HN user
I like it! I happily note that you mention that the client works fully offline. But is there or have you considered a self-hosted option that can be run completely on-premise and without cloud access?
Being cloud-based makes this an immediate non-starter for many use cases (and I specifically don't mean large enterprises but especially SMB, NGO, and homelab use).
Unfortunately, it doesn't let you filter by aspect ratio, so you cannot get e.g. all 16:10 monitors which is something I'm always actively searching for and it's so difficult. The page also doesn't list the unique Dell U3023E and its predecessors which are 2560x1600, i.e. 16:10 monitors, and perfect for design & development both in portrait and landscape mode. If the developer of that website is on HN, I hope they can add a filter for aspect ratio and more 16:10 monitors as well.
I would really like to know what the whole tech stack was to produce this: Which camera system was used to record these images and what platform they used for building the 3D experience?
The pictures must be of insane resolution, as you can zoom in to read even the smallprint on all the posters clearly (imagine Google StreetView like this). And I didn't really notice any stitching, tripods etc.
Also they have cleverly embedded video animations in some of the rooms 360 degree images. These were clearly recorded separately but I still haven't fully figured out how they added them. Very well done and indeed probably almost as good as being there in person.
That may or may not be a correct assessment but you will have a hard time convincing anyone, moronic or non-moronic, without any real arguments and counter-examples.
I for one would have loved some more substance to your post...
Are any of those, or a similar well-polished service, available for use with your own workstation, e.g. for 3D/engineering/video editing workloads? (Basically remote desktop on steroids)
Most - if not all - the people in your first group are also in the second group! That is, I think, what they (and everyone) really needs to realize and understand:
The all-powerful CEO who wants access to detailed customer data? He will be in The Database himself (if not his own, then in the one that a rival company offers). As will his favorite son with the drug habit, and the questionable thing he did on holiday that one time... Might not even be that bad or illegal. But would he want his workers to know those things about him?
The policitian whose party is in power right now? She is in The Database, too. As is her shady half-brother, all the info about the medical procedures she had done while in college, plus her husband's business dealings. Sure, they are legal but will it sound good to her constituency if it leaks? After all, her party might not be in the majority anymore after the next election...
Whenever your unbridled greed for tracking, profiling and surveillance becomes overwhelming, please attend your closest meeting of "Data Collectors Anonymous" and memorize the mantra: IYDTS - It's your data, too, stupid!
Your own daughter will be spied on by creeps. Your mother may be discriminated against when trying to get a mortgage. Whenever you collect people's data for profit or control, you WILL hurt yourself and the ones you love.
Even if you personally are the cleanest Mr. goodie two shoes to ever live, those around you surely aren't - and don't forget, in the end it's very easy for The Database to have some entries about you that might not even be true. Mistakes happen. Good luck proving or correcting them.
If you don't do whatever you can to protect privacy and minimize data collection, every day the chance increases that your own data will be collected and used against you or the ones you love. Then you might not be in a position to stop it anymore. And you may never be happy again...
Adobe demoed a similar project as far back as 2016 called "Project Voco" [1] which was also called "too dangerous to release" at the time, even though it apparently still needed as much as 20 minutes of source material (vs. allegedly a mere 2 seconds here).
It was never heard from again afaik - even though Adobe is not known to shy away from an opportunity to increase revenue, so one cannot help but wonder...
This is awesome. Helped me find an elusive HN submission from a few weeks ago that I remembered vaguely but was unable to find with HN's own search function (algolia) even after good five minutes of searching. With your plugin, the desired post was in the top 3 results at first try. Thanks for making this.
Finally, it's about time that Embarcadero remembers again what used to make Delphi great: Its community! I recently gave Delphi 11 a try again and it is eminently usable for both cross-plattform development and for web and Windows. Built a couple of quick & beautiful apps over a weekend and it got me determined to use Delphi more and more now. It has several ChatGPT plugins available for the IDE which work quite well and speed up development especially for someone like me who is a bit rusty, not having used it for some years. The component ecosystem is amazingly still thriving, with companies like TMS and others offering tons of great (and, for academia, free) ready-to-use components for everything you need these days, from HTML components, full SIP servers, WebView2 integration, SVG support to one-click AWS and Azure integration etc. Such an immense timesaver for anyone wanting to create beautiful GUI apps, too.
