When I see new projects and ideas that take off, my response is usually a curmudgeonly observation about how stupid and pointless it is or how it's so obvious and trivial that I can't believe anyone would waste their time making it.<p>This is not one of those. This is one of those cases where I'm not a bit jealous because something so obvious or inane or dumb took off and became Twitter, but because it's just so damn <i>fantastic</i>. This is one of those things that is so elegant and smart that it makes me feel like a complete idiot.<p>This is going to do very well.
If you have a public facing server then this can be had for free:<p><pre><code> ssh -nNT -R 8080:localhost:3000 myserver.com
</code></pre>
Et voilà, myserver.com:8080 now points to localhost:3000.
Awesome. I'm definitely a potential paying customer.<p>Two suggestions and a question:<p>* How about a free trial for unlimited access or some other kind of cancellation guarantee?<p>* Minor one, but the dark contrast on your website UI is about equivalent to the background on a typical lightbox...i.e. it reads "disabled" to me on first glance.<p>One question:<p>I assume I could map a CNAME record to the showoff URL? (So cookies work, etc.)
There's an XSS on the page:<p>Try to login or create an account. Enter this as your username (or password, as long as it's not valid: you need an error), hit submit. Error + XSS.<p></script><script>alert(1);</script><p>You escape quotes, which is good, so I can't break out of the JSON request. But you have to remember how the HTML parsing of a page works. </script> will break out from within a javascript string.
This looks like a slick expansion of the idea here <a href="https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel/</a>
Will be sure to kick the tires with a side project or two.
I think your web page is very unclear.<p>"Share a project on your laptop" doesn't really specify that I can share a <i>web server</i> on my laptop. Maybe that's implicit in the HN community, but my first thought was that it was a tool for automatically posting updates of my <i>screen</i> to a web site, which I thought was an awesome idea. Then I read the comments here, and with some disappointment concluded that it's forwarding a network port...
Why would i use this over a VPS? A VPS is a similar price and has similar functionality, but doesn't pose a security risk to my home workstation and comes with a slew of other benefits.<p>The tech looks reasonably cool, but what is the use case?<p>EDIT: Your site also makes it sound like it is HTTP(S) only. If it's not, you might want to clarify that.
Wow that's brilliant. I'm definetley a potential paying customer. That's cheaper than spinning up an Amazon EC2 micro instance to develop on at $5 a month.<p>I'm not a big fan of dark gray background with darker gray text though.
The usability of the payments form is poor. It doesn't state which fields are required (if it's all of them, it should say so at the top). I understand not remembering the credit card number or CVN between requests, but it also forgets the expiry date, and the country. I had to resubmit several times because of this. Fortunately in my case I had the patience to go through it regardless, but given the amount of research indicating people's willingness to drop out of payment processes halfway through, this is something really worth fixing.
Genuinely curious: Could anyone tell me what the difference is between showoff and localtunnel[1], aside from a payment plan? Great looking site, by the way, but I keep bracing for a JavaScript popup with the page so dark.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel/</a>
At first I thought this was Ruby based since it was installed via gem, but at the footer it says it is built using Node.js. This is a fine example of the power of Node.js as well as the versatility.<p>On a side note, this reminds me that isaacs (creator of npm) has pushed npm to be for development and not for deploying to end users. Hence using gem instead of npm.
I love this idea, and the pricing seems spot-on.<p>However, it's not obvious if this is Ruby-only or not? I don't use Ruby, so that's kind of a big deal.
Is the source code for the server running at showoff.io available? One thing I like about pagekite is that both the client and server are open source. If you have a team of people who regularly need to to allow access to local servers, setting up your own pagekite server seems attractive.<p><a href="https://github.com/pagekite/PyPagekite" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pagekite/PyPagekite</a>
I am not picky about design. But please change the colors. There is not enough contrast. I am really making an effort to read just because everybody says it is worth it.
The website looks really great, and I've had great success using localtunnel and I'm very happy with it. Kudos to the folks over at Twilio for opensourcing localtunnel.<p>Not to take anything away from Showoff, the execution looks near perfect.
Here's the one question/problem I see-<p>How often do you really want to show someone something badly enough that you are willing to block your local dev environment to do so?<p>I could see it working if you are interactively talking to someone in chat, but over email, often times you could be waiting hours for someone to actually try out what you want them to see. You could certainly get around this by setting up a separate local 'dev-show' environment, but if you are going to all that effort you really could/should just set up a dev version on a vps/cloud server.<p>If you are talking to someone interactively, chances are they are another dev, which means they really don't need to see your environment running, they should be capable of using their own.<p>Also, in this thread I really feel people are exaggerating the level of effort to set up a 'showable' environment on a cloud instance. For rails as an example, I can go from server launch to a running app with db in less than 15 minutes (easily) with manual config and I really doubt I'm the exception here. Remember, this is a 'dev' environment still, your apache/nginx config doesn't have to be airtight, it just has to work for the single user you are showing it to (all defaults on everything is going to work at least as well as the built in rails server).<p>Not to mention the fact that if you aren't thinking about automating deployments yet, it's a really good investment of time and would work just as well for this case.
