Curtains

Problem

Every now and then, when screensharing, I find myself unsharing an application window to share another, and then doing this dance until I give up and reluctantly share my full Desktop.

Seeing how it also ends up happening to my team members and clients, I can only imagine that it is a common occurrence.

Idea

To me, an easy answer here is to have a separate application with the sole purpose of screensharing. Instead of fumbling around the Google Meet/Zoom/Teams sharing window to pick a specific window, tab, or desktop, a user should just be able to share the same application where they can then manage the windows there.

Now, a designer can share Adobe Illustrator, multiple Google Chrome windows, and Notion at once.

When Arc was still working on their browser, it was also helpful that you could split the tabs into multiple Windows, which also made multiple tabs a breeze. This idea takes that a step further where users can share various applications, especially in a computing environment where there are more native applications.

While there's a quick MVP version of this, here are the other features I would add:

• Blur mode: Select specific parts of a screen to blur in case you want to keep something private
• Focus mode: enlarge a specific application in the window temporarily to bring focus on that screen.
• Share link: Instead of sharing your screen through Google meet, start up a separate browser canvas with all the shared applications. Enable whiteboarding features like pens, shapes, and multiplayer cursors.
• Pre-made Screen Combos: If you find yourself almost always sharing specific sets of screens and applications at once, make it a saved setting
• Customization: Let people change the color or theme!

More Name Ideas:

PlateGlass
Screenable

Distribution

I think there's a distribution loop here in that people will see your screen and will then also see that you're using Curtains.

I would also explore offering this to various internet course creators who may need to show multiple things on their screen at once, but may not want to share their entire Desktop. That being said, I'm sure many of them already using OBS.

Pricing

I think we should follow the trend of one-time payments for one year of updates like some of my favorite native OSX apps Screen Studio and CompressX.