I only wish Delphi had a "favorites" filter for the Object Inspector, so you could quickly access your most needed properties without scrolling (that would save so much time when naming a bunch of components, setting captions or adjusting height and width). Never understood why such an obvious and simple feature was never implemented.
The other thing Delphi should really have is a way to "package and export" (or snapshot) the whole Delphi setup, with GUI settings, installed components etc. (similar to how Adobe InDesign lets you package projects with all font files, graphics etc. included), so you can save them along with a project. I find it still a big pain to open an old project on a new machine and having to spend three hours searching and installing components in their latest versions again. Oh well, maybe one day.
Anyway, so great to be able to do Rapid Application Development once again, the latest Delphi is a win, maybe Embarcadero finally saw the light again. Fingers crossed.
Finally, it's about time that Embarcadero remembers again what used to make Delphi great: Its community! I recently gave Delphi 11 a try again and it is eminently usable for both cross-plattform development and for web and Windows.
Built a couple of quick & beautiful apps over a weekend and it got me determined to use Delphi more and more now. It has several ChatGPT plugins available for the IDE which work quite well and speed up development especially for someone like me who is a bit rusty, not having used it for some years. The component ecosystem is amazingly still thriving, with companies like TMS and others offering tons of great (and, for academia, free) ready-to-use components for everything you need these days, from HTML components, full SIP servers, WebView2 integration, SVG support to one-click AWS and Azure integration etc. Such an immense timesaver for anyone wanting to create beautiful GUI apps, too.
I only wish Delphi had a "favorites" filter for the Object Inspector, so you could quickly access your most needed properties without scrolling (that would save so much time when naming a bunch of components, setting captions or adjusting height and width). Never understood why such an obvious and simple feature was never implemented.
The other thing Delphi should really have is a way to "package and export" (or snapshot) the whole Delphi setup, with GUI settings, installed components etc. (similar to how Adobe InDesign lets you package projects with all font files, graphics etc. included), so you can save them along with a project. I find it still a big pain to open an old project on a new machine and having to spend three hours searching and installing components in their latest versions again. Oh well, maybe one day.
Anyway, so great to be able to do Rapid Application Development once again, the latest Delphi is a win, maybe Embarcadero finally saw the light again. Fingers crossed.
"Excited" is one way of putting it. If we had any chance of this working or ending well, we wouldn't get daily or weekly posts here on HN of people having their Stripe/AWS/PayPal/Google accounts banned. Look forward to "Your company has been locked, please contact your auditor AI to get no help whatsoever"...
Is there an open-source/self-hosted alternative or something that's friendly to extended families, small/tiny businesses etc.?
I see so many use-cases for browser isolation but haven't found a well-working option that doesn't need a full-time admin to set it up, isn't call-for-pricing or doesn't have streaming quality issues.
I did look at Browserbox some time ago and found it very promising, but alas the quality/performance (compression) was too subpar for non-tech users, even when run locally on the same machine.
Yes, that was it. I had a non-common TLD in the email domain. com/net/org are no problem but it seems that many country TLDs and generic TLDs are not working. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction but can I suggest that you tweak the email validation algo, so that it allows basically anything as TLD. Otherwise you'll always end up missing some new or more exotic TLDs.
While you're at it, please also make sure you support "plus addressing", and let people change their email in the profile settings without having to email you...
Email address validation is not easy, you'd be surprised what weird things can be in valid email addresses ;-)
I'm now going to check it out in more detail.
Thanks for sharing this - and happy birthday from me as well.
Hi Marcus! This looks extremely interesting, would have loved to try it out, but trying to sign up / create an account always shows a "Something went wrong" message...
As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k
I really wish that were the case. Alas, more and more sellers think it makes them look cool and enterprise-y if they go the "contact us" route. Possibly the most ridiculous I encountered was a browser plugin startup offering that ended up costing something like $2/month/user with a 20 user minimum but even during the demo they were all about "Fortune 500 this and national ISPs that".
