Screenhero co-founder/CEO here — this is really great! It looks like we had similar feelings after leaving our acquiring companies with our products being sunset.
Since leaving Slack, I've been building Pop with a new team. The first product we launched in 2020 is essentially Screenhero 2.0 (pop.com). Since then, we've been building an expanded product: a virtual office for remote teams, which is now almost ready for launch (there's a waitlist at https://new.pop.com). We've even got Wayland support in! We have plans to open source a part of the Wayland piece, which Petal could potentially use too.
I do love this space, and wish more tools were about live collaboration — it feels so much more human and fun than single-player mode. I hope Petal becomes a growing community that thrives for the long haul!
I was lucky to work with Till+Jason on CoScreen (I came in late); they're really exceptional people and CoScreen had a great collaboration UX that still hasn't been matched by Zoom and friends. Really keen to see what they'll be able to build this time around.
Till here, another co-founder of CoScreen. Like Jason wrote, our launches on HN and the feedback by many of you in 2019 were really important all the way back to the earliest days of our small and fancy tool. We did a lot of things since we're proud of but a few plans remained unfulfilled, like support for Linux, until now.
We'd love to work with you and see what you'll build, now that Petal is out in the open for anyone to use, jam on, and make it your own.
Thank you for this, I am a big fan of pair programming, and even jetbrains is getting rid of their code-with-me service! It’s so Frustrating to see a useful feature/tool get abandoned due to low usage. But those of us who use pair programming absolutely love it :)
It’s a tool that helps further human connection, imo. And we could all use a little more of that atm.
It's crazy because we dogfood Petal daily, and did so with CoScreen while it was alive... and we absolutely cannot live without it.
I'm in Utah, and Till is in CA, so it's vital to our daily work.
Truly I don't understand how people do remote work or collaboration these days... maybe they don't? Or maybe Zoom/Meet are good enough (I really truly think they aren't, it's an abusive horrible experience every time I am forced to use Zoom or Meet for anything).
There just seems to be something sticky about them, but the people who try a CoScreen, Tuple, Pop, or other tool designed around collaboration I think become converted permanently, but getting people into that funnel is very very hard.
This is just what we need in our small startup. It solves problems we have when working remotely and joint debugging along with walking our customers through tricky issues. Can't wait to give it a spin
The self-hosting guide currently calls for running the token backend as well as LiveKit, then rebuilding the desktop app with the backend URL baked in. Is there a way to switch the released app to a self-hosted backend without rebuilding?
Will give it a try! How is LiveKit working for you in terms of achieving low input2video latency? Did it lend itself to getting tuned for this application?
One of our engineers is working on a very low latency video/audio mode for gaming. The truth is Petal isn't yet as tuned as say CoScreen was for low latency.
It's on our product roadmap to have a mode to support this though.
Some of our engineers have discussed a totally p2p iroh based video transport and other ideas.
LiveKit was the fastest/easiest way to get it to market, and it was something Till and I volunteered to pay for at the moment so we have an off-the-shelf cloud offering that is free and usable.
We can work on it. Obviously it's Till and I working on the copy, and unashamedly we are using Claude to help expedite it so we can focus on the fun stuff... but yes, I absolutely hate this crap too.
It's understandable, I don't think most of us like getting to the actual documentation of our project and would rather keep coding and/or prompting.
I think this is a message more for everyone that feels this way than just you but...
I'd suggest having a model go through it using pstack's unslop skill and see if you like that copy better.
But in all honesty we should be proofreading readmes before sending instructions out to millions of people. I've tried setting up a few that just didn't work when following instructions because of incorrect info or just completely leaving necessary steps/info out... Usually totally useless info in its place.
There's a conundrum there where we're so excited to show off our project that we present it in this streamlined way that makes people unable (or unwilling) to even digest what it's for and how to properly set it up.
Fingers crossed this time. Leave an issue on the repo if you have any specific wishes/distros to support or also want to contribute. Most of Petal is OS agnostic so it would be at least easier than ever to make it happen
Hell yes, thankyou for this! Our team literally been moaning for weeks every time we use Tuple (and Pop! and huddles, and every other tool we tried) that it wasn’t co-screen!
Screenhero co-founder/CEO here — this is really great! It looks like we had similar feelings after leaving our acquiring companies with our products being sunset.
Since leaving Slack, I've been building Pop with a new team. The first product we launched in 2020 is essentially Screenhero 2.0 (pop.com). Since then, we've been building an expanded product: a virtual office for remote teams, which is now almost ready for launch (there's a waitlist at https://new.pop.com). We've even got Wayland support in! We have plans to open source a part of the Wayland piece, which Petal could potentially use too.
I do love this space, and wish more tools were about live collaboration — it feels so much more human and fun than single-player mode. I hope Petal becomes a growing community that thrives for the long haul!
How does the virtual office compare with something like Gather (https://www.gather.town/) ?
Amazing to see you here.
Folks looking for Linux support, check out J's work!
Omg I thought Pop was dead. We used it for literally years. Even emailed support multiple times asking if dead. Wtf???
Trying to view https://www.coscreen.co/ and seeing:
"www.coscreen.co uses an unsupported protocol"
SSL Labs report: Assessment failed: Failed to communicate with the secure server https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.coscreen....
