michael_forrest

Yeah but I’m a developer, musician and a videographer so I’ve got a hold-all full of cables, a pelican case full of cables, a trunk in the garage full of cables, drawers full of cables and my office/studio is full of fucking cables all over the place.

This was the toughest thing I’ve ever attempted but it was well worth it.

I'm a solo developer so it's all too easy to get distracted. These are always exciting projects to me so I thought I could start sharing them.

This! I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a chance to spin up a greenfield project, prototype or proof of concept in my 30 year career. Those were always stolen moments, and the bottleneck was never really coding ability. Most professional software development is wading through janky codebases of others' (or your own) creation, trying to iron out weird little glitches of the kind that LLMs can now generate on an industrial scale (and are incapable of fixing).

I've been working on this framework for a few weeks now, because I want a way to use a SwiftUI-style declarative syntax to render realtime video.

Here's the next video documenting my progress creating a SwiftUI-style declarative video rendering engine. This video shows how I'm anchoring the features to the needs of my project to avoid getting carried away with silly features...

This is a fast tour through the implementation of a fadeIn(duration:) modifier in the SwiftUI-style video rendering framework I’ve been working on.

1. How modifiers are implemented 2. How image processing works 3. How the realtime audio works

Still feeling my way through, and I didn’t even touch on how much time it took to get everting into Swift packages before I could even start with the audio. But yeah this was a couple of days’ work last week and feels like huge progress.

I lasted about 18 months at Canonical (thankfully I didn’t have to deal with this interview process) and I can say that this description of an interaction with Shuttleworth rings true. The poster really did dodge a bullet by not getting hired. Enough time has passed that this now gives me amusement instead of making me feel outright angry. Shuttleworth is an autocratic micromanager who sprinkles arbitrary mandates into every aspect of the business, which accumulate to make it impossible to deliver anything effectively. The promise of the project was huge (this was over 10 years ago) and he hired many brilliant people but then largely ignored their expertise in favour of his own whims. You may notice that the things Ubuntu does well are mostly things that he didn’t find interesting enough to interfere with.

Yes this is a marketing video for my apps.

One of the hardest things about being a solo developer is quality control.

If you're the only developer in the team, and you don't have any testers, how do you make sure you don't break things?

I've been in a lot of startups that got this wrong. Now I'm on my own and I've had to find a way to cut through all the noise and create a sustainable process to keep my software stable while continuing to innovate with creativity and vigour.

I needed to find the perfect balance of automation and flexibility.

The over-engineering

This is an absolute masterclass in remote presentation. Cindy does incredible work.

Always room to iterate. I changed it from one with an obvious free tier last week to solve a different problem!

The only difference between the paid version and the free download is that you can only create three cards per document.

I have made the comparison table link a bit more prominent on the pricing page so hopefully it's less ambiguous now.

Thanks for pointing this out. I did it in a hurry and thought I'd made it only load third party js if you clicked Accept.

But I think it's correct now?

That said, I'm still too scared to look at the damn hotjar data so I don't even know why I'm using it .

lol

I refer you my earlier comment about how this model unlocks value that would be much more difficult without a subscription model. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346050

But I would also dispute this as "rentseeking". Am I taking something from the commons and putting a paywall around it, or am I working hard as a producer of value, and trying to find a way to be rewarded for my labour? To me it feels like the latter. I'm not sitting back on the spoils of capital, I'm working for a living.

Well, to a point. I wouldn't have been able to attempt this without a certain amount of privilege - for instance not being rent-burdened for the last few years due to my partner owning her own home - but I'm not exploiting workers or anything here.

I wish I didn't have to spend so much time thinking about how to make money from my work. But that's Capitalism for you. But if it makes any difference, I described how I wanted to run my company (if it ever starts making enough money to support a team) by paying everyone the same here: https://goodtohear.co.uk/changes/modal/social_enterprise (direct link to a modal which usually sits on the product page).

Yep. I've learned the hard way that it's a bad idea to try targeting a mass market audience as a solo founder.

I think I've made this clearer on the website now but you know you can download the whole thing without even creating an account on the website. The only limitation is the number of cards you can create, but it's more than enough to figure out if it's a workflow you like.

I have a YouTube video from a couple of years ago where I show how to do this sort of thing in OBS. So yeah, it's possible!

Yes. This is how I do all my educational content and there is a Record feature for just this purpose. I prefer to record another take than to spend hours editing!

Something that gives me confidence here is that in macOS Sonoma Apple have gone all-in on sharing screen content on a webcam feed. I feel this will motivate Zoom and Teams to take this into account when compressing video. But don't forget, if high fidelity is super important, you can always switch to a normal screen share. I just find that a lot of the time, this isn't the case, and it hurts the communication overall. But yeah, I do encourage nice big, short, bold bullets in an attempt to minimise this risk.

