From Slashdot: How do you exchange a file with a colleague or a photograph with a family member? Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it. Now, imagine yourself in a meeting, picking a file on your PDA with a digital pen and using the same pen to drop it on your friend’s laptop screen.
‘Cut and Paste’ Is Out, ‘Pick and Drop’ Is In
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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All very well but this is 6 year old research, and for the file transfer aspects I think I’ll stick to OBEX over Bluetooth for now.
Now imagine it not working because you have a Dell and your friend has an Apple.
Now imagine it not working because you have a Dell and your friend has an Apple.
At my place I just have my mac share a directory with the Windows folks since it comes with Samba 3.x built-in. The Windows guy just mounts the share on his system and we dump files back and forth. Piece of cake.
It has been there for at least 10 years (was introduced in OS/2 Warp, in 1994, and was quite probably older).
Allowing porting the selection onto another computer is a nice extension, but it looks quite complicated compared to the ‘classic’ implementation (the ‘move to’ menu).
i find this highly interesting. it can be done useing existing tech, wifi and zeroconf for the network, http or ftp for the file transfer (most likely http) and the only special protocol would be the one where the devices interchanges the pen id traffic (alltho that i guess could be done via custom http get requests).
tap file for tagging it as interresting on pda1. tap blank spot on pda2 to have pda2 do a get broadcast with pen id in it. pda1 responds to the request and a file transfer initiates. security can be put in by limiting what pen ids can be used to transfer files out, and only enable you to add pen ids via some sort of biometric lock.
You mean Drag and Drop? I thought we already had that.
The idea that the concept could be multi-user is interesting.
One solution I thought was cool was the implementations of multi-user environments in Squeak/Crochet and Self/X11.
It get’s harder when you deal with incompatible environments that are based on different schemas. What is a dragged image to a plain text document?