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'Cut and Paste' Is Out, 'Pick and Drop' Is In
Roland Piquepaille writes "How do you exchange a file with a colleague or a photograph with a family member? Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it. Now, imagine yourself in a meeting, picking a file on your PDA with a digital pen and using the same pen to drop it on your friend's laptop screen. This is exactly what Jun Rekimoto and his team at Sony Interaction Laboratory have developed with their 'pick and drop' technique. BBC News looks at this project in Digital pen takes on mouse. Because it's based on cheap and existing components, such a system might be released in the near future, though Sony hasn't announced any plans to do it. You'll find more details and pictures in this overview."
This is a great step towards a more social use of computers. Instead of being bogged down with components and using hardware to move files around, it looks as though presenters will be able to quickly move through lectures or presentations without having to mess around. This seems much more seamless to me, and natural. Imagine gaming with the pick and drop scenario. I'm an amateur game designer and this is opening a whole new field of dreams for me... like maybe a better way to interract with film, in theatres, or the advent of much better interactive social gaming.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This sounds like what Tom Cruise was doing in Minority Report with those fancy computer gloves.
To me it just seems like another one of those novelty items. On the other hand, if they can get it to be as robust and enough mem like thumb drives, they could really take off.
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
Will sony open source it?
Will MS support it?
Will they give these pens out for free?
Will anyone actually use it?
May the Maths Be with you!
The question is, how long before 'pick and drop' is patented and no one else can use it without paying exhorbant liscencing fees.
What's sad about the above statement is it's not meant as humor.
Isn't this what mac's have been doing for several years now?
A business card pre-encoded with the contact information for its owner would be cool. Hand someone your card, they touch it to their PDA and hand it back.
Other more permenant uses would also be cool, get train schedules (including changes due to repairs (Those in NYC know just how important that detail is) at the station with a quick touch.
paul reinheimer
'pick and drop' sounds much better than 'cut n paste'
geeky.
I'm not going to give up on the usefulness of my Cue Cat just yet.
I don't know about your friends but I've got some real winners who just keep forwarding until the original info is nested 40 layers deep. argh!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
How long will you have to keep your "pen" connected for the data to be transfered. If you're going to have to hold your hand there for a while for bigger files you mind as well just use other methods of data transfer.
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
see this slashdot article for insight, needless to say slashdot keeps feeding him while he steals other peoples content and reposts it as his own
I've just confined its use to nasal maintenance. Sometimes an added roll step is required between the pick and drop steps. It sounds like these guys have just taken this concept and run with it.
This thing'll be used to drop porn on the board room's projector during a meeting, a'la Fight Club, or will be used to write nasty things about the presenter, who would probably be facing the audience rather than the screen...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I wonder how this works, and how the PDA would differentiate between more than one stylus. The only solution I can think of is there would need to be some sort of data storage capacity in the pen. They already charge you $10-$40 for a piece of plastic shaped like a pen, who knows how much it will cost when it has a miniature hard drive and wifi connectivity in it.
I suppose that someone should play devil's advocate and point out that this will revitalize the old "dirty disk" transmission vector for virus's and other malware. Where it use to be, "Don't put that disk in your PC, its got a virus on it", now it'll be "Don't touch me with that thing, its dirty!".
Subsequent invention of a small, slip-on firewall is pending...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
I really like the idea behind this because it targets a specific audience that will really benefit from it: i.e. people who have to use computers to work, but don't want to know how they work.
Sure it won't be as efficient as cut + paste (won't work on remote machines for e.g.), or as powerful + customisable as a perl script, but for day-to-day needs of people who don't have or want a clue this may be a step further to making computers invisible (kinda like the taps and sinks and washing machines we're so used to when we want water)
How do you exchange a file with a colleague or a photograph with a family member? Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it.
No. That's what the "attach" button is for. I've always found cut & paste into an email to be quite dodgy.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
I didn't read the article (Yet, I swear!) but if (as is often NOT the case on slashdot) it turns out to describe what the description says this sounds great.
I have often thought of the stagnation of the mouse/keyboard as inptu devices in computing, it seems weekly there is some crazy new way of doing things proposed but most mouse changes are simple iterative improvements (adding buttons, removing the mechanical ball, etc) but a pointer that could transfer data with a strong metaphor like the description gives would be a revolution in computer-human interaction.
