CTO of CoScreen here.

I think it's a really good question and not snarky at all.

This is honestly one of the biggest hurdles I think we have towards adoption.

We have bet a lot on the benefits of producing frictionless remote app-level sharing.

At the moment you can share one application, or your entire desktop with other tools. Then there is the friction of allowing sharing, asking for sharing, or even down to just knowing where the remote user's cursor is at.

CoScreen eliminates all of that. Anyone can share any window at any time. You see their shared cursor over your window that is translated into the adjusted coordinate space for that window.

You can be discussing a piece of code, share vim in Alacritty, or iTerm. The remote user looks up some documentation, and immediately shares it with you. Or you have a Android/iOS emulator that you want to immediately preview your work in.

Basically you're working in a shared working space more analogous to what you would experience in the office.

It's a paradigm shift from video conferencing, and traditional screen sharing tools that I think has to be experienced to be understood.

That being said it's going to be a great challenge to make this experience more transparent, and we are actively working on different scaling modes, the ability to move windows independent of remote users, and other concerns that we think will take it to the next level.

Our goal is to facilitate things like pair programming by fading into the background and just letting you continue with your normal workflow while not thinking about the tooling behind it.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my bad question sincerely!

Here's a situation that actually comes up all the time in my remote pairing sessions. Both peers have mutli-screen setups where a terminal (tailing logs, etc.), an IDE, and a web browser (perhaps even the browser dev tools) are all in separate windows, where some windows are on one display, some on another. With CoScreen, would "hey, can we check the logs real quick?" become as simple as the other peer clicking the window to add it to the session? That could be pretty big on its own IMO!

Also really useful, as the non-driving peer is looking up documentation and adding it to the session for group reference.

I'd love to try this out eventually, joining a new team soon and perhaps I can pull it off there if/when pairing needs arise!

"Thanks for taking the time to answer my bad question sincerely!"

No problem! It's actually a great conversation starter.

"With CoScreen, would "hey, can we check the logs real quick?" become as simple as the other peer clicking the window to add it to the session?"

Basically yes, there is a tab that shows above your window.

At the moment we have a shared context space, so your windows have a relative location that is based on the layout of the remote screen.

Ultimately this helps in like the pair programming scenario you make above, but is a weakness in other situations: we are working on a model that will let you break all of the window locations apart, or relatively translate the position of another user's windows wherever you want.

"I'd love to try this out eventually, joining a new team soon and perhaps I can pull it off there if/when pairing needs arise!"

We'd love to hear your feedback. We rely heavily on our community to determine our development path, so please reach out to us when you do, and leave feedback!

I see download options for Mac and Windows. Is Linux support in the works? Slack and Teams have us covered.

Linux support is indeed on the roadmap. We've got Windows done only last week and we'll get at it next...

Happy to keep you in the loop, here's the sign up: https://form.typeform.com/to/tWKFDe

Ah, a bit of a shame that it isn't supported yet. This looks like something that might interest my team and I would've loved to try it, but we're all on Linux. Looking forward to hearing about that being implemented.

I hate to say it but this sounds fairly close-minded.

Does this need to be a new product? Yes.

There are no great collaboration tools for developers I've ever seen like this. I'm immediately willing to pay whatever it costs to get this for my team. No more awkward calls trying to communicate complex concepts that don't often have terminology unless you make it up. Quickly highlight and explain a conflict without back and forth or frustration about how and where it fails over 5 minutes, just kindly ask if they wouldn't mind and start editing in the use-case or failure-case to explain the concept instantly.

Have you ever had to grab someone's mouse and keyboard awkwardly to get to the point of a conversation or feature? You never have the need to do that again.

Ever had the displeasure of trying to explain something that couldn't be explained by text / call in person over their shoulder ending up back-seat driving? Never again.

I mean, you can say it it's okay! I can't encapsulate my ENTIRE way of thinking into every comment I make, which has the unfortunate side effect of sometimes coming across as "close-minded".

For the record, as you can see from my reply to a sibling comment from the CTO, I am legitimately interested in CoScreen and products like it.

So why did I ask what I did? I know the CoScreen people are watching, so I took advantage and asked for some reasoning about why "this time, it's different." And I got a good answer, too!

Does your product support iPad with drawing? Because difficulty of explaining is often relieved with visuals, as opposed to merely gesturing at something with the mouse. It’s something that’s keeping me on Zoom vs the competition.

The way we're doing this is that we use Miro (https://miro.com) on an iPad, open the same file on the desktop and share that window using CoScreen.

That way you can draw on the iPad, share the content via CoScreen with your peers and they can even draw at the same time - all while sharing & interacting with other windows in parallel. Does that address your needs?

I couldn’t have said it better myself @bmcahren! Perfectly summarizes the pain points we’ve experienced that led us to build this. (CPO of CoScreen here)

Watch Doug Engelbart sell you on it 53 years ago in 1968. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

The fact that this isn't a reality in our every day computer use is sad. Glad to see CoScreen picked up the ball which Microsoft and Apple dropped long ago.

would really prefer this implemented as an open protocol instead of a product.

There used to be an app called ScreenHero, which did. this, and it was really great. For some reason Slack bought it and killed it, but I think it validated the use case

First, as employee number one at Screenhero…thank you for the kind words :D I'm immensely proud of the tech we built there.

Second, if you liked Screenhero, you're going to love CoScreen. Instead of sharing one computer's entire desktop, CoScreen lets each participant share their own windows onto everyone else's computer, effectively creating a shared desktop. It's pretty magical.

That was not clear from the landing page at all, but if you describe it like that it sounds pretty impressive.

Yep. ScreenHero was the absolute bomb for a remote-only company like the one I worked at at the time. A sad day indeed when Slack pulled a MS/Skype on it.

I was a huge ScreenHero fan, and will never forgive Slack for killing it

After Slack acquired screenhero but before they killed it, i actually convinced my employer to get a paid slack in part because it was the only way then to get screenhero. then they killed it shortly after we did that. oops.

The original founder went on to create https://screen.so which is what we use for our team. Free since Covid too

In sincerity, can this stand on its own as a corporate line item? Likely. Therefore, why shouldn’t this business exist?

Whoa whoa whoa I am not saying the company should not exist. I was simply trying to poke at it to get some more in-depth answers!

We use TeamViewer which offers multiple user keyboard and mouse control and it is awesome. We can pair or mob and handover control instantly, we usually set a 5-7 minute timer and rotate through the team to keep everyone engaged.

If it saves me from the struggle of keeping a screen share working in Zoom I think it's worth it :) My experience is that Zoom suddenly just stops streaming the video to the other participants