hangouts. We are paying Slack customers, but no still no video? Slackers.
The worst part is this even affects non-linux users. My team is about 80% macOS and 20% linux. We can't have meeting without 20% of the team, so Slack is useless.
You need to support everyone, or it all becomes pointless.
Hangout's encoding also it's a real performance hog because most devices don't support H.264 in hardware. Every time I'm in a hangout the fans come on and the battery rapidly drops towards zero.
Most devices DO support H.264 encoding. Hangouts however uses VP9 in Chrome and that's not HW accelerated. If you use Safari on Mac it'll switch to H264 and that will stress CPU less.
I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.
I've tried to run 4K60 VP9 (and h.265 for that matter) video from youtube on the latest top spec MacBook Pro and it's completely impossible to watch. Transcoded to h.264 and computer barely gets warm.
Maybe you could rephrase that. How many years of human progress and CO2 emissions have been caused by the uncooperative licensing situation caused by these software patent owners?
> I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.
It would definitely be an interesting way to look at how bad software patents are for our society. It's not Google's fault (though they do participate in this system) that good technology had been locked away only to be used by proprietary software.
Well Google want something for free, why can't I get stuff from Google for free? Like, not rent their data, but actually browse their index properly (remember, verbatim && date search has been removed and it's likely to get even worse).
Not sure what that has to do with a discussion about why Google uses a non-patented codec rather than a patented one. What access Google gives their users is not a factor, and is a non-sequitur.
But also I think you're missing the point of free software if you want to limit usage of free software based on your personal value judgement of a company. That's antithetical to free software.
It isn't what is wrong with Hangouts so much as it is a list of things we like about Slack:
1) Channels - each message has a home. Notifications can be set to the correct level.
2) APIs/Integrations - We hook it up to github, pivotal, new relic, AWS and some of our own custom hooks. Reminders, alerts, messages - whatever we dream up that needs to be done and it is open enough to do it.
3) History
4) Past an image right in it without saving it as a file.
5) Voice calls.
Right now Hangouts is only for meetings where we want to share a screen or video chat. Most of the time a voice call is enough.
Hangouts Chat / Meet [0] brings a lot, if not all, of this when it comes out. Meet keeps most of what hangouts video has today, but a better UI and uses hardware codecs when it chan.
Hangout Chat is really a rework of the idea of hangouts. It brings a lot of functionality that people like from Slack (everything you mention I believe).
Note that Hangouts today does have search sorta (it ain't great). If conversation history is on, it can be searched from Gmail web (not Inbox either), using the "in:chat" filter.
"The Hangouts Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities — from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script — and integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation."
That's I think all that has been said so far. More details will come once it's released.
Have you looked into Discord? Not sure about their Linux availability, but it can do all of the above, also voice channels. They don't have video/screen share right now but it's apparently something they're working on. It's also more free than Slack.
That might not be a good thing though, since it's unclear if $5 monthly will be able to support them over time.
Have you tried hangouts.google.com? It's possibly still blocked, depending on your employer, but if not, it's just a hangouts webUI that also allows calls.
Hangouts actually works at the moment, but work could change that at anytime, so making it a key piece of my workflow is unwise. I get your point though.
Employer blocks Gmail (and other sites) via the corporate firewall. They are not paying for Google Apps (at least not for me). Get a job at any large enterprise and you'll experience some restrictions you wouldn't find at a smaller company.
I believe GP was saying that they'd go Slack-only in their org if it had linux support for screensharing/video. Slack is pretty much everywhere now and has the mindshare and platform support for chat and collaboration. Having everything in one place makes things easier, ergo ditch hangouts and have it all in one place. Hangouts is missing crucial features to even begin to fully compete with Slack, including decent chat, collaboration, integrations, reasonably good mobile apps, and trendiness.
Hangouts eats battery like mad. The UI/UX is still a big mess: there's really two hangouts webapps; one for calendar calls and one for ad-hoc calls, and that's a mess. Finally, it's nice to have one single tool, rather than multiple tools for this sort of thing.
I see mentions of Screen Hero in a way that makes it sound like it's dead, but my team still uses SH daily (via Slack's `/hero` command). It's easily the best _remote pairing_ tool that I've found.
This new Slack feature seems like something different, for presenting content to everyone on a call, not for collaborating on code.
