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Comment by davideous | Hacker News Reader

Stand-alone ScreenHero sharing is smooth as butter -- truly amazing. Controlling a remote computer feels local.

Right now I'm using the slack-integrated "ScreenHero", and it's really laggy. This is super disappointing, and painful to use. It's actually making the mouse pointer of the person sharing lag for them.

Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.

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> Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.

Given the shitty performance of the Slack desktop client (which basically only does IRC with gifs and emoji), I'm not too confident in their ability to improve the performance of, well, anything.

1gb of ram for an IRC client.... I don't know... :|

That's what happens when you bundle an entire web browser

Someone has to eat all your ram and wreck battery life tho!

Try out eul:

https://eul.im

It's a native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Slack, Facebook, etc. It's only 4 MB, it has minimal CPU usage, and it can handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag.

Probably should disclose that you make it: https://github.com/eul-im

Also, given that it's not open source, I can't trust it with my private Slack teams. I would seriously consider making the source open. You can still charge for it (and I'd love to pay for it!), but I need assurance that it's not doing anything untoward. Perhaps a Patreon level that includes source code access?

Having the source but not building it yourself doesn't rule out that the compiled app actually has different source than the code you got. So having the source but having it rely on some complex or irreproducible build system is not enough for open source here.

Why does it need to "download embedded browser" as part of setup?

Its disingenuous to claim its 4MB when the first thing it does when you run it is download 500MB of data in order to function.

It needs a browser (~50 MB, not 500) to do authentication once, then it works without it.

I'm not happy about it, but there's no other way.

It's still a native app, you don't have to always have a web browser running any more.

It downloaded 500MB here.

If there is no other way then perhaps you should stop claiming it only takes up 4MB.

That's like claiming that World of Warcraft is only 4MB because that's how big the launcher is. It also creates folders in the wrong place[0] (1 directory above %APPDATA%).

[0]https://i.imgur.com/FTZhjuX.png

Good catch, thanks! Will be fixed in the next release. I'm not good with Windows stuff.

I don't agree with your WOW example. The browser is downloaded only for authentication, it's not used after that. The actual app is indeed 4 MB, and it has minimal CPU/RAM usage, unlike web browsers and WOW :)

Yes, downloading 50 MB for authentication sucks, but you still get a light native app.

Except they actually have IRC and XMPP gateways available if you're RAM constrained or are a console cowboy type.[0]

[0]: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

Having used the XMPP gateway I wouldn't call it a viable alternative

Why not use run an open-source IRC server then?

How would you use a poo emoji then?

Most IRC clients support UTF-8.

Screenhero.com says:

> If you currently use Screenhero, you’ll need to migrate your team to Slack before December 1st, 2017. At that point, the stand-alone Screenhero app will no longer work — but you can enjoy the same features in Slack.

Sounds like they already have their plans set in stone.

If anyone from Slack is reading, I'm respectfully asking that they change the sunset date or invest the engineering effort to fix the performance regression before the sunset date.

Perhaps management didn't know how much of a downgrade this was.

Late last year and early this year we used Screenhero daily. It was free, so I didn't expect too much, but my team had various connection issues daily on various OSs and locations. I stopped using it despite it being smooth as butter when it worked (which was 80%+ of the time).

Hopefully Slack's acquisition helps/helped them with those apparent scaling issues.

I tried so hard to make screenhero work for me in 2015. It's smooth when it works, which is sometimes and for an hour at a time. Basic things like keypress replication were so buggy that I consider them unfinished - keyboard events would just be dropped on the wire and be careful not to type too fast or yur cde wll ome out ike thi!

I'm sure it's all fixed now as the Slack experience itself is robust.

Why has "smooth as butter" become such an overly used phrase in the tech world? Listening to the last Apple product release I must have heard the word butter a few dozen times.

I don't know about anyone else but this phrase is really starting to annoy me. It's overly used, and the word "butter" in my mind is closer to "greasy", like "don't touch it with your finger because it'll get slimy and you'll have to wash your hands". Can't you just say "smooth" or "without any perceptible lag"?

EDIT: Seriously, this doesn't bug anyone else?

butter is known to generally render at >=60fps

"Smooth as butter", "smoother than butter", "butter smooth", et al is a common western phrase. It's as old or older than the King James Bible itself (Psalms 55:21 if you're curious). It's a quintessential English idiom.

Thank you, that's fascinating!

Psalm 55:21 King James Version (KJV)

21. The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.

While this is true idomatically,

there was also a 'Project Butter' designed to make Android 'Buttery Smooth' a few years back - I think the high level of application of this idiom to video rendering specifically took hold at that point..

Well, the username of the complainant is "Osiris", so the phrase might still be new for him.

the top two comments use that term, odd.

Obvious shills of Big Butter.

If it makes you feel any better, silk is still the preferred standard for smoothness, and even baby bottoms are slightly more smooth than butter:

https://trends.google.la/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=s...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=smooth+as+butt...

Sorry for the downvotes, it bothers me too

"smooth as a Quantum stabilized atom mirror" just doesn't have the same ring to it...

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