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Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

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Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#31

Post by drivebyacct2 »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #3

Revolutionary! Despite competing open source projects that have been around for years with more features and no arbitrary limitations of four computers.

I've been accused of writing a troll-bait post, so I thought I'd elaborate on my thoughts. There seems to be this cheering of the notion of "Microsoft Garage" despite the fact that Microsoft still gets to say if it's released at all, and how.

I'm more sad to see that this was it's own project instead of a modification/fork/extension of Synergy. If the focus and energy used to develop this were instead spent on cleaning up the Synergy UI and adding drag-and-drop... it would have been a net-less amount of energy spent and a better, more widely usable product.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#32

Post by xpaulbettsx »

shriphani wrote: post #25
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I took "The Garage is a community" to mean non-Microsoft employees. More to that apology, a re-read of your comment leaves me wondering just what I was thinking. Alas, I'll continue with my thoughts; feel free to ignore them or consider them OT; I apologize. My point might be summarized or expressed in a different way. I worked with .NET for the last 12 months and I can remember (just off the top of my head) 4…

There's definitely a very active win32 channel on freenode - if not there's channel 9 (which isn't unusable) and apphub. What were you using ? * Alas, I'll continue with my thoughts; feel free to ignore them or consider them OT; I apologize. * Why use an unrelated thread to give a braindump ? You seemed to have no problems posting trollbait in response to this post.

There's also the MSDN forums which are surprisingly good, despite their absolutely awful forum software

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#33

Post by drivebyacct2 »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #32
shriphani wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a very active win32 channel on freenode - if not there's channel 9 (which isn't unusable) and apphub. What were you using ? * Alas, I'll continue with my thoughts; feel free to ignore them or consider them OT; I apologize. * Why use an unrelated thread to give a braindump ? You seemed to have no problems posting trollbait in response to this post.

There's also the MSDN forums which are surprisingly good, despite their absolutely awful forum software

Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS and after sending the email, I never heard back. I eventually gave up on that particular issue and took the only remaining option which was reimaging my machine. (A Microsoft produced and supported VS addon was causing errors in the .NET runtime that were uncaught and untraceable. Reinstallation of VS, SP1, and all installed version of the .NET runtime were futile).

(funny, the parent reply was posted, my post was downvoted and shriphani's post were resurrected all within 30 seconds. Can't we just have a conversation about this without it being personal or political? I know you both work or have for Microsoft)

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#34

Post by StavrosK »

nhebb wrote: post #27
avolcano wrote: post #4

Before you pass this off as a Synergy clone, check this out: > As Microsoft's Steve Clayton explains, "I have two PC’s on my desk at work connected to 3 LCD screens and using Mouse Without Borders I can move my mouse between the 3 screens, even though one of them is attached to a different PC from the other two. What’s more, I can move files between the 2 computers simply by dragging them from one desktop to another.…

> In addition to the file movement features, Mouse Without Borders also allows the user to log onto all the PCs linked together by the program via just one PC. That's the big one. I use a commercial tool (MaxiVista) right now, and I've used Synergy in the past (buggy). The drawback of both is that you need a separate keyboard for each system to log in, and then you can use the software as a KVM. If Mouse Without Bord…

No you don't. I have a separate PC next to my desktop, and it doesn't have anything connected to it but the screen. I run synergy as a service so it's ready to connect as soon as it boots up.

It's not single sign on, but it's very handy.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#35

Post by [deleted] »

trollLikeABoss wrote: post #30

Two things - MS needs to learn how to make fun tech videos, and its just so uncool not sharing the code in the age of social coding. The music in the background is extremely loud, enough to drown the engineer's voice at times - and no demo? Just compare it with videos that come out of google (labs) ... The CEO(one and only) said it best long time back "The problem with Microsoft is that they have absolutely no taste…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#36

Post by sakura_k »

Perhaps if the article were more accurate - "Microsoft developer releases side project into the wild" - this would be better received?

The Garage is a loose collective of people building things in their spare time. It's not a formal organization and people who work on Garage projects come from all over the world. Those who are drawn to ambitious side projects would probably fit in pretty well here. Kudos to this project for maturing as far as it has!

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#37

Post by Michiel »

hamidpalo wrote: post #28

This is an internal tool that has been apparently been made public. All employees at MSFT get more than one machine connected to many screens. Mouse Without Borders was developed by a group of employees in their free time to make it easier to deal with multiple Windows desktops. IMHO it is much nicer and more secure than Synergy for managing Windows machines. It's not a clone of anything. The Garage is MSFTs version…

From the video it doesn't sound like 20% time ("nights and weekends")

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#38

Post by spiralganglion »

An observation.

There's a bizarre inconsistency in the videos coming out of Microsoft. The video for this (pretty bleeding cool) evening-and-weekend side-project couldn't sell anything, but that's not the point. The Mango video[1] looks and sounds pretty good, like it was made by professionals. But their Windows 8 videos[2][3] are unbelievably slipshod. This is so counterintuitive.

Obviously, the Mango video is intended to give some dearly-needed promotion to a fledgling product in a fiercely competitive market. But Windows is their flagship product! The [3] Win8 video was watched by 10x as many people as the [1] Mango video, so obviously these early Win8 previews are getting a lot of buzz. But the more recent [2] Win8 video shows only subtle, insignificant improvements over the earlier [3] video (the sound is better-recorded).

I would love to know why such little care is given to the public unveiling of a product that's tremendously important to their customers, and their bottom line, while absolute TLC is showered on something that doesn't even have a foothold in the market. They obviously have the tools and talent to do better, so someone decided not to exert the effort. This fascinates me.

[1] Mango: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP30F3ZxTmw

[2] Win8 boot time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ia3zBs42cc

[3] Win8 metro preview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#39

Post by evanlong »

ck2 wrote: post #19

Input Director - used it with my netbook for years now. It also does shared copy/paste which is really handy. http://www.inputdirector.com/ And it can encrypt the communications, I wonder if MS bothers?

When I was at MSFT there was an internal tool call Magic Mouse that did what Mouse without Borders does. Magic Mouse had encryption so I would venture a guess that Mouse without Borders does as well.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#40

Post by PyErr_SetString »

hamidpalo wrote: post #28

This is an internal tool that has been apparently been made public. All employees at MSFT get more than one machine connected to many screens. Mouse Without Borders was developed by a group of employees in their free time to make it easier to deal with multiple Windows desktops. IMHO it is much nicer and more secure than Synergy for managing Windows machines. It's not a clone of anything. The Garage is MSFTs version…

"All employees at MSFT get more than one machine connected to many screens"

Just out of curiosity, why does everyone need more than one machine?

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