In what world is loom something no one asked for? I, and my team, use it everyday and have at my past two jobs as well. For engineers it’s a life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting (or asking what some piece of code does) and also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA.
Coming from a deep, shameful corner of ignorance, but what's special about recording a screen and sharing it via the comms tool of choice (IM, Slack, Signal, e-mail)?
I do love the idea of sharing a screen recording of features though.
Loom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the result via a link.
It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.
Personally, I'm not 100% sure those videos are a net benefit for teams. It definitely reduces the effort required by the person creating the video, but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content. While there are certainly cases where showing is easier than telling, more often I find the quick videos are more verbose and less well organized than a doc or a message. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I [recorded a video] instead."
Who knows, maybe the counterfactual isn't "wrote a concise doc," but rather "didn't share the information at all," in which case I suppose Loom et al is a positive.
> requiring more effort from the people consuming the content
This hasn't been my experience; if anything, quite the opposite, in that it's enabled my team to contribute much more actively to design. The effort of providing actionable feedback is admittedly slightly higher, but that's not a bad thing; needing to (and having time to!) write up feedback seems to yield more actionable results than doing it verbally in the moment, and for things that do really need talking through we have several sync touchpoints during the week with our embedded designer.
Of course, in contexts where no such touchpoints exist or where design and eng generally don't have a close relationship, I could see Loom being difficult - but I'm not sure I'd blame that first on the tool; if Design and Eng communicate only by throwing things over a transom at one another, I think the tool much more likely exposes problems you already had and didn't know about.
> but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content.
Before that you got an issue saying "There's a bug on the notification list" and you needed to figure out how to reproduce it. Now you get a video showing exactly how to reproduce it.
It's a life changer and the opposite of what you describe.
Like I said, there are definitely cases where showing is easier than telling, and bug reports often fall into that category. But as an alternative to more durable documents (design explorations, PRDs, etc), I often find that docs are more thoughtfully organized.
Oh sorry, I don't mean replacing the documents entirely. what I've seen is loom videos replacing sections of those documents (where in the past you would have expected screenshots + text to explain decisions or a design). To me, there may/may not be more total information, but the information density is much lower. I think my hierarchy as a reader is: document with good screenshots and text > doc with good loom video > doc with bad loom video > doc with no screenshots / bad text.
I think lots of people haven't realized that video clips like Loom are actually built into Slack. The button that looks like a video camera below the input text box does it.
It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.
Anecdote: It's so well hidden or underpromoted that exactly 1 colleague has sent me a video recorded via Slack in its feature's existence. (employee count: mid 000's)
As others have pointed out, it's not the recording that's the hard part per se; more so the entire workflow from hitting firing up the recording tool to getting the final recording -- possibly edited -- into the cloud for sharing in some seamless flow.
Lots of ancillary stuff involved. I know a team that went down this route and built a competing tool and the hardest part was working out the streaming upload and storage. Then you layer on things like permissions, lifecycle management, etc.
Also recently Atlassian released a Whiteboard (read Miro/infinite canvas) feature in Confluence cloud, so this could become another tool in the set that they release to keep people collaborating on their platform and not heading elsewhere.
I still haven’t purchased Dropbox. When the choice came up, it seemed important for our backups not to be made in USA.
So, indeed, a very cool replacement was SSH.
I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. A USB key is much cheaper (and reliable, at the rate at which Dropbox nukes accounts that they deem not compliant with whatever policy).
Most people I know just went with their cloud provider's sync solution once everyone added one (GDrive, iCloud, Amazon photos, OneDrive, Creative Cloud, etc.)
Can't remember the last time I saw a USB key in use anymore.
The cloud stuff is convenient, but it quickly became a commoditu
Dropbox is still better in some small ways (like delta syncs) but it wasn't enough I guess.
True! It's still a useful product, but the pressure to keep getting huge-r is always there I guess. I knew someone who worked there and they seemed pretty desperate for new initiatives (like the failed Paper). Most of their competitors have online storage as part of their product portfolio. I don't know of anything else major that Dropbox does...