As far as actual very large enterprises are concerned (pardon the pun), there might even be some truth to that: I know procurement guys who would only buy if they got the white-glove/wine-and-dine treatment and would have never bought something with a corporate credit card on a website that said "click to buy 35,000 licenses now" (you can do that with Atlassian IIRC).
Fair enough.
But for 99% of companies (i.e. SMB) it's just annoying to the extreme, especially if you have to do this more than once per year because your org is restructuring, your CTO is actually the CFO and reads marketing whitepapers and case studies to follow the latest tech fads, or you're in consulting.
I say, offer both: An SMB plan with listed pricing (segment further at your leisure) and an Enterprise option with "call us". If you don't want SMB business, be honest about it and say "enterprise only, we only do bespoke, don't call if your budget is <50k".
"Professional" subreddits, such as /r/MSP, as well as the Spiceworks community will have answers for some of those, depending on what kind of SaaS it is exactly. Ask, oftentimes (former) vendor reps or happy/unhappy customers lurk there and are happy to help you out, although their info might be outdated - but it may help for a first orientation.
(I, too, consider price-hiding the bane of my existence and wish I could get those days and months of lifetime back that I spend going through useless "demos" and "quick calls with an evangelist/key account manager/person who nopes out at the first technical question".)
Another strategy is that you prepare a long-ish text that you email to a - perferrably senior - sales contact at each company, ideally one that has been referred to you (again, the above-mentioned sources may help).
Just change the name and first line mentioning their product and outline that "due to internal restructuring" your company will decide yea or nay "on doing a PoC within the next three working days" (i.e. you don't have time to waste on demos), that you are already very familiar with their product in all details from an earlier job, in fact, you want to recommend to your CTO to buy it, and that you wish to receive nothing more than their current pricing for $detailedreqs asap. Be overspecific as to your reqs and specs, so they can't weasel out with "it depends".
You might need to go one or two rounds where they try and talk you into doing calls/demos regardless but they will often CC more senior or local reps whose contacts are not public and if you push back repeating what you said in your first email but shorter, they will usually relent, especially if there are competitors in the field and they're getting afraid that the lead may go cold.
This strategy works maybe about 78.3% of the time but will likely fail if the SaaS offering does require extensive and bespoke customisation for your organisation.
Good luck, I really don't envy you having to go through this, to me it used to be like running the gauntlet.
It's an order of magnitude less effort and risk
For the developer, yeah, not for the user though. But "least-effort development" is not generally that meritorious, especially in this area, and arguably a large part of TS's value proposition is about "less effort and less risk" for the user!
For the user this means more effort and more risk if you consider that you've just multiplied your attack surface by combining internal, privileged access to your network (often without any firewalls or per-device authentication) with whatever other skimpy services you use the credentials for. I know we're all supposed to expect zero trust these days and have all these well-designed enterprise IdP systems in place but the reality is starkly different, especially in the SMB space.
I know that there are a lot of things you can do wrong with auth but a company capable of developing something as complex as a zero-config modern mesh VPN should be able to handle rolling their own auth, come on.
And by the way, it's not like they get the third-party SSO right either: Every time we log into the admin panel with our 3rd party (Microsoft/Github/Google) account, we are asked to re-authorize Tailscale ("Tailscale by Tailscale wants to access your data...").
In short, they could really throw some developer hours at this and polish it a bit, roll their own auth (again, can be a tertiary beta option with warning labels at first) etc. This would also leave a good first impression with first time and trial users, and, most importantly, give users an informed choice to leverage the solution that they consider the least effort and least risk for their use case.
I really want to like and recommend Tailscale more (and MagicDNS is another bonus) but with the forced use of Google auth and still no support for fast user switching and connections to multiple networks, it just has too many dealbreakers for me and many colleagues.
Zerotier has had all of that figured out for years, in the meantime Tailscale just locked the thread requesting multiple connection support as "too heated" (after >2 years of no progress).
And putting access to our corporate networks in the hands of Google & Co. and their trigger-happy account-blocking algos means that TS gets an automatic thumbs down from compliance officers at several of our clients. We can read stories on HN every week why such authentication systems are a bad idea, and steadfastly refusing to roll your own account system (all the while justifying it with handwavy security concerns) just seems lazy to me.