Of course it would have to be universally standardized, and would require standard data formats accross platforms. So it actually won't work that great. Of course if you have all SONY, MS, or equipment it will work great... but I bet the "standard" application will be about as good as cut-and-paste is in X between a GNOME app and an old Mosaic app.
come on Michael do your homework
Roland Piquepaille story spammer
What the hell is the difference? Seriously. Now instead of using programs already implemented and functioning, we'll have to carry around a little pen with some memory or bluetooth or some other technology built in? Thus slowing down bootup time, adding more drivers to deal with, and potentially more flaws? I love how the article says "this is very intuitive..." Shit guys, cut & paste is intuitive cuz we've been doing it the better part of 20 years, now you want to 'shift the paradigm' (TM).
Sony should have seriously sat back and said, "ya know, it isn't broken and it doesn't need to be made any better right now, we have better things to spend money on." But noooo, instead Joe Jackass VP said "Hyuk, I wanna touch my friends laptop and have my files automagically pop onto their computer."
And holy hacking batman, this is a whole new world of identity/property theft.
schild
editor, f13.net
Ah, for the days of sitting in Dad's lap, watching HeeHaw, admiring the cowgirls.
-Laz
What does this do that I can't do with cut&paste?
When i need something on another computer, it's always a file anyway, which I can put on my LAN (Like 1GB+). This just seems like a waste of time when we already have a simple way of doing it.
So now my stylus will be able to store data and copy it to another device? A "smart" pointer?
I read that as equating to $$$ when I lose the bloody thing.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
That would be cool!
No, typical interfaces used to exchange information are impractical or clumsy. Well designed interfaces are not. Back before my Palm died I used to use beam-it to exchange files with other palm owners using the IR link. While the user interface was far from optimal, it was far from being impractical or clumsy.
Setting up a "pen manager server" just so I can exchange files is impractical and clumsy.
Best quote in the BBM article:
Dr Russell Beale, of the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham in the UK, said it was "toys for the boys".
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I still like "Xerox and throw". . .
"When the pen tip comes close to the screen of another device, a shadow of the attached object appears on its screen. Tapping the pen tip instructs the 'pen manager' server to copy the file to that location." I can't tell if the pen actually is screen location sensitive, or if it just sends the file to the destination machine? In other words, is it actually a copy and paste across two computers, or is it just a clunky way to send files?
Given the Sony approach to a device that has a unique ID that can be tracked through some kind of communication, I don't know why they don't simply take the opportunity to stuff the "pen" with the data. The demo talks about handheld to handheld, so it's not likely to be huge amounts.
In either case, the device is an intermediary, that could be built into anything most people have with them at all times. Cellphone, for example.
Check out the paper he submitted at CHI. Also the BBC has a story about this at this address.
In short, the pen doesn't actually store the file, but uses a third server to mark and notify which file should be copied to where...
You have to physically carry the data from point A to point B
You have to hand the data to the recipient, so both of you have to be space-time coincident
This will just add another step in the old one-upmanship communication chain:
"I need a copy of that."
"Can I fax it to you?"
"Can you email it to me?
"Do you have a web site where I can drop it?"
"Here, just drop it on my PDA"
Feh.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Isn't this what OBEX was designed for ? OBEX over IRDA or BT sounds like a lot less hassle to me.
I have done extensive research into this subject after discovering it, and I'd like to offer some more information:
Here is the concept of the 'pick and drop' technique, which was demonstrated last April in Vienna, Austria, at the CHI 2004 conference.
Rekimoto and his team also developed the 'pick and beam' approach, suitable for lectures. You select an object on your screen and you drop it on a dashboard.
You'll find photographs illustrating the two techniques and some others at Sony Interaction Laboratory.
hump n' dump
fuck n' chuck
bound and gagged
Pick and Drop is very cool ... in case anyone is interested, we knocked up an audio-based pick and drop interface a couple of years ago inspired by Rekimoto's work. Cheesy videos and webpage available here, and the academic paper describing the work in more detail.
The idea is that you can use existing devices (like voice recorders, mobile phones, PDAs) that can play or record audio to capture documents and move them around. By playing the sound back to a device (e.g. a print server), it decodes the identifer and downloads it via the higher bandwidth network.
I prefer copy and paste. That way I won't lose the original data if I happen to screw it up.
