Show HN: Frop.io, instant remote presentations. In your Browser

by derwildemomo • 9 years ago

57 16 9 years ago

Hi HN!

https://frop.io is a simple application that allows you to present content (PDF presentations, Images, Text, YouTube videos) on a remote screen without installing any software. It's completely based on web standards (Websockets, JS) and runs in most modern browsers.

Simply start a session by calling frop.io/[yoursessionname]

I posted this two weeks ago. Since then I've completely overhauled the design and built a native tvOS and Fire TV viewer app (both free and publicly available).

Once again, looking forward to your comments, suggestions and criticism.

Thanks!

moondev• 9 years ago

Looks cool. Would be nice to be able to drag a pptx or google slides link which would unpack the images or slides automatically. Then you could use arrow keys to easily advance the stream. May be outside the scope for simplicity though

derwildemomo8• 9 years ago

Ha, I'd actually love that. Google Slides should be in the realm of possible things, PPTX could get more complicated.

What I suggest you try is to upload a PDF. I've built a moderator mode on the presenting screen, there you can do exactly what you want (just not with a PPT but with a PDF-Presentation).

The reason is that PDF can be rendered very consistently across platforms, this is more problematic with Powerpoint and friends.

nojvek• 9 years ago

This is great. Does it do any screensharing?

derwildemomo8• 9 years ago

Not really, I think there are better and more mature tools for doing that (like appear.in or Skype) out there. frop.io is quite special in that it does not do screensharing at all, but just transmits the content, being super bandwidth-conserving.

david90• 9 years ago

Great work! Supporting multi-page PDF is a good feature there.

derwildemomo8• 9 years ago

Thank you!

CDillinger• 9 years ago

I love this concept, and it's great to see the current support for dragging and dropping images and PDFs.

I was checking out the functionality and tried dropping a couple different formats into the host screen (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, .txt files), and the host screen would either do nothing or get stuck on the validating screen. I'm guessing this is because these aren't currently supported types. If this is the case, I'd suggest notifying the host that the file type is not supported.

derwildemomo8• 9 years ago

Hi, thank you for your feedback!

You are right, the current feedback mechanics need some love. I'm working on that ;)

Supporting Word, Excel, PPT is also an item on the list, but since we rely on client-only processing, displaying documents consistently across platforms and browsers needs some time and work. But: On it!

detritus• 9 years ago

Does this only allow for one viewer per presentation?

I can imagine a lot of use-case scenarios with multiple viewers enabled, if at all possible?

Nice work though, I can see some uses for this already!

derwildemomo8• 9 years ago

At the moment it's one viewer per presentation, though that limit is quite arbitrary and could be changed in the future.

I thought or considered this to be a nice-to-have but not mandatory feature, but more people keep asking for that. Always good to have some external feedback – thank you!

kpsychwave2• 9 years ago

Excellent.I was working on a similar personal project. I had these functionalities in mind:

- Gradient / Color full screen mode - Keep remote screen awake - Screenshot preview of remote screens (html5 canvas)

+ Visualizations

It is nice to have a TV/monitor on to use as a light, clock... without having to deal with Chromecast

derwildemomo8• 9 years ago

I like the gradient/Color-Mode Idea very much. Going to integrate that (with attribution if you don't mind).

Do you have any example regarding the Visualizations? I'm keen to learn more about that and to see if it fits in well.

kpsychwave2• 9 years ago

Looking forward to seeing it. :)

I don't have examples. I am thinking loop videos, GIFs, or CSS3 animations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27XvZReW_cs http://likethemammal.github.io/css-visualizer/

avi02• 9 years ago

I tried it and it looks good to me, my only concern was how will be the session name collision is handled?

derwildemomo8• 9 years ago

Sessions are ephemeral – once you close the tab or browser window, the session is gone (and the viewer will go back to the 'waiting for content' screen). This is by design – frop is meant for realtime collaboration or presentations, so having something stick around forever is not really the use case (in my head).

Show HN: Frop.io, instant remote presentations. In your Browser

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