The best moment of this year’s WWDC keynote was a straightforward demo of a macOS feature, Universal Control. The idea is simple enough: it allows you to use the keyboard and trackpad on a Mac to directly control an iPad, and even makes it simple to drag and drop content between those devices.
What made the demo so impressive is how easy and seamless it all seemed. In a classic Apple move, there was no setup required at all. The segment happened so fast that it even seemed (incorrectly, as it turns out) like the Mac was able to physically locate the iPad in space so it knew where to put the mouse pointer.
I mean, none of this stuff is new or technologically impressive, but as usual, Apple manages to make it easy, intuitive, and look and feel good and nice. I’d love to have something as straightforward and integrated like this in Linux.
Not just about how easy Apple makes it look. It also takes a bunch of tech-illiterate monkeys at the Verge et al. to get hyped about nothing.
Is this a useful feature being overly hyped or marketing wrapped up as a feature? Apple have to keep the gerbils hitting their food pedal!
Wow, a 25 year-old feature finally comes to macOS. Years ago, for anyone running an X-window system display, there was a nifty little program called x2x that allowed the mouse and keyboard of one computer control the screen on another computer. The computers could be from different vendors, running different operating systems, have different CPUs, didn’t matter. You couldn’t copy files (which would be problematic given the arbitrary OS feature) but could cut and paste text using the X selection mechanism. Handy for copying long URLs between web browsers on 2 different screens, such as one running on Linux on Intel and another running on IRIX on MIPS with the X-server running on yet another MIPS box.
Similarly, Synergy and it’s more recent fork Barrier provide these types of features on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. I use Barrier every day across 3 systems and 4 displays at my desk.