And then the virus potential
Buy stock in Symantec now!
Gee Sounds Like what I do on my Mac with iChat and files.
I take a file, drag it over to iChat, drop it on the individual I wish to send the file to, he sees the file come up as an icon in his iChat window, clicks it and it downloads onto his desktop.
I'm really unimpressed with this, it's been done before. Granted it wasn't a wireless device, and the platform is different, but not THAT different.
--Remove chicken to e-mail
Only a matter of time til that picking and putting gives you more than you bargained for.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Several people posting seem to have the impression that this thing is like a USB thumb drive shaped like a pen. It is not a storage device, it is an interface metaphor. The actual data still has to move across a network. It is just a more fluid and intuitive (well fluid and intuitive is a matter of opinion) of telling the systems to transfer data. ie, instead of expilictly transfering the data from the PDA (via hotsync, ftp, nfs, whatever) the pen motion initiates an implicit transfer of data.
Why not fork?
you havent done any research, you are a story spammer, why dont you get a real job and stop stealing other peoples words and pictures to pimp your shitty advertising blog, try being honest
plaigarism is a disease, and copyright law still exists to protect authors from leechers and scum feeders like yourself
So what does the Sony pen do that a USB memory key doesn't, except:
1) Write on paper, and
2) Not use a standardized USB interface or driver?
I mean, it's a cute idea and all, but if you're going to be moving a little widget back and forth between computers, why not just use a memory key that works with every computer right out of the box, instead of some futuristic tinkertoy that only one company (or optimistically a HANDFUL of companies) supports?
Seems like a pain in the ass implementation to me.
It's simply an easier way of just moving data from one device to another without using:
1. Bluetooth/Wi-fi
2. Cables of any sort: LTP/Serial/USB/Fireware/ETC
3. PC-Cards:PCMCIA/CardBus/CompactFlash/Memstick.
It's like taking a 'wand' and magically sucking the data into it and then tapping on the screen and *POOF* your data is there. Bibbity! Bobbity! Boo!
I am pretty sure disney's got a patent on it, but, if not I'm filing!
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
history repeats
Back in '92 in a High School computer class after some serious concentrating on coding, I looked over to a friend's PC next to me, and instinctively tried to move my mouse cursor over to his PC to show him an error. At the time, I felt silly for doing that. In hindsight, my subconscious actions might have led to a similar innovation.
Now on a related note, I found that after hours of playing Castle Wolfenstein (back then), I had the urge to push on every brick wall I found to see if there was a hidden room behind it.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
fuck off elsewhere Roland with your spam
try flipping burgers as you are obviuously desperate for cash
Most bluetooth or IrDA cellphones support swapping business cards using the same standard (vCard) as PDAs and other IrDA compatible devices use. I've used my cellphone at conferences to beam business cards to and from all sorts of handheld gadgets.
It seems to me that one could avoid all the expensive hardware by simply basing this around USB keys and the cut-n-paste model.
Simple... write a utility to capture some key combo (like ctrl-p for 'picking') and automatically store the data on a USB key... Then, when you put the drive in another computer and hit 'ctrl-d' to drop, it pastes the file as normal, from the storage space on the USB key.
Seems simple enough to me.
So why use the pen at all .... why not use biometrics ... maybe fingerprints .... grab (pinch) a file and move it to the other guys machine .... you would just have to make sure that your finger print is readable on each end.
Wow ... like this is anything new? This concept has been around, and you can implement it in many ways (pen carries, direct pda-to-pda transfer, or network transfer in the background).
I'm not sure how this is different.
Ed Grossman, InformationWeek
...then you would not have to worry about loosing the pen :-)
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
Oh great, now BB will setup scanners to see what's on all of our digital pens. /* :) it's Friday */
Halliburton -- "Everybody owns a share"
You only use 2% of your DNA
So basically an item is selected then xfered to a "pen server" with the unique ID of the pen that selected the item attached to the object. Then next time the pen interacts with a screen, the pen server gets polled and whatever resource is currently in there for that pen gets put up on screen.
Seems like a lot of extra infrastructure to me.
Why not just place a small memory card inside the pen? When the pen selects an object, that object is copied into the memory space of the pen.
Then you don't have to worry about servers or a wireless network infrastructure. You could use a simple bluetooth setup to communicate between pen and pda/laptop/or other device.
