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.