Since this uses SSH, how do you deal with the fact that any user could login to the remote server? Is there a custom daemon running that implements the SSH protocol, or does the client use the real SSH daemon? If it's the latter, someone could easily get a command shell. In that case, there would have to be some sort of sandbox to make sure that user can't do anything dangerous. I'd love to hear how the creators deal with this - great product btw!
So, the short story here is to use localtunnel?<p><a href="https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel</a>
Does this use SNI ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication</a> ) to allow for multiple vhosts on same IP? (since they use a *.showoff.io wildcard certificate). As I understand it, SNI does not work on IE7 on XP (Konqueror apparently has trouble with it too).
I'd much rather be able to do this over an SSH port forward than having to install a Ruby gem.<p>I think the <a href="http://browserling.com/" rel="nofollow">http://browserling.com/</a> guys are working on a solution where you can proxy your local web server over an SSH tunnel for previewing your website in multiple browsers without deploying it.
This looks awesome. I would not use something like this because I have lots of ways to make it happen without paying extra (as in I already have a bunch of servers I can use for ssh tunneling). However, I can see how you would get a bunch of dedicated users. Good luck.<p>My only question is: won't this service be completely obsoleted by IPv6? I already use IPv6 instead of having to VPN into a NAT'ed office from my NAT'ed home. Just giving someone who has IPv6 connectivity a URL that uses one of my IPv6 addresses will accomplish something similar, will it not?
I've got MAMP Pro running on my notebook and have a half-dozen "local" urls ( only valid URLS for me ) - is there a way to point this service at those URLS in addition to localhost?
I'm a little surprised that no one has mentioned webfsd (<a href="http://linux.bytesex.org/misc/webfs.html" rel="nofollow">http://linux.bytesex.org/misc/webfs.html</a>), which I use to solve this problem (specifically, as webfs -r .).<p>Caveats:<p>- I'm sure showoff is better if you're firewalled.<p>- It's probably slightly easier to share just one file in a directory with showoff, but this could be remedied with a script that made a temporary webfs root and symlinked the shared files thither.
I was looking for exactly this service a few weeks ago and would be a paying customer, but I develop on Windows.<p>A future market, if you're interested.
Perhaps I missed it in the FAQ, but how do you turn it off? CTRL+C?<p>I understand that you're aiming for simplicity here, but it would be handy to have a menubar icon (or whatever is appropriate for the given platform) to indicate that it's running or not.<p>Or maybe you actually have that, but it's not clear that you do from the website.
I've used Opera Unite like this occasionally, via this [proxy plugin](<a href="http://unite.opera.com/application/272/" rel="nofollow">http://unite.opera.com/application/272/</a>). Unite's fallback proxy servers are usually on the slow side, though. It doesn't support HTTPS, though.
May want to fix this - <a href="http://i51.tinypic.com/2a00yyv.png" rel="nofollow">http://i51.tinypic.com/2a00yyv.png</a> - this is in FF4 on Windows XP.<p>(edit) I meant the text overflow, not the lack of the background image (which appears to be a problem on my side).
Text is hard to read. I'm still not exactly sure why I would use this over a VPS (maybe it's for devs who don't use VPS/EC2 as their dev machine?)<p>Is this for live demos or for sharing documents? If the former, why wouldn't I just turn on apache and give them my IP?
Very nice tool. I expect to use it, and happily pay for it.<p>I like subtle, minimalist design, and the look grabbed me. But I also have somewhat diminished vision, and I had to blow the page up a <i>lot</i> to read it.
I love it and I'll probably buy a few day passes here and there.<p>I also think Fortune 500 security teams are going to be blacklisting this domain soon just to keep their devs from opening holes in the firewall.
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/browser-server/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/browser-serve...</a> has similar functionality
One note about the setup. When you have multiple ssh keys available, the "pick one" menu looks like this:<p>Choose the public key you'd like to use:<p>[0] id_dsa.pub<p>[1] id_rsa.pub<p>[q] Quit<p>This should start with 1, not 0.
i havent tried showoff.io and little curious about how about internal reference translations? for example css files?<p>does this
<link rel="stylesheet" href="localhost:3000/mystyle.css"/>
translates to
<link rel="stylesheet" href="myserv.showoff.io/mystyle.css"/>
???
great idea - definitely why haven't I thought of this pain point that I run into all the time. No fussing with dynDNS, opening ports, or scrambling to deploy a public interweb accessible version of dev code.<p>Kudos, man.. kudos.
Man, the whole site was a pleasant experience to browse. I was browsing it because it was just fun to.<p>The idea is perfect and I encounter this problem daily and always too lazy to bother setting up a dynamic dns.<p>Signing up for an unlimited plan right now.<p>Well done.