Plus you could have like a fixed-object or long-term object stored in the pen, such as a business card or other contact information.
The only hurdles would be providing power to the pen itself. It'd probably wind up about the size of a typical ball-point pen, rather than the slender size of today's typical styluses (styli?) for PDAs.
Certainly the static objects could be implemented using something similar to rfid where the object is hard-coded and the rfid signal is enough to retrieve the information.
Marf.
A number of posters seem to have missed the point on how it is implemented (not surprising because that is hard to find in the articles). The key concept seems to be some shared space such as a server. The BBC article says:
"The 'pick and drop' system was developed using the Mitsubishi Amity handheld pen computer and a Wacom PL300 pen-sensitive desktop screen.
Pens are given a unique ID, which is readable by the computer when the pen is close to its screen.
When a person taps on an icon with the pen, the computer contacts a 'pen manager' server, via a fixed or wireless connection, and the object is attached to the pen, although the pen itself has no storage capacity.
When the pen tip comes close to the screen of another device, a shadow of the attached object appears on its screen.
Tapping the pen tip instructs the 'pen manager' server to copy the file to that location."
You mean just like CDs did ...? Or perhaps you mean like nurofen (tradename for ibuprofen, granted it's more widespread since the patent lapsed, but it didn't die). Maybe, you mean that it will fade away like ring-pulls ...
Just because something is protected by a patent doesn't mean that it can't be licensed reasonably. Rewarding good, genuinely innovative, ideas is OK in my book.
Of course, this is quite clever as it uses hardware as well as software and so can more easily be patented in places that restrict software patents (which is still true in Europe, whatever the press says).
pbhj
It seems like this is what I've been doing for years upon years with my mouse.
Macintosh in particular has had universal drag and drop for at least as long as I remember.
I've always found cut & paste into an email to be quite dodgy.
I've always found cut & paste to be an ugly description of moving files, period. The concept may work fine in things like word processors and image editors, which can be easily compared to similar non-digital activities. However, do you cut folders out of a file cabinet, or paste documents into another folder?
I don't understand why it would not have been just as easy to establish "move file" and "...to here" as the commonly-accepted file movement option instead of "cut" and "paste". I think it would have made more sense, especially with respect to the entire desktop concept realized by Apple and Microsoft. I would love to hear from someone with background in UI development and history on this subject, because even today it bugs the hell out of me.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I want to see you touch someone else's computer screen with your mouse pointer.
Clear, Dark Skies
The metaphor itself is a very powerful construct. The article talks about moving files between computers, but the "pointer" could be a much more powerful context-sensitive device. So, when pointing to a computer display, the inference might be "copy this data". When walking around Fry's, pointing at an item might be "deliver more information on this product". Or a similar action in a supermarket might mean "purchase this and deliver to the checkout or my home". The concept is interesting and extensible.
Which will inevitably lead to "piss and moan" technology when the file takes forever to transfer due to low bandwidth, or loses link half-way through, or just errors out completely. Yay!
I wonder how hard it is to maintain the "user has clicked and is now dragging" event while jumping edges to another screen.
twitter.com/gravitronic
As we have already seen with the Linksys line of wireless access points, most people are not willing to go any further than plugging it in.
I think that this would be a much more refined use of technology if they had built a pen with a small flash chip and a lightweight (Bluetooth, USB-Wireless, etc) wireless interface into it. That would enable you to put the data directly on the pen and not have to have any infrastructure to support the communication other than the need for compatible devices.
Unfortunately, the device I have described would probably run about $300 USD on the market today. Most people just aren't willing to spend that much money on something that they can already do with the current technology. It only takes a few more minutes to send the data and requires a bit more technical expertise than they would need with this pen.
That's just my two cents.
No of course not, this is /.
Anyway, in the article they described a system where the pen was a dumb device with some method of being identified (perhaps RFID...I forget if they mentioned a specific one). The pen does not have any memory of its own so you are not (as the last fifty posts have described it) copying onto flash memory and then dumping it onto a computer.
You are just telling a program running somewhere "This data should follow this pen". When you place the pen somewhere else the program then sends the data along.
This reminds of the chess piece that Ed got in Cowboy Bebop. She touched the chess piece to the board, the board read a serial number and connected over the net to the player who had sent out the chess piece.
