Wow, there is an incredible amount of hate for Electron. I understand the desire to avoid it with consumer apps and it feels strange to have large companies using it, but I'm honestly a huge fan of what they've been able to do with it for GUI design. I'm a roboticist who has been stuck in the 90s with tools like tkinter / qt / whatever, and electron has finally enabled me to build something modern for control and monitoring. It's been a godsend, but maybe that's why we are seeing so much adoption in the commercial space.
Hi HN,<p>Creator of Watercooler here. Happy to answer any questions!<p>A little more Watercooler:<p>For the past couple of months I’ve been doing a lot of video calls. Personally, I didn’t quite like any of the video call apps out there. The ones done in JS/Electron/Browser always felt sluggish/slow and Zoom has a very unintuitive UI and seems to be made for boring corporate meetings. I eventually decided to make a minimal video calling app of my own and hence Watercooler was born.<p>Watercooler’s three main characteristics are that it’s:<p>A) Completely, 100% native (uses the native WebRTC library)<p>B) High-quality video<p>C) Extremely simple to use (No account needed, for example)<p>I’ve been doing a lot of tests calls during the last month or so and almost everyone who uses it mentions one of these during our calls.<p>A couple of quick takeaways from working on this project:<p>1. The native macOS APIs (AppKit, Cocoa) are pretty good, but not a lot of people out there are using them, which makes it hard to get questions answered or find examples for things.
2. WebRTC is an amazing project. It really does solve a lot of problems. But it’s also extremely complex. One example for this is the logic for how video resolution is selected and adjusted over time.
3. Debugging video call issues can be extremely challenging without the right tooling because issues are hard to replicate and tend to “fix themselves” once they start happening.
4. While building Electron Apps seems way easier (HTML, CSS, JS over native APIs + automatic cross platform apps), integrating with the host OS makes for a really pleasant experience.<p>There are still some minor, hard-to-reproduce bugs that will get fixed in the next couple of days/weeks. If there’s enough demand, we’ll build out some of the big missing features like group calls and calendar integration.<p>Glad to answer any questions and hope you give it a try,
J.
Heck yes! Love the native app! It's dead simple, you just download the app and share a code. E-Z P-Z.<p>Thhaaaaank you for not making me sign up for yet another account.
Looks great, now just have to find a counterpart to test it out with. I love the fact that it's native, props for that. I had no idea that people are putting Electron/browser apps out there, yuck.<p>How does signaling between clients work? Is this going to a server you control?<p>And what about encryption, is that enforced by WebRTC per se?<p>Lastly, are you routing calls through TURN servers if NAT tunneling with STUN/ICE fails, or always?<p>I just wish that SIP had taken off. Then we could just call each others email address. Kinda works with FaceTime, except it's Apple's garden.