I just gave Microsoft’s SharedView Beta a little spin. The program enables you to share a desktop or an application with others. It does more than this, but that’s the basics.
Not to waste any time I wanted to see how well ink was passed between the shared sessions. I was fairly impressed. The app does a wonderful job of passing ink from the “owner” of the session to others than have “joined” the session.
I tried sharing an InkGram within SharedView from a Tablet PC to a UMPC. At first, no ink I drew showed up on the UMPC although the app showed up just fine. Eventually after some resize events, the ink started showing up on the UMPC. Quite surprisingly the ink transfer was almost instantaneous. Very slick.
Then I tried going the other direction. I set the UMPC in “control.” I wanted to try inking on the page via the UMPC. It worked, although the ink was very, very, very slow to lay down. The result is ugly looking ink. I’m not sure if this was a UMPC issue or an issue with the app. I’ll try it on some other machines later.
In the following picture the top ink was drawn on the Tablet PC and the ink below the line was drawn on the UMPC and sent back to the Tablet. It’s definitely more faceted than the Tablet’s ink. Almost unintelligible.
One last point I’d like to make to the SharedView team: If you really want this to be amazing, you HAVE to develop a Mac version. You HAVE to. Not only do many of my contacts now have Macs–I know they’d get a blast out of me inking within a shared document :-). What better advertising is there for the Tablet PC?
PS: By the way, my passion for showing ink on the Mac extends into Windows Live Messenger too. Please, oh, please let me send ink to a Mac via Live Messenger. How hard can it be? Two weeks of work? hehehehe.
