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Comment by marinosbern | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN! I’m Marinos, I made this. Here’s a medium post I just wrote going into more detail on the motivation & design decisions behind Witness: https://medium.com/@marinosbern/witness-livestreaming-for-em.... Let me know if you have any feedback/questions about Witness or live streaming or anything else. One question I get a lot is whether I am planning to open source this. I am, and I’m also extracting all the live streaming logic into a drop-in iOS library. Cheers!

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After you're done polishing/publicizing your app, you should write a blog post describing the transition from developing trading algorithms to developing public service/safety apps :)

:) I was lucky enough to work for a great company [1] that was very techy so in terms of the culture it wasn't much of a transition. The hardest part (which I am still working on) is developing for anyone out there instead of internal use. I rarely had to think about UI/UX/User Behavior previously.

[1] http://www.sig.com/

I am curious, did you do a search for the term and other name collisions before you started your project?

From http://witness.org/ : "WITNESS trains and supports activists and citizens around the world to use video safely, ethically, and effectively to expose human rights abuse and fight for human rights change."

They are also on github: https://github.com/witness

Unfortunately not - I picked the name at 4am at the Disrupt hackathon and, at that point, name collisions were the least of my worries. In fact, there's a ton of apps in the App Store with Witness in them. After it won the hackathon the name stuck and it was impossible to change

Reminds me a bit of this: http://www.sosbeacon.org/ - I worked on an early version of it many years ago. Doesn't look like he's done much with it lately, though.

It's a good idea, so good luck!

This looks really nice - are you planning to support other OS, like Android, WP or Blackberry?

Blackberry? Seriously?

What? The Android apps are fairly easily ported.

Yes, I'm already working on an Android version and an Apple Watch version. I'm really excited about the new Apple watch which is rumored to have a camera because it seems like the perfect medium for Witness to run on

Awesome to see companies open source their tools.

I'm just one guy, not really a company:) But definitely agree with you, and, in fact, Witness itself is made possible thanks, in part, to a bunch of open source projects

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