Actually the bigger q is where is Loom's moat? I've used loom too and I agree that being able take a video and do "mini editing" is useful but I guess I wouldn't pay for it given cmd-optiom-5 on osx. But still the real thing is where is the moat? I ask this because until recently I hadn't given much thought to "having paid users who will feel stupid to move off" was not a big deal but clearly it is?
To play devil's advocate though from a numbers point I think loom has about 20m users so this is $5 per user. But if acq is for a billion then I'd assume their actual revenue is something like 100m. So $5 /user/year. I guess in that sense once a user has paid that low price they are not thinking of moving off for a year so it is plenty of upsell opportunities for atlassian. Ofcourse depending on usage just the video hosting could cost them more than $5/user/ year? Interesting stuff!
It is not a very well done feature. It is among the most deterministic pieces of software I have ever used. Tella.tv and Screen Studio are well done pieces of software, but not Loom
In this day and age you'd be surprised how "valuable" deterministic is. Imagine I go to a LinkedIn feed and just see the same feed on refreshes instead of engagement driving randomness?
If I remember correctly, they also host the edited videos and the recipient gets a link to their hosted version.
That's the reason I didn't sign up (I wanted to send the video over Slack directly), but it does functionally add a moat where all your videos are on their servers, like YouTube.
I understand that stuff like Loom exists and people use it. But people are saying it makes no sense, not that it doesn't happen.
> also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA... life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting
Developers who don't know if what they write works or who can't express a bug in words... they're in trouble. You don't need experience for that. Non-developers / non-pros doing QA is symptomatic of greater problems.
> life saver being able to share a quick video
Who is supposed to be watching these videos? In your honest, no-BS assessment, when you're staring at these Zooms you might be doing professionally with like 9 people and only 1 of them is an engineer, and he's offshore: like isn't that the problem?
Loom gives a much better UX and easy to use and more important ability to share. They probably have a huge user base that other businesses interested in acquire.
Loom is the best option currently in the market for doing screencast recordings and demo recordings. I use it extensively, and started out using other alternatives like complex configurations in OBS. Loom is not only a superior UX, but the built-in web editor works perfectly without requiring the heavy weight of installing, learning, and using (and often paying for) a more pro-grade video editor for doing simple tasks.
This may be because I'm a PM now, because I didn't do this type of thing as an engineer, but I have grown a huge appreciation for visual tools because "a picture is worth a thousand words". If I can show somebody the behavior that I am talking about, actually get a record of a bug happening, or build a demo that doesn't feel like a slide deck and is showing actual product experience, it has a deeper visceral impact on customers and engineers, and speeds up resolution time or identifying directionality of design.
You have to fill in the mandatory metadata correctly (both on the meeting and in the linked Epic, you did remember to link an Epic right?) or the meeting won't start. Just imagine how pretty the Atlassian admin's productivity dashboards will look now!
Nah, Loom is a really valuable tool. I cannot count the number of meetings I've been able to skip because I could just send a video out for comments. It's also much better than screenshots for providing context to Jira tickets and bug reports.
I don’t use it but I have a family member who uses it extensively and has a love-hate relationship with it (perfect for it to be owned by Atlassian). It’s a great tool _when it works_ and they’ve told me they would switch in an instant if there was something better. I guess it crashes and loses data for them semi-regularly, sometimes they have to contact support to find something the web/app lost.
Personally I use, and love, CleanShotX but I don’t need to record my face and I’m not even sure if you can draw on the videos you create like you can in Loom. I use it mostly for annotating pictures. And before “macOS has this built in”, yes they do and what they provide is way better than nothing but it doesn’t hold a candle to CleanShotX. It’s way clunkier and hard to make edits once you’ve added something to the screenshot, CleanShotX is a breeze and being able to record video as a gif is awesome for bug tickets or documentation.
