Hacker News Reader

Comment by itslennysfault | Hacker News Reader

Looks cool, but how is this better / different from just doing this on Zoom? I'm already using zoom daily for meetings and occasionally use screen sharing and once in a while use their "request screen control" feature, and it works great. No complaints, and no new tool needed in addition to my regular video meeting tool.

Not at all hating on this tool. It really looks nice, but I'm just trying to understand if there is a reason to use it instead of / in addition to zoom.

View on HN

Thanks for the feedback. We have a few Zoom-converts and here's what they've told us they like about CoScreen: 1. Every user has their own mouse pointer instead of sharing the same. 2. You can share bi-directionally, so not just one at a time. 3. More importantly, if I share two or three windows with you, they appear as three separate native windows for you and you can resize and position them as you like without interfering with me instead of being stuck in a black box.

> and you can resize and position them as you like without interfering with me

Does this resize the window only locally, like scaling a video? If somebody shared a browser window with me demonstrating a responsive web site, could I drag the bottom right corner of the window around to see how the site reflows?

Yes, you're pretty much scaling the video while retaining its aspect ratio. We're doing that so users can't interfere with each other's setup (it was different early on and annoying).

Pairing programming.

If pairing is a huge part of your culture at work, the higher resolution screen sharing makes all the difference as you don’t have to squint or strain your eyes while reading code.

Max from CoScreen here. Yes, we've heard this from many users as well. Generally speaking our approach to this is: 1. Deal with capturing and rendering of this in the native layer to achieve high performance and throughput. 2. Use something we call "DPI-match" to open shared windows at the right size on the receiving end to avoid unnecessary text blurring from pixel count mismatch. 3. Give the screen sharing stream high priority.

I think perhaps this is a little more developer and creatives focussed as opposed to business meeting focussed al la zoom and I suspect and it’s inferred from what they’ve focussed on (optimization, multi screen, 60fps) that this will be more performant than zoom. That said I am yet to try it but zoom is pretty much down there at the bottom of screen sharing tools I would want to use daily… There wasn’t much mentioned about security but again it’s probably more secure than zoom

Reply on news.ycombinator.com