I still remember the good ol' days when I had to stand up to change TV stations. It's getting ridiculous. Barron Vangor Toth www.BarronVangorToth.com
How do you know that the person's file, business card, etc doesn't have a virus or spyware? Or, that it isn't also "taking" information from your computer (MAC address, IP address, etc) for later, malicious use such as spam where it just gathers addresses and info to submit to a database for bad usage. "I noticed this person was running an unpatched version of Windows XP, so we should use this IP / MAC address to hijack and transmit spam / viruses.".
What are the safeguards? I can't get my co-workers to stop automatically opening attachments that give them viruses, and that involves them actually opening somtehing.
What impact would this have, from a sysadmin point of view, on our workload. After a business meeting, there is a virus outbreak that we need to contain because a "dirty" pen touched one of our screens and gave us a virus, or worse yet, ganked our documents that weren't meant for them.
I prefer to make it a little harder to allow people to put or take things from my computer. This could be a cool idea, but I think it needs work.
(Pick It and Flick It)
I use Tokens to exchange any size files with my family and friends. So, I can e-mail a Token that contains a reference to some videos and pictures (the size of which easily exceeds the size of an e-mail attachment). The receiver can redeem the Token. No more fiddling with sending CDs through the mail with the latest pictures and videos of the kids. For more information or to try it out:
http://www.creo.com/tokens
So i want to send a file to a friend in say Canada:-
* Pick file up using pen
* Buy stamps and envelope
* Mail pen to friend
* fried puts on screen
What a fucked up system,
Becuse cut and paste is limited to one computer whereas pick and drop could do one computer or numerous _devices_, in theory. As long as everything was compatible.
I don't have a TV now, but that's ok. The shows in my mind are almost ALWAYS better...
One must wonder why they chose a pen. I don't think I've ever owned a pen that picked stuff up and let me carry it across the room... I usually use my hands for that (pick and drop gloves ala Minority Report?)
The problem is, of course, how would this work with a desktop machine? Or something that isn't a tablet device?
I could be optimistic and say that one day in the future we'll all be walking around with regular ball-point (or some other fancy new kind of ink-delivery mechanism) pens with some flash memory and WiFi/Bluetooth/whateverthehellwe'reusing in them, allowing us to walk up to train station timetables and snip off the bits we need, or go to information kiosks and pick up the location of the computer store...
...but then it seems like even something supposedly as simple as drag & drop still isn't even consistent. Maybe instead of inventing new metaphors, we could concentrate on making the best use out of the ones we already have. If you want to take a look at something that uses drag & drop effectively, take a look at Rox. It's editor allows you to both open and save files by dragging and dropping them. Cute, if not rather isolated...
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
Well, if they'd expand this idea ot to something like a Bluetooth pen that acted as a key drive that i didn't keep having to conencting and disconnecting, it'd be worth it to me (assuming that the local computers supported it). Double-click on the desktop and a shelf appears with your stored files that are on the pen drive in a stack. Drag and drop them on or off your shelf and have the shelf disappear once done. maybe control click with a button on the pen to automatically copy a clicked file to a pen and control click to deposit the last file on the local desktop. As an IT guy, i have my little key drive with all the various support files on it and I'm sick of having to climb under the desk to plug it in, and then have to click on several buttons to be able to disconnect it again (requiring me climb back under the desk to physically unplug it again).
Another way of making small portable computers into "must have" devices. I take it that the pen contains a the address of its machine and a key for accessing the clipboard of that machine so that the other pc can contact said machine. I guess the pen has to behave like a wireless mouse, but I don't suppose that it needs memory as well. Otherwise it would be a very bulky pen. Maybe the Japanese think of it as an electronic caligraphy brush instead.
Since they just cancelled sales of the Clie in the US and EU how are we supposed to "pick" a file from my PDA and "Drop" it on my friends Laptop?
Before you go about saying that this will be used on all sorts of items, not just Sony Clie's, Let me point you to Sony's track record on coming up with innovative new stuff and having it widely adopted. Shall we run down the list?
Beta
Minidisc
Memory Stick
DVD Camcorder
I'm sure there are Lots more, Sony makes everything under the sun in thier OWN version of products.
they seem to be all about innovation, but innovation dies if no one adopts it.
moo.
I had just learned to say 'Cut and Paste' and now the change it all around :(
the second a cure for the common cold is ;)
another solution in search of a problem. i already got enough digital crap on my Bat Utility Belt...