You are correct that Screen Hero still works and all, but it is technically "dead." No one new can sign up for the service. You can only use it if you already had it setup. I would personally consider that "dead" if it's now closed off for anyone to signup with. It's not like you can recommend this as alternative to what Slack is doing with their screen sharing.
On https://screenhero.com/login they even say "New signups are closed while we integrate with Slack." - I consider that "dead."
I typed /hero in slack
It gave a link to "add the Screenhero Integration"
I clicked that link and it took me to a Slack prompted me to create a "free account", which it did using my Slack information.
Then I was able to download screenhero.
So, anyone new can sign up for the service via Slack.
If you're part of a paid Slack org, you can go to [ORGNAME].slack.com/screenhero to create a ScreenHero account.
If you're not part of a paid org, a lot of times nonprofits have free premium Slack orgs, and you can use your membership in one of those to get Screenhero.
I've dropped the Screen Hero binary to a few people (even outside of my Slack org) and they were able to sign up via the app even after that message appeared, but you're totally right, we're on borrowed time.
You can sign up with your slack account though. They shut down general sign-ins but I just set this up for a project and it requires a paid slack account to be a new user to Screen Hero. I really hope all the killer features of SH (users having unique mouse/keyboard via screenshare) make their way into Slack before it is shut down entirely.
I also still use SH extensively. However, it's clearly at best in maintenance mode. A few weeks ago it was broke from some time Saturday to Monday afternoon. I spent probably the hours in total on two different projects with two different pairs to get sooner other acceptable solution to work before SH became functional again. I'd rather pay for it and have it be reliable. Signing up for it is also not creating trust when I try to bring new people to use it with me.
Multiple tabs in a web browser flat out sucks for multi-tasking. macOS, Windows and many flavors of window managers for Linux provide many ways for switching between windows, seeing what's open, hiding things, etc. In a browser they're just straight tabs.
Have you ever need to switch between multiple tabs semi regularly while keeping other tabs open? Have you ever wanted two tabs to be side-by-side? It's a usability horror show.
Wrapping Slack in its own app let's me use the windowing manager my operating system came with.
Not really. It doesn't function the same. Doing Command + Tab on a Mac shows them as the same application so you can't switch that way, you still have to use Command + ~ which is unlike all other apps in function as well as key combo. Also features like expose show the same framing around each website so if you have enough things open the only visual queue is a very tiny preview of the website which, depending on what you need to use, isn't always clear (at least not for me on my 13" MacBook).
It's a workaround that I do use but it's not a substitute I'm afraid. Windows handles this a little better, IMO, but it's still not great and the occasional crash of a web browser tab still sometimes takes the whole thing down.
I think you missed the part where I said Windows was better but still not great along with the issue of one tab crashing taking them all down (which still happens despite the separate process per tab).
I pin the most important ones, then switch using cmd+1/2/3 to the one I need (would be nice to have feature to switch to -1,-2,-3 (aka last, second to last, etc) tabs
cmd+` to switch between different Chrome profiles/windows
option+shift+a/d to snap window to left or right
tiptap to switch between tabs when using trackpad
when slack notification comes up, just click on it and it takes me to the right Chrome tab
I do agree we need a better way to integrate tabs in native windowing
I wouldn't call tabs a usability horror show with the reason you stated. Surely you can just drag a tab off the tab line and then you have it in its own window. Ready for you position however you want, in the full control of the window manager.
It's so easy to separate tabs into their own window and utilise the window managers control.
Unless you explicitly enable separate tasbar buttons in Windows you still have all of your browser windows accessible only through a single 32px-wide button on your screen. And the default thumbnail preview delay is also equally frustrating.
You still lose out on multiple features of the OS for Window management when you simply create more windows within an App. I addressed that here if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14355971
For me, it's mainly because it gives me one icon that's always Slack, no matter how many browser tabs I have open, no matter how many windows or even different browsers I am using at once.
Click there, get Slack. No risk of accidentally closing it or losing it somewhere.
Yes... not the only one though. Not a very obvious joke. Also, just checked slack on my Mac: 38MB memory usage, 4 open groups and many channels. So, not a good joke either?
Want some more examples of the awesome that is the Slack desktop app? Have a single animated emoji on screen in a channel. Just visible in the currently active channel. The Slack app is using ~30% of the CPU in my 2016 MBP, even when it's in the background. I quiver at the thought of the awesome that will be available when Slack's valuation hits $20B.
