Saturday, September 10, 2011

"Mouse without Borders" utility from Microsoft Garage (Software KVM + Shared Clipboard + Files) - Think "Input Director/Synergy" from Microsoft [Note: Prototype and free for non-commercial use only)

Next at Microsoft - Microsoft download from The Garage: 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 PC’s 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.

..."

This is a utility like Input Director & Synergy. It lets you share your mouse/keyboard across machines, has a shared clipboard, shared locking, easy file transfer, remote screen capture, etc. What's different is that it's much easier to setup and configure. It's really drop dead easy to install and configure.

Here's some snaps from the install and after;

SNAGHTMLe68aa3e

SNAGHTMLe6abeb8

image

SNAGHTMLe805c7d

SNAGHTMLe7f6f9f

One thing to note: During the initial configuration, when you're connecting to different machines via the getting started wizard process, a computers name might get cut off and there's no indication of that in the UI. I kept trying to connect to a machine and it was timing out and not working. I thought it was a firewall, VPN issue or something. Nope. I was just missing a trailing "p" from the machine name I was trying to connect too... Doh!

So far it seems to be working fine and just as advertised.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Synergy – Finally after three years I gave it a try (and must now accept a –5 debuf to my geek cred)
Synergy - Mouse/Keyboard Sharing Utility for Across Different OS's

3 comments:

Don Kitchen said...

Now, if there were an OS X version that would make it 10x more useful! Synergy has this but it has always been a bit of a pain and buggy (for me).

Anonymous said...

+10000 to OSX. Synergy is horrendous. Please someone create a nice, 1-step, simple UI version of synergy so I can actually BUY it.

Ed Terry said...

Mouse without Borders is amazing. I can't believe how much more work I can do simply by using this program.