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]
Download Now [1.1mb]
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