The scripts for it still likely get loaded and compiled. I'm not sure how much of a hit that is, but Electron apps tend to eat a lot of memory quickly even doing basic stuff.
Maybe not a few weeks, but 2.5 years seems pretty intense. Why not six months? I find it hard to believe they couldn't have executed well in six months if it was a priority. Clearly, it wasn't.
Just because something could be built it doesn't mean it should be. I, for one, applaud the fact that they rolled it out when they were good and ready. Shows a steady hand at the steering wheel.
It says you can only share your entire screen. That's fine from a laptop, but if you have a 4k/5k display sharing to people with laptops, wouldn't the text be unreadable? Sharing just a single window is the standard solution here.
I always wonder if people would be interested in a small SAAS providing a terminal demonstration and sharing service with web and terminal client. Users could on one hand share step-by-step demos for common tasks on the terminal (say "Let's build $foobar on Ubuntu 16.04 optimized for the following infrastructure") similar to asciinema.org and on the other hand share there terminal read-only to demonstrate live-debugging or development operations.
Obviously this is already possible using a setup involving tmux and ssh (or pixel-screen sharing via Slack), but maybe a streamlined service that has both a powerful terminal and web-client would be an interesting addition to some documentation-heavy workflows or remote debugging sessions. There is also shellshare.net, which is also a nice little project.
In essence, yes. Furthermore I guess that it could be a feature to not have the ability to write to the terminal and/or accompany recorded sessions with additional documentation.
Can someone explain why slack web app always turns my MacBook video indicator light on when I'm on a call even when I'm not sharing video? I don't like them accessing the camera unless I actual want to share video.
i wonder why people down voted you. you're asking valid questions...
I'm starting to see a recurring pattern on HN. If you say something that somehow goes against "HN ideology", you get downvoted. Anyone else see this too?
It's because "I don't see a single feature in Screenhero that others don't have."
Which is just incorrect. Screenhero has interactive screen sharing while the others don't. Or course he qualified it with "I don't see.." however, that tells me that he never used Screenhero and thus really doesn't have much credibility when critiquing it.
Express all the opinions you want, but they ought to be based on facts.
Broken notifications and horrible SharePoint magic behind the scenes. The way Teams is organized confused some of my team.
Interestingly, we also had a lot of problems with Skype for Business.
The dark theme and the way Teams formats while you type was great, though!
We're trying it out now (since it's included with o365) and I find it mostly usable. It has most of the things I need (group (video) calls, screen share, search, files tab etc). My biggest complaint has been the random glitches you run into every now then (repeatedly being logged out for no reason comes to mind). That and the slowness (i'll often see a lag between when I've hit return and when my message shows up in the conversation). Hope someone from Teams is reading this :).
We're doing the same thing. I want to use Slack but we're going with Teams for cost reasons (included in o365). I've never had any problems with screen sharing with skype for business.
I'm really surprised this took so long. Hipchat has had this available for a couple of years now.
If they aren't adding the pairing features that made Screenhero so good (dual mouse pointers, dual control, resolution adjustment and scrollaround windowing) then what's the value add?
Our team is equally parts remote and in-office and we've had so many issues with hangouts for our daily stand-ups. Not picking up audio, screen just stops sharing, links outright breaking for unknown reasons. We're a slack house already and will be very likely switching to this after some internal testing to see how we like it.
So I'm glad they're doing something with the purchase. I LOVE screenhero. But right now...holy crap this is bad. Really crude benchmarks but I'm seeing an ADDITIONAL ~3.5gb of ram usage when screensarhing via slack. Checkout screenshots here. https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/864908004176658433 I know its beta, plz help improve this. I love both products
Curious if anyone has an idea how the multi-mouse system worked. My guess is that on the screen being shared, a transparent full-screen window is overlaid that just draws in the second mouse and that when this proxy mouse is clicked the event gets simulated on the sharer's side.
This effect was so cool and would love to see an open-source library that shows the effect over WebRTC. Curious if it's anything more complicated than that and why it's never been replicated by other packages.
I keep finding myself wanting to use slack more and more for customer calls. Generally the audio quality has been pretty great compared to Google Hangouts / Uberconference / Gotomeeting. Screensharing makes me want to use it more.