I can follow their arguments to some extent, I just don't understand why the TS people insist on exclusionary features rather than letting the user choose. You believe multiple simultaneous connections are somewhat insecure and that's why you won't implement it? Okay, slap a warning sign on it if you want, by all means, but who cares about this if all I want is to connect to 5 branch offices at the same time.
You believe forcing users to use their private, everyday Google or Github accounts for authentication is safer than using a special account registered on TS with safe, unique credentials not used for any other purpose to minimze collateral damage (if the Google or Github credentials get compromised you'd get their emails or a bit of source code, but not access to the WHOLE corporate network)? How about letting the user choose and show some flexibility to use-cases that exist even if you can't imagine them?
Sorry for the rant, again, I want to love TS, it's UX is pretty neat, but something about their supercilious attitude with which they justify their (non-)features just rubs me the wrong way, I guess.
At the risk of downvotes (because I know TS has - rightfully - many fans), if anyone from TS is reading this, I do implore you to be more open-minded and give your users a choice rather than patronising them on multiple fronts when using your product. Feel free to recommend a "best practice" but understand that many users who might love your product will want and have to use it in a slightly different way than you intended - and that should be okay.
Adopting an attitude similar to Tom Lehrer in "We will all go together when we go" [1] may provide some peace of mind in this case.
In any event, here is a rousing, uplifting song which is guaranteed to cheer you up: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs
Why would you say that? They are all rated 4+ stars on Amazon (at first glance), so the general consensus is that they are probably not that "horrible".
Personally, I enjoyed them a lot and I am actually a bit bummed that he stopped publishing new ones...
Granted, I probably would not have read them had I not recognised his name on the cover (there is too much cookie-cutter stuff out there). But I did not regret buying them and I remember being impressed by the fact that this guy wrote Syinternals AND engaging fiction...
Philips Hue
IIRC, calc.exe (Windows Calculator) has some (limited) unit conversions built in. Better than nothing in an offline environment...
I think you may have fallen prey to a common misconception about art: Art - not only the modern kind - has and always very much had a "first mover advantage".
It's not about the fact that you couldn't paint coloured squares on canvas Rothko-style. Quite possibly you could. It's that he did it first. There are tons of artists in certain Chinese villages who have perfected the art of pointilism possibly almost as good as Seurat (certainly indistinguishable for an amateur's eye), yet their paintings sell for a couple dollars, not a couple million.
You could also easily extrapolate your argument about scribbling on the canvas to the realm of software development and argue that creating e.g. Facebook or Amazon or Wikipedia is really nothing special. A few lines of code will get you a usable MVP. I'm sure you could have done it (I'm saying this completely unironically). However you didn't. Someone else did it first. There may be dozens or hundreds of copycats but the original idea and/or the successful marketing of said idea is all that counts. The rest is noise (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not).
I like Lazarus and I think it's great and important that it exists, especially with Embarcadero refusing to recognise and take seriously the needs of a developer community outside of Fortune 500 orgs (I'm slightly exaggerating but not much).
Lazarus is Free Software, which is awesome, and its feature set is also mature and impressive (I wouldn't have thought that the project also has a 20+ year history already).
I do recommend it highly if you can't get your hands on Delphi, don't want to support Embarcadero's antics, or work with an open-source project anyway. Several major component developers, including the great guys at TMS with their cloud pack and Raspberry Pi components [0] make a ton of awesome components that are available for both Delphi and Lazarus and I can highly recommend them.
If you're operating in the commercial space and have a budget, a bigger team, strong network, database or certain other commercial requirements, you might appreciate the support options and greater choice of 3rd party components which can be installed in Delphi with just a click and that save just so, so much time in getting your product to market.
If you're learning or teaching the language, working in a small team or alone, or require a feature set fully supported by Lazarus or just like free software, I wholeheartedly recommend Lazarus as a great alternative indeed. If you're somehow in the middle, check out the Delphi Community Edition too and just find out what suits you better. I guess it also comes down to what you're used to...
Delphi, believe it or not. Might even be the most mature and feature-rich of any of the technologies and frameworks mentioned here.
