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!
Folks looking for Linux support, check out J's work!
dddw 16 hours ago [-]
Nice! Will pop it up.
Great name!
swhitf 22 hours ago [-]
Omg I thought Pop was dead. We used it for literally years. Even emailed support multiple times asking if dead. Wtf???
coscreen 1 days ago [-]
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.
ripley12 22 hours ago [-]
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.
lochnessduck 1 days ago [-]
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.
thedracle 1 days ago [-]
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.
joshuat 1 days ago [-]
Reminds me of Tuple (https://tuple.app/), which was also billed as a Screenhero replacement
coscreen 23 hours ago [-]
True, another great app in the space
r00k 22 hours ago [-]
<3
citizenfishy 1 days ago [-]
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
coscreen 1 days ago [-]
Please do and leave your feedback on the repo or submit through the app. Any contributions are appreciated
therealbithead 1 days ago [-]
Thank you for your work, looking forward to the Linux version!
coscreen 1 days ago [-]
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
smw 23 hours ago [-]
Just want to say thank you!! Screenhero was invaluable. Pop is pretty good, but open source is a game changer!
e12e 12 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Was sad to see so many products in this area sunset (most after acquihires).
I wonder if tools built around multiplayer LLM work won't win out though?
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?
thedracle 1 days ago [-]
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.
morikyouko 17 hours ago [-]
As is common with lots of software like this, unfortunately, it looks like this product doesn't support Japanese/CJK text entry (with an IME popup and multiple input sources). This is a deal breaker for the Japanese/Chinese speaking market.
It is not impossible to support as there are other apps that do properly support Japanese text entry. I was excited for an open source product for the reasons OP noted, but I'm very disapointed that it does not support my use case.
Is there any plans for adding full international text entry support?
thedracle 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the feedback! This was one of the areas where CoScreen was strong.
We will take your feedback and see what we can do.
compounding-err 21 hours ago [-]
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?
iparaskev 15 hours ago [-]
Feel free to try Hopp[1], which supports self hosted backends without having to rebuild the client. Selfhosting takes literally less than 5 minutes.
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.
thedracle 1 days ago [-]
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.
ThePinion 23 hours ago [-]
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.
Thanks for the honesty! I don't blame you, it's hard to write good copy.
Cheers and good luck!
dvt 19 hours ago [-]
This is super cool and thanks for open sourcing. I remember seeing CoScreen & Screen Hero here on HN years ago and thinking it was absolutely the cat's pajamas. Unfortunately, I think it was one of those cases of being blinded by the tech being super cool.
Of the ~decade since I've seen these types of apps, I've never used one and, frankly, I never ever craved for "just sharing one window" or "playing in multiplayer" as @jsherwani put it. Which is kind of odd, because COVID came and went (peak remote/screen sharing days), and I had totally forgotten these kinds of products even existed. While this is (still) super neat technically, I just don't really see a concrete use case other than "lemme show you something super cool."
Has anyone actually used it? Where would this kind of tool be better than just screen sharing over Google Meet or Discord or Slack or whatever?
klauserc 17 hours ago [-]
Just being able to ping a location on screen is super helpful, otherwise: "Can you open the debug panel please. It's the bug icon in the lower left. No, three icons above that. No you just went past it."
Sharing multiple windows and allowing others to arrange them as the please is also much more productive. Otherwise: "Can we check the app. No not the live app, the local instance"
iovrthoughtthis 1 days ago [-]
i loved screen hero but this is probably 10 years too late
thedracle 1 days ago [-]
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.
heeton 1 days ago [-]
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!
r00k 24 hours ago [-]
Hi! I'm one of the co-founders of Tuple. What was making you all moan? :)
heeton 23 hours ago [-]
Ha, sorry! The fact we can't share individual windows. Co-screen was perfect for us.
r00k 22 hours ago [-]
No worries! Thanks for clarifying :)
1 days ago [-]
masonroy12 12 hours ago [-]
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smichloe01 13 hours ago [-]
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DylanMerigaud 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ls-a 1 days ago [-]
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Rendered at 22:28:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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!
Folks looking for Linux support, check out J's work!
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.
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.
It’s a tool that helps further human connection, imo. And we could all use a little more of that atm.
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.
I wonder if tools built around multiplayer LLM work won't win out though?
Any thoughts on how this compares to https://delta.dev/ ?
Maybe you can contribute some of your private innovations upstream to Petal ;)
"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....
You can view it here for nostalgia reasons: https://web.archive.org/web/20260828162646/https://coscreen....
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.
It is not impossible to support as there are other apps that do properly support Japanese text entry. I was excited for an open source product for the reasons OP noted, but I'm very disapointed that it does not support my use case.
Is there any plans for adding full international text entry support?
We will take your feedback and see what we can do.
[1] https://github.com/gethopp/hopp
(disclaimer I am one of the maintainers)
> The media server — traffic stays yours
The product looks cool! It’s just… reading that sentence makes me __immediately__ lose all interest.
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.
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
Cheers and good luck!
Of the ~decade since I've seen these types of apps, I've never used one and, frankly, I never ever craved for "just sharing one window" or "playing in multiplayer" as @jsherwani put it. Which is kind of odd, because COVID came and went (peak remote/screen sharing days), and I had totally forgotten these kinds of products even existed. While this is (still) super neat technically, I just don't really see a concrete use case other than "lemme show you something super cool."
Has anyone actually used it? Where would this kind of tool be better than just screen sharing over Google Meet or Discord or Slack or whatever?
Sharing multiple windows and allowing others to arrange them as the please is also much more productive. Otherwise: "Can we check the app. No not the live app, the local instance"
Given CoScreen's very recent demise, we felt this space deserved some love still.
Hopefully you try it out some time, and provide feedback.