Thanks for the question. It was honestly a close call and we knew we couldn't do both at the same time (this is a side project).

The reasons where:

1. Our personal devices were Macs at the time we started.

2. We felt that the first use case for CoScreen would be agile developers who collaborate with UX designers. The latter seemed to mainly use Macs (https://austinknight.com/writing/designers-prefer-macs) while the former are mixed e.g. also depending on the region. In the SF Bay Area Macs quite popular among developers so we ran with it.

In any case, we hope to be able to support all 3 OSes soon. For that reason CoScreen was built 95% in a platform-agnostic way (nwjs) so we're optimistic.

Does that mean you use the JS Screen capture api to capture each and every window separately?

I would’ve thought that’s too much for typical (laptop) cpus but have to admit I never tried this

We're capturing them natively and are working on another major performance improvement which should make it at least as efficient as other major solutions.

Are there other solutions that capture multiple windows at once? I’m only familiar with typical screensharing where the use case is either full screen or a single window.

The way I understand you, coscreen captures each window shown individually.

Doesn’t that also mean that overlapping windows are captured in full? I can’t try it out atm so perhaps if you could leave a comment on cpu usage for encoding as well as bandwidth (upload) compared to a typical Screen Sharing solution with a single screen that would be great.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a MacBook with cores > 4 for precisely that idea: capturing every single window, streaming them out to a separate machine for analysis of what’s happening in them and possibly making them accessible for collaboration as well, all without losing too much performance

I believe somewhere in this area is a lot of productivity waiting to be unlocked with better tools, not just for typical remote use cases but for any kind of office work

We do capture overlapping windows separately but we turn them into one video feed with overlaps to save bandwidth and overhead. We might stream windows individually but feel free to reach out directly if you have specific requirements & ideas.

It's not called a "machinetosh". It's Macintosh, or Mac for short. Named after the McIntosh variety of apple (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntosh_(apple)).

"Windows is used way more than [Macintosh] on developer machines." - Citation needed. Macs are extremely popular among web developers, and are required for iOS developers, both pretty major categories of "developer".

Thanks for the historic context ;)

Edit: + Stats from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019

Windows: 47.5% MacOS: 26.8% Linux-based: 25.6%

Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

looking forward to using this once it rolls to linux

Btw, we've just set up this quick survey to help us prioritize operating systems. Feel free to sign up & we'll keep you in the loop...

Stay tuned!

it might be a technical reason sometimes. Does windows provide an API for you to capture a window, instead of a desktop on a specific screen?

True, just in this case we just went with Mac because we used it personally. Windows might actually have been easier because macOS gets increasingly restrictive (e.g. with Catalina). Nevertheless, glad we made it and we'll do our best to support all major OSes.

I don't want to make this a game of one upmanship but I'd be surprised if there are GUI things you could do on a machinetosh that you cannot do on Windows.

Agreed, hopefully Windows will be easier though. Getting mac done well gets harder with every macOS update...

Windows APIs give great info about size and position of windows. Challenging part is really the per monitor scaling, but it’s not impossible either. Great product, top work

Thanks for confirming & your feedback!