I just updated the pricing last week and missed this button. I've fixed it now, sorry about that!

As someone who speaks to a lot of Ecamm Live users, I beg to differ. They're paying >$300/year for a tool that is basically a less-convoluted version of OBS (and Mac only).

The drawing feature is possible using other apps but it's always a bit of a compromise and awkward to set up.

I help people to do this every day and I know lots of them would prefer something easier!

> It would be great if you also had more of a non-linear mode for content that is less structured I have a "Dashboard" that sits in your Status Bar for quick access to sharing and camera switching which might be enough.

> Maybe it would look more like a sound effect board/stream deck/TV Mixer where there is a matrix of buttons to playback videos, add titles, show images, play sound effects, etc. I think you're talking about a Stream Deck! CueCam gives you the other part of the Stream Deck puzzle when you do have structure, but lots of its features can be accessed with the Stream Deck plugin.

It's already possible to deep link to specific cards so you could set that up if you didn't feel like scrolling. But I'm usually fine to scroll (it's a pretty low friction interaction!) and it's less fiddling-about up front.

I have chroma key support already.

Other things may appear over time. If I find myself wanting to do some data-driven motion graphics you can bet that feature will appear within a week

Hello! Been a long time since I was at Canonical!

CueCam has a "Teleprompter Window" that you could adapt to this purpose. You can "Include Camera Feed in Teleprompter Window" and then whatever you're sharing will come through. Although it does have window chrome so maybe not ideal. Another option is to fire up a QuickTime window and use "New Movie Recording" and use that as your sharing source window.

You definitely want "Original Sound for Musicians" switched on in Zoom if you're doing any audio sharing with CueCam.

I was thinking about your comment when I responded to [this one above](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346050)

This reasoning obscures the huge overhead of creating a distinct "version 2" next year. I can do a much better job on the software if I don't have to spend 70% of my time marketing the next version or sectioning off this or that feature for commercial reasons.

But I take your point, I don't love subscription software either, but most of my current users are pretty comfortable with these so it's good for now while I'm working alone. And my hosting / API access fees are not _zero_ so there is a vague justification there too.

> I want my presentation software to have a set of features and then never change until I make a very deliberate act of upgrading to a new version while still having the old one around in case I get stuck.

Note that I'm not using the App Store for distribution, I'm using Sparkle, which means that it never updates without you allowing it to.

Also , if it's a dealbreaker for a lot of people, it would be trivial for me to make older versions available for download! (I keep them all, and this has come in very useful on some recent support calls).

I've been thinking about this and while it's true that I have been trying to find a viable subscription model for my business over the last couple of years, that's not really important for you.

But it does benefit you in a very real way.

I work alone. I'm very good at spinning up features in a few hours. With a subscription model I can release these changes continuously, so you get new features and improvements on a weekly or monthly basis.

If I had to come up with a release schedule I'd have to make a lot of decisions about cordoning off different features, coming up with names, marketing materials, deciding what goes where. This is a huge mental and technical overhead. I'd be juggling git branches across multiple pieces of software, the website, and beyond. I'd be incentivised to put more and more things behind the next paywall and I'd be getting less and less real work done.

I don't have the marketing clout of Apple or Microsoft. They can take a different approach. I've tried a few and now I'm trying this!

One more thing, I do plan on adding some more cloud-based features as time goes on. I'm already managing a Chat GPT integration, and in future I'm picturing an online content library and search to let teams quickly access decks and slides for demos. But that's future stuff, so not relevant to your question just now.

Short answer: it lets me, as a solo developer, give you more cool stuff.

> A screenshare takes over the layout This is exactly what I'm trying to avoid :-)

When a screen share takes over, a conversation turns into a broadcast, which isn't always what you want.

There will always be scenarios where the improved resolution of a screen sharing codec will be necessary (and nothing is stopping you!), but I find a lot of the time there's a big white screen with a bit of branding and one bullet point on screen, and I can't see the face of the person who is talking.

I was on a group call recently where the speaker presented in this way for half an hour as a tiny thumbnail and I found it quite painful, thinking "I've been listening to this person for ages but I wouldn't recognise them in real life".

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later I had an awkward conversation where this exact person kinda recognised me but I didn't recognise her, so I felt pretty vindicated .

If we avoid the overhead of screen shares, the conversation flows a lot better, and everybody can be seen without the host having to turn anything off. And don't forget, if somebody's on a phone screen then they can't see all the detail anyway. This is why I prefer zooming in on important content than sharing my whole screen (I zoom in on my desktop using a pinch gesture in Video Pencil on my iPad and it feels magical).