The only issue is that you can't just invite any random person to a call, they already have to be within your slack organization. I wonder if they'll end up pulling this out as a separate product.
Just give someone a url and you can start chatting with them. No plugins, no logins, all WebRTC. It seems to try to load some flash, but it looks optional.
That's been the present for the majority of most people's lives. Even with email there wasn't much, if any, time where the majority of people ran their own servers.
On Windows 10 whenever I click the "Start a call" button it causes the entire slack app to become extremely blurry. Other apps do this too sometimes. It has something to do with how they are being rendered, maybe related to high-dpi support or something. I've tried disabling the high-dpi support and enabling compatibility mode but it doesn't have any effect.
Even after I close the "start a call" dialog the blurriness persists. It doesn't go back to normal until I restart Slack.
Any ideas what is going on? I can't find any working fixes for this in Slack or any other apps where this also happens.
An interesting thing I noticed was that in Unity (game dev IDE) when I set the render method to anything but DX9 it causes this same blurriness. Only DX9 makes it render sharp. DX10, DX11, etc all cause the blurriness.
I just have a normal Windows 10 desktop, latest drivers & updates, GTX 1080 GPU.
It's perplexing that it's not built using cross-platform web technology. If you're not going to leverage that, why saddle users with the signicant resource and latency impact of an Electron app?
This has been my greatest frustration with slack (and with google voice calls, though I will angrily use Chromium if I have to, which I guess is Google's goal)
At the risk of being confrontational, is usable VoIP going to come at some point?
Not only do I systematically get dropped calls, but also enraging UI bugs, e.g.: interrupting calls from other apps (whatsapp, phone, google hangouts, etc.) fails to put the slack call on hold and renders the "hang up" button ineffective.
Isn't slack videocalling in beta and still macOS only? I wish they'd finish implementing a feature [on all platforms] before moving onto other features.
As a team, we can't really use videocalling until the entire team can use it. It's really all-or-nothing.
No one else has mentioned zoom.us here. For my money, it's easily the best of its kind for multi-person video chat. The UI could be made a bit easier to navigate, but beyond that, it's a fantastically well-built piece of software.
This is great. I hope they're able to stay on top of other things like cpu usage and general bug fixes while they add these new features. On OSX it hovers around 20% cpu while idle.
Make sure it is actually idle, the gif reactions under messages use up a lot of CPU. I often switch to the slackbot channel when not using it to save CPU/
Have never been able to get Slack calls working behind our corporate proxy, gave up after many attempts, changing network settings, "noproxy" settings etc.
I try to use Slack voice as much as possible with my team but I find it quite unstable in terms of call quality with lots of dropped calls. Is this the case for others?
I work for a 75-staff company on a pretty tight budget, and we have office 365. For us to use slack with SSO and have more than 10k messages, we'd have to pay about $11k/yr. Teams, we're already paying for with o365 (and even if we weren't on o365 yet, E1 plan is approx $7k/yr and includes teams, exchange... sharepoint (not that I'd use that)). That's what's going to prevent Lync/s4b from going down the drain.
we loved Screenhero too, but now switched to aws chime and find it even better (except for funky UI) because you can have multiple video calls and control presenters screen.
Well, I love Slack https://www.slack.com too and I use it every day. I also referred it to hundreds of my friends and colleagues all these years and they've thanked me about that many times.
I try stuff that give me value and I am not ashamed to share my experiences. If that sounds like a Slack advertisement or whatever I can only say that I've used WebEx, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Hipchat, Zoom.us, Gotomeeting and other collaboration tools as an early adopter (sometimes in the first alpha and beta versions) searching for something that could stick with my needs.
I love this stuff (collab s/w) and I used screenhero at least a year+ before slack bought them. I was not impressed back then, but I am ready to see how they evolved.
Slack is great but sometimes all these large companies are doing stuff the way Microsoft did with Skype .. took them ages to evolve the product after they bought it.
However, one major feature that Screen Hero had that I don't _THINK_ this new screen sharing built in Slack has, is the ability for the other person to control the mouse/keyboard on your screen. I could be wrong, but if that is the case it's a huge feature missing. That was one of my favorite things that Screen Hero had, being able to click for the other person or type while they were screen sharing to help them out on a task, if needed. If it's not in there for this release, I hope it gets added soon.