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]
@Adam Macleod: congrats you won the douchebag comment award for nitpicking something incredibly minor and then claiming it ruined the article for you.
Has anyone tested this with a Thinkpad? Synergy doesn't work with the trackpoint scrolling on Windows... does this?
Yeah, um synergy has been doing this across mac/linux/windows for YEARS.
this is a very fine work and i'm enjoying it immensely. would be cool if this is built into windows 8.
any comments about this vs. Input Director? Fairly happy with ID's implementation. Sometimes it drops on my school network where one computer is on wired and other on wireless, but it usually reconnects automatically and fairly quickly.
Mine just keeps timing out... is there a fix? both PCs are on the same network but it just wont link.
Didn't work for me w7 to xp &VV. no time to figure out.
This is great. Love it!
One humble suggestion - when you drag shortcuts or pointers of any kind from one machine to another, the program should make an attempt to update the shortcut to point to the UNC path instead of local path (e.g. change "C:\" to "\\computername\c$"). That way the shortcuts won't be broken.
Still, 4 stars :)
For anyone having install issues.. make sure your Firewall service is turned on till you finish installing
Excellent app. Nice to see these things coming to windows and working well on top of it.
My only suggestion would be to have an option that allowed you to see the remote screen as well on the computer the mouse jumps to. Would love this as my computer is on a different floor than my wife's.
How Do I find security code ? Cannot find "Settings". Can someone help ? Thx.
I can't make it work it sa about fiewall but I chack it is allow mouse w.b.
Any help thank
says 'cannot start mousewithoutbordersSvc' in xp
It would be great if it worked with OSX. I currently use Synergy to connect XP and OSX, but it can be buggy at times with copy/paste.
I would forgo the "easy of use" for multiple OS support as it seems like a more likely senario then having multiple windows desktops side by side.
Either way, it looks impressive. Well done!
What an impressive and elegant software solution. Wow!