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]
We have had this for years???
I use teleport for OSX!
This is sweet! Working great so far on my desktop with Win 7 Ultimate and laptop with Win 7 Home Premium. :)
Awesome job. It's the little things like this that make life easier.
Oddly this has a lot of the same problems synergy has for me... this isn't just synergy repackaged is it?
Installed it on my Win 7 Pro netbook and my Vista laptop, but it won't connect. I've tried linking them both ways and it just searches for a connection for a bit and then times out. I've made sure the program is allowed through both machines' firewalls, and they're definitely both running on my home network. The IP address it shows is different in the last digit depending on which machine is trying to establish the connection - would this make a difference? Anyone else having trouble connecting?
Adam Macleod: It's "loses", not "looses". The irony in your criping is amusing.
Embrace
Extend
Extinguish
en.wikipedia.org/.../Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
Thanks from Germany for these software! It is great!
This looks great, thank you for providing it.
Does it work under Direct X for games?
This was already invented... it's called Synergy.
This was already invented at least five years ago.
I like it, but it doesn't do me any good. I use Synergy because it's much easier to handle between work and home configurations. I have laptop that I like to remote control from my workstations, and it doesn't seem I can set up a profile or "easily" change between configurations.
What a great piece of software!I just installed a new server two days ago on my business and I needed something like this to switch between my workstation and the new server using the same Keyboard and Mouse
In case anyone's wondering, the equivalent software for OS X is Teleport:
www.abyssoft.com/.../teleport
awesome tool, keep it free and cool!
grait work from the garage... for nerds like me with many computers and screens its a awesome tool! good job
If this becomes cross-platform, I will be the happiest person on Earth. Being able to make my Windows and Ubuntu laptops finally play nice with each other would make it a glorious day indeed. Too bad it'll never happen.