October 01, 2003
ShareKMC and Synergy
I see someone posted on Scoble's blog about Synergy as an alernative to ShareKMC. Some people find Synergy to be a better match for how they work. You may want to check it out if you've tried ShareKMC and found it wasn't to your liking.
The two programs are similar although Synergy is designed with cross-platform support in mind and I wrote ShareKMC just so I could use the Tablet PC with my Windows boxes.
Both apps enable you to share the text clipboard between machines and control the cursor on the Tablet PC with the mouse on a desktop. However, ShareKMC also allows you to copy/paste images between machines. I use this all the time to capture screenshots, paste into OneNote or Photoshop, and mark them up.
Here's a screenshot of MSN.COM I captured on the desktop and pasted into OneNote on the Tablet PC. I tried copy/pasting the highlighted part of the webpage shown here with Synergy and ShareKMC into Word.
Now here's the selected part shown in this screenshot copy/pasted into Word using Synergy:
and here's the same contents copy/pasted into Word using ShareKMC:
As you can see, the current version of Synergy (v 1.0.14) only copies clipboard text.
I'd really like to show the screenshots in OneNote, but I'm not too sure if I should since OneNote is still in Beta. OneNote has several features that make archiving my development work very pleasant. The OneNote launch is soon, so I hope to put together a set of screenshots that illustrate how I use it in my development work. Or maybe someone knows if it's OK to post the screenshots now?
Anyway, there are some other differences between the two programs that I should point out too. Maybe I can put together a brief discussion of these tonight. Hmm.
Loren,
That was me.
I should be clear: I still like ShareKMC, and it has been a very useful tool for me. Thanks for all the hard work on it.
In fact, I just went and tried the new version of ShareKMC, and the mouse lag performance problem I had in the prior version seems to be all fixed now. Kudos!
One thing that I would really like to see in ShareKMC is the 'mouse off the edge of the screen' display switching like Synergy has. To me, this feature is a huge time saver. I can move the mouse subconsciously, but I can't reach for a key without breaking my stride.
And I'm quite excited to see any Tablet-specific features, like special hooks for OneNote.
Thanks again. I'm looking forward to see how ShareKMC evolves.
Posted by: Adam Duggan on October 1, 2003 08:42 PMErr... isn't OneNote technically released already since partners and MSDN subscribers already have it. And everyone who visits the Office 2k3 website can see how it works?
Is there still an NDA attached to it?
Posted by: Marauderz on October 1, 2003 09:11 PMGood point. I'll get something ready.
Well, now that I've learned that Microsoft has their own ShareKMC-like utility I'll try to make a more generic posting that shows the concept of how I copy information back and forth rather than discusses how I use ShareKMC in particular.
In light of Microsoft's utility, I'm glad I haven't spent any more time on ShareKMC. There are lots of other things to work on.
Posted by: Loren on October 3, 2003 01:16 AMWhat utility would that be? If it's the one I'm thinking of it doesn't natively share clipboard, only keyboard/mouse. Your program OTOH is available to all, and does support sharing the clipboard. So please don't abandon it! :)
Posted by: Mark on October 3, 2003 11:33 AM