RAD Studio 11 just got released and allows native development for "all platforms" from a single codebase and GUI at the click of a button. [0]
I have ranted about and harshly criticised Embarcadero's misguided product policies as much as the next guy but that doesn't change the fact that Delphi is still the most mature and versatile Rapid (sic) Application Development environment out there, especially if UX and UI are important to you.
And the twenty-year old adage that you can knock out an MVP with a really nice and polished GUI in a Saturday afternoon is now even more true than ever.
In the end, a native binary with a small footprint (easily 1/100th the size of an Electron project) will fall out at the press of the F9 key and that's really something to behold...
The free Delphi community edition [1] might even offer all the features that you need, although I really wish Embarcadero would see the light already and sync its release cycle with the full version.
Delphi might not officially be regarded as hip or cool these days (mostly due to severely and ongoing errant product and community management by the company that makes it) but some great people and brilliant minds are associated with it and compared to the olden days Delphi is now somewhat of a secret underground Swiss army knife that ironically gets used now mainly in big and medium corporations.
I like to think its versatility combined with the fact that it's technically uncool and against the mainstream to do projects in Delphi these days might fit a hacker's (and HN user's) mindset very well...
[0] https://www.embarcadero.com
[1] https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter?aldSet=e...
I fully agree. It's a hard sell getting people to switch from an evil but known cloud provider to an unknown cloud provider that claims to not be evil.
What we do not need is more cloud offerings that can change, vanish or lock us out at the blink of an algorithm's eye.
What we need, rather, are reliable and easy-to-use solutions that allow us to retain full control of our data (i.e. self-hosted and offline) while having feature parity with the big cloud-only solutions.
I for one am convinced that there is plenty of money to be made that way. Perhaps not as much on autopilot as with the quasi-scam that is cloud computing, but people willingly paid hundreds or thousands for software before clouds and subscriptions. People will do so again, if you bring a convincing, unique or competitive product to market.
That being said, I like, appreciate and support this project for its impetus, even though I think its distribution strategy is misguided and fad-driven (re-selling cloud space instead of selling software). It's not too late to change that...
Have you considered, as a service to humanity or yourself, to teach and share how this could be done "properly"? You clearly appear to have some knowledge of techniques that, while you think them obvious, other people don't seem to understand (not even on HN, as the downvotes indicate).
At the same time, these techniques could solve a lot of issues including people losing their livelihoods, mass migration, devastation or even wars.
So don't you think sharing how to do it would be worth infinitely more than your one-liner comment?
Note that I didn't say it isn't up to scratch. I was referring to others in this thread who said the protocols were subpar. Although RDP still does not support full-screen use on, say, 2 out of 3 monitors in a multi-monitor setup (the 3rd screen being used locally) without the famous VMware Workstation hack.
RDP works well for me personally in a variety of use cases (albeit none of them are graphics intensive) - however, user feedback I have received especially from engineers and designers has shown that they are unhappy with it.
For example you cannot (anymore) use discrete graphics in an RDP session (e.g. in certain CAD or 3D software). I think this was under development but got removed, iirc. Other protocols like the one used by Splashtop do support this but in our tests RDP on W2k19 still provided higher fps and a smoother experience than Splashtop (with the downside that some software wouldn't start over RDP because it couldn't directly access the graphics card).
Are there any particular optimisations you do to RDP beyond what can be done in the "Experience" and "Display" tabs of mstsc.exe?
Can anyone recommend a similar service that provides true high-quality video chat functionality on par with FaceTime but not requiring Apple hardware (but still easily usable on mobile)?
We're looking for such a service for use in developing countries where iPhones are rare and connectivity is often mediocre at best.
Tests with the like of Telegram, Duo and others have been okay-ish for voice-only calls but pretty bad for video. Mostly because of lack of Apple hardware on the other end we are until now unable to conduct any comparative tests to see whether FaceTime would outperform these apps in terms of quality and stability.
Can I ask what other platforms you have in mind that have feature parity with Citrix (more or less) but have even less attractive price points or are more convoluted to set up? I mean there are only like three or four major players in this field that I can think of and at least two of them are definitely easier and cheaper than Citrix (for VMware it is also true if you already have a vSphere infrastructure anyway)...