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by tommyderami 2132 days ago
I appreciated the copy of the landing page--my literal first question after 'what is this?' was why would I use this when slack video and live share has been fine...it's still a tough value proposition but I'll certainly give it a spin and really would love to see a dev-built company like yours suceed!
2 comments

> was why would I use this when slack video and live share has been fine

To be able to share your code with people not using VSC. We are also optimizing a lot the video quality and we are going to add more integrations soon to the video chat. As we are focused only on developers we can do a lot of things that Slack video can't.

We were trying to do Clojure pair programming in IntelliJ+Cursive and vim-iced over Tuple.app/Screen.so/Zoom/macOS-VNC-over-ZeroTier during the past few weeks.

Here are a few conclusions:

Having multiple, independent mouse cursors in one screen is and extremely useful feature.

Consistent low-latency is much more important than temporary low-quality video.

To conserve bandwidth, we hardly ever use the video-call capabilities; low-latency, crisp and wide-frequency-band audio is more than enough.

The screen sharing codec should be optimized for text, with sharp edges. I don't want to see glow or other jpeg artifacts around my letters...

Any of the mentioned programs can provide audio and video call capabilities; that's not a differentiating factor. I wouldn't mind using a separate program for just that, since it's a negligible initial inconvenience, when we are having pairing sessions for hours on end.

Instead of wasting your money on re-implementing such features in your own software, just blog about what existing solution would recommend for audio/video/chat. It's MUCH CHEAPER, than giving in to the NIH syndrome...

I would rather like to see you focus on more important aspects of developer collaboration, for example terminal and "network" sharing. After all we are writing that code not so we can talk about it, but to run it! For example, since we are programming in Clojure, we must see the same REPL window(s) too, not just the source code. We are constantly running the code we just wrote (and its tests) in those REPLs. Currently, the least painful way to do this is sharing the whole screen :(

I haven't given up on other solutions, like Emacs in tmux or in a headless xvnc server with small resolution, 8bit colors only and tiny fonts. Viewers would just magnify it to full-screen. Characters would look pixelated, but still sharp, if the magnification factor is integer. It's a pity that open-source vnc solutions are a lot slower and macOS' built-in one and they don't support server-side resizing to the viewer's window size and things like that...

The video is a bit annoying, as it keeps switching between Chrome & VS Code. It would be easier to watch if the windows were side by side.