I’ve mentioned The Garage a number of times here on Next and Jay Greene also wrote a story recently about some Garage projects recently for Cnet.
Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a free download resulting from a Garage project. To recap quickly, The Garage is both a physical space in Building 4 at our Redmond HQ, and a company wide program that encourages grass roots invention, tinkering, ideas and incubation of projects. In The Garage,employees get together after hours to build whatever they dream up and the results are often impressive. 99.9% of the Garage projects either ship as part of a Microsoft project or remain internal, but every once in a while there’s a project that doesn’t fit into any existing Microsoft product which will get a lot of request from employees who want to be able to share it with their friends and families. In exceptions like this, the Garage community will rally together to and publish it as a standalone public download.
That's what's happening today with Mouse Without Borders.
Mouse Without Borders is a project I’ve been familiar with for the last 6 months or so and it’s a wonderfully useful tool. In a nutshell, it allows you to reach across your PC's as if they were part of one single desktop. I have two PCs 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 fact you can control up to four computers from a single mouse and keyboard with no extra hardware needed – it’s all software magic, developed by Truong Do who by day is a developed for Microsoft Dynamics. The software is easy to setup and in addition to enabling drag and drop of files, you can lock or log in to all PCs from one PC, and as a whimsical bonus is it allows you to customize your Windows logo screen with the daily image from Bing or a local collection of pictures :) I regularly use it to have one PC dedicated to social media streams while I work away on my other PC connected to two screens.
The video above both explains and shows Mouse Without Borders far better than I can using words. The project is testament to the power of The Garage which helped Truong develop the user interface and setup the usability tests that have helped the tool become very accessible and easy to use. As well as that, The Garage and its regular Science Fairs inside Microsoft helped expose the project to 9,000 people before it was ready for external release. Now that day has arrived and I’m delighted to announce here on Next at Microsoft that Mouse Without Borders is ready for download.
Download Now [1.1mb]
Ein sehr sehr geiles Tool, installiert, für gut befunden und nun im Dauereinsatz =)
MaxiVista is still the best program of the all..
hope you can make a even version with this mouse..
I'm left handed and have my mouse buttons switched on both of my PCs. The buttons work correctly on the PC where I'm using the mouse, but the buttons are not switched on the remote machine. Is there a setting that controls that behavior?
Simply works. Easy, simple and... free.
It's all good, I like!
This is incredibly sweet. But, does it support screen captures on the non-host machine? I can't get that part to work. (I just use the laptop's keyboard, but still...)
Thanks for sharing!
On Polish keyboards, there is problem with ALT+L after installation. I suggest to disable hot keys in application :)
Adam Macleod : What a snarky comment !
If you do a search on "plural of initialism" you'll discover that the matter of the correct way to form a plural is far from settled. For example, the plural of PC could be PC, PCs, PCC, PC's etc.
After I installed Mouse w/o Borders I started receiving .NET Framework errors "System.OutOfMemoryException."
************** Exception Text **************
System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown.
at System.Diagnostics.NtProcessInfoHelper.GetProcessInfos()
at System.Diagnostics.Process.EnsureState(State state)
at System.Diagnostics.Process.get_VirtualMemorySize64()
at MouseWithoutBorders.Common.CheckMemory()
at MouseWithoutBorders.frmInputCallback.helperTimer_Tick(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Timer.OnTick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Timer.TimerNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)
Anyone else experiencing this?
Seems a great idea. Now to see if it really works!
Is there anyway to get this to work with a corporate firewall. Perhaps some type of USB direct connection?
How does it compare to www.keyboard-and-mouse-sharing.com ?
Larson
Fantastic little program welldone Garage Guys
This software works!! I use it between several Win7 Pro desktops and WinXP home laptops. Copy/Paste is quick and simple between any two machines and the mouse runs from screen to screen enabling me to omit a mouse when updating machines and doing maintenance. Ya gotta love it when a plan comes together.
Nice! I like being able to drag and drop files across computers, but wasn't able to drag and drop folders. Would this be difficult to add?
I am using XP and it says it can not install and to contact the vender to see if it is a valid windows installer.