Yeah, Datadog sunset CoScreen in July.
You can view it here for nostalgia reasons: https://web.archive.org/web/20260828162646/https://coscreen....
Very very happy to see this!
I was lucky to work with Till+Jason on CoScreen (I came in late); they're really exceptional people and CoScreen had a great collaboration UX that still hasn't been matched by Zoom and friends. Really keen to see what they'll be able to build this time around.
Till here, another co-founder of CoScreen. Like Jason wrote, our launches on HN and the feedback by many of you in 2019 were really important all the way back to the earliest days of our small and fancy tool. We did a lot of things since we're proud of but a few plans remained unfulfilled, like support for Linux, until now.
We'd love to work with you and see what you'll build, now that Petal is out in the open for anyone to use, jam on, and make it your own.
Thank you for this, I am a big fan of pair programming, and even jetbrains is getting rid of their code-with-me service! It’s so Frustrating to see a useful feature/tool get abandoned due to low usage. But those of us who use pair programming absolutely love it :)
It’s a tool that helps further human connection, imo. And we could all use a little more of that atm.
It's crazy because we dogfood Petal daily, and did so with CoScreen while it was alive... and we absolutely cannot live without it.
I'm in Utah, and Till is in CA, so it's vital to our daily work.
Truly I don't understand how people do remote work or collaboration these days... maybe they don't? Or maybe Zoom/Meet are good enough (I really truly think they aren't, it's an abusive horrible experience every time I am forced to use Zoom or Meet for anything).
There just seems to be something sticky about them, but the people who try a CoScreen, Tuple, Pop, or other tool designed around collaboration I think become converted permanently, but getting people into that funnel is very very hard.
This is just what we need in our small startup. It solves problems we have when working remotely and joint debugging along with walking our customers through tricky issues. Can't wait to give it a spin
Please do and leave your feedback on the repo or submit through the app. Any contributions are appreciated
The self-hosting guide currently calls for running the token backend as well as LiveKit, then rebuilding the desktop app with the backend URL baked in. Is there a way to switch the released app to a self-hosted backend without rebuilding?
Reminds me of Tuple (https://tuple.app/), which was also billed as a Screenhero replacement
True, another great app in the space
<3
Thanks for making this. We used co-screen so much that when you shut down, we had to build our own.
Haha. I think I know who this is, and I won't out you, and thank you so much for your support over the years!
Maybe you can contribute some of your private innovations upstream to Petal ;)
Just want to say thank you!! Screenhero was invaluable. Pop is pretty good, but open source is a game changer!
Will give it a try! How is LiveKit working for you in terms of achieving low input2video latency? Did it lend itself to getting tuned for this application?
One of our engineers is working on a very low latency video/audio mode for gaming. The truth is Petal isn't yet as tuned as say CoScreen was for low latency.
It's on our product roadmap to have a mode to support this though.
Some of our engineers have discussed a totally p2p iroh based video transport and other ideas.
LiveKit was the fastest/easiest way to get it to market, and it was something Till and I volunteered to pay for at the moment so we have an off-the-shelf cloud offering that is free and usable.
From that perspective it has worked great.
I really wonder if it’s just me, but I have a deeply visceral reaction to AI copywriting that is largely irrational I’m willing to admit.
> The media server — traffic stays yours
The product looks cool! It’s just… reading that sentence makes me __immediately__ lose all interest.
Lol. Yes, all of the Mic-drop crap.
We can work on it. Obviously it's Till and I working on the copy, and unashamedly we are using Claude to help expedite it so we can focus on the fun stuff... but yes, I absolutely hate this crap too.
It's understandable, I don't think most of us like getting to the actual documentation of our project and would rather keep coding and/or prompting.
I think this is a message more for everyone that feels this way than just you but...
I'd suggest having a model go through it using pstack's unslop skill and see if you like that copy better.
But in all honesty we should be proofreading readmes before sending instructions out to millions of people. I've tried setting up a few that just didn't work when following instructions because of incorrect info or just completely leaving necessary steps/info out... Usually totally useless info in its place.
There's a conundrum there where we're so excited to show off our project that we present it in this streamlined way that makes people unable (or unwilling) to even digest what it's for and how to properly set it up.
You know what they say about first impressions.
https://github.com/cursor/plugins/blob/main/pstack%2Fskills%...
https://github.com/michael-denyer/pstack-claude
Thanks for the honesty! I don't blame you, it's hard to write good copy.
Cheers and good luck!
Thank you for your work, looking forward to the Linux version!
Fingers crossed this time. Leave an issue on the repo if you have any specific wishes/distros to support or also want to contribute. Most of Petal is OS agnostic so it would be at least easier than ever to make it happen
i loved screen hero but this is probably 10 years too late
Better late than never!
Given CoScreen's very recent demise, we felt this space deserved some love still.
Hopefully you try it out some time, and provide feedback.
Hell yes, thankyou for this! Our team literally been moaning for weeks every time we use Tuple (and Pop! and huddles, and every other tool we tried) that it wasn’t co-screen!
Hi! I'm one of the co-founders of Tuple. What was making you all moan? :)
Ha, sorry! The fact we can't share individual windows. Co-screen was perfect for us.
No worries! Thanks for clarifying :)