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Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

This looks like an amazing idea executed brilliantly–reminds me of Dropbox in that way.

But I've been thinking about it for the last five minutes and I cannot figure out how you guys actually managed to implement this. What sorcery is at the root of this? How do you composite windows from two different machines into a single desktop on macOS?

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I assume it's not a real desktop, but a full-screen window of their app. And I guess it basically works via two-way machine control. Each person's computer is actually driving their own windows, but the software allows everyone to control everyone's (shared) windows, just like one-sided remote-control apps. It's a pretty clever idea!

Thanks both - here's how it works: 1. CoScreen captures each of your window to be shared individually. 2. It sends them across in a combined video feed per user with window positions & sizes. 3. On the receiving end, it creates actual native windows which are filled with the video streams of the corresponding windows. That way they look and feel like actual local windows. E.g. you can move & resize them like any other native windows. 4. Whenever you click or type into a remote window, the input is send across to the origin of the window and applied there.

This is so good!

How does it work with selecting text and copy-pasting? In the Sublime Text example, can Bob overwrite Alice's clipboard.

We're still figuring this out and will probably get inspired from remote desktop solutions. But reach out to us if you have specific ideas

If everyone could have separate clipboards, but still copy from and paste into each other's windows, that would be ideal.

Also: this would be a major feature request from me. The ability for me to paste code into someone's else text editor (or copy out an error message) when I'm helping them would be a major productivity boost.

We hear you and will prioritize this. Some remote desktop and virtual desktop solutions enable you to choose local or remote clipboards through a slight tweak of the traditional/locally applied shortcuts (e.g. Command + V), we'll check this out as well.

My hunch is it uses the MacOS accessibility APIs.

Bingo ;)

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