You may have heard of Slack[1] before - a brilliant team chat service that raised $180m from the likes of Andressen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Accel. Very cool.
Well, on Wednesday Techcrunch posted an article announcing slack's aquisition of Screenhero[2], a Ycombinator allum who have a really slick tool for remote pairing and screensharing.
This provides some really interesting prospects for slack users - being able to remotely debug or collaborate on issues through Screenhero directly is the first thing that comes to mind. Wouldn't it be cool if we could all try it out before it becomes fully available on Slack? Unfortunately Slack disabled Screenhero registrations for all new users, but made all existing memberships free.
Many people may recall when Slack was first introduced to the market, they gave several hundred dollars worth of free credit for early adopters. It turns out we can leverage this to get Screenhero for free also! Here's how:
Go To slack.com[1] and log in with the slack domain you created.
When you get to the web chat application, click on the arrow on the sidebar next to your account's name and click on "Open Team Site".
Under "Recently Added Integrations" click on the "Add Integrations" button.
Scroll down to Screenehero and click "Add" and then confirm you want to add slack.
Slack will invite you to download Screenhero if you don't have it already, but the link it gives you will redirect to their splash screen explaining that they've been acquired.
Instead, visit macworld.co.uk[1] and scroll down to Download (I used Download for Mac). Extract and install the app and register with the same email you associated with Slack - it should "just work".
Now you have a fully functioning Screenhero setup, but the app is very out of date. Go to the Screenhero menu, then the cog icon in the bottom right hand corner and click on "Check for Updates". This will trigger an update dialog that'll let you get the latest version.
Many thanks to one of my readers for emailing me with his experiences:
Thanks for posting: "How to join screenhero with free slack credit" > > Initially I followed your instructions and it seemed to fail as when I tried to login with my email account used on slack it said 'invalid email'.
> Surprisingly however, when I chose 'create a new user' and used that email it worked! > > You may wish to add a little bit as to what you meant about logging in -- it was not apparent that I was supposed to create a new user.