I'd have to say:
Sony will patent the device and charge substantial license fees to other manufacturers to make them.
Of course this will be pocket change to MS and they will pay the fees and embrace the technology. Look for MS to add "innovations" which only work when the pen is used on MS-based PDAs, cellphones and PCs. Microsoft will try to patent these so Sony and others cannot legally implemetn them.
No bloody way will the pens be given out for free. More than likely they "given away" with other hardware (probably Sony-only, but perhaps some other brands later) but the cost will really be built into the bundled price.
If Sony doesn't try to excessively hoarde the IP then it'll catch on--it's a really cool idea.
Sony does show some promise however--they have embraced Linux on the PS2 and more recent products so they have some interest in Free SOFTWARE. I'm quite confident that they'd fully cooperate in making such a device work with Linux.
The question remains however on what they think of Free HARDWARE (Free in the "libre" sense rather than "gratis"). You'd think they'd learn from the Betamax videotape format, however they have persisted to some degree in repeating the same mistakes. How widely deployed is their "memory stick" technology beyond their own products? Next to nonexistent compared to CF, SD/MMC, etc. Now they've invented yet another format for their PSP portable gaming/multimedia device.
I've had a concept like this on my personal site for months. studio saynuk
How about just holding your PDA near his and pressing a button and having it "beam" your business card to them?
"But, Dr. Evil, that already happened."
How about holding your PDA up to a kiosk and getting a schedule "beamed" to it?
"But, Dr. Evil, that already happened."
Yes, folks, this has been built in to just about every handheld computer made in the past five years, though it's been an uphill battle getting Microsoft really compatible with Palm... they seem to have pretty much made it work in PPC 2002.
How is this substantially different from what bluetooth is supposed to do? I click the icon, see all units within reach, pick one, and send an object to that unit. Even works with non-pen-enabled devices.
.. altough, in MSN Messenger (yeah, so shoot me), it's painfully slow .. I'd like to be able to assign my own proxy...
Or for longer distances, your preferred instant messaging protocol has a feature for instant peer-to-peer transfer
This sounds similar to what Spring created for Macs.
Kinda reminds me of the key fobs that the Victorians used in D.A.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
Now when I lose my pen, I'll be losing both a pen AND my data!
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The idea of requiring connectivity to a shared "pen manager server" and unique IDs on all pens, is so much more complex and messy than just sticking the data in flash inside the pen. Their solution is worse than this "mistaken assumption".
Cut & Paste, Drag & Drop, Pick & Drop, Publish & Subscribe. Its all the same thing only named differently so they can patent it as their own.
Being able to only carry around one file is pretty limited. Why not add some extra information, like contextual (pr0n may go to the home computer but not to the main screen projector) or another sort of intuitive action, such as assigning a name or symbol to the file and drawing it when I get to the place to drop the file off. Maybe if I can't remember the name I'll write a question mark and the UI if it exists will bring up a list of available files for me to choose.
I understand this is mainly targeted at pda's, but you can accomplish exactly the same thing using an IRC server and xchat. If I want to give someone a file, I just drag it from ROX to the nickname in the channel we are in. The dcc launches automatically. Dunno if xchat does the same in the windows version, but I'm sure other windows clients would. Of course you can do the same thing use a public network share as well.
Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it.
If you're a retard, maybe. I usually COPY and paste. But maybe that's just me...
nah with kids nothing will ever beat the pick and eat paradigm.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
What he is trying to say in simpler terms is that object oriented (every OS we deal with) is like playing "Go Fish" for a file because all of the icons are neatly spaced apart, and there is no real distinction between them. They all look the same to me.
"I open the folder and all I see are little boxes. Little boxes everywhere. WHICH ONE LAUNCHES THE PROGRAM!"
If anyone remembers optical pens, this sounds remarkably similar idea - just different implementation. And it won't replace mouse since it's totally impractical for PC - most people get big screens so they can sit far away from them. Now, I'd consider it for a laptop perhaps, although good trackball would beat it without any problem - but those are gone - why?
I knew I should have applied for that patent. At the time I was thinking patents are bad/wrong, but then again, so is working all day and still being broke..
TallGreen CMS hosting
Maybe they should get cut and paste working in the first place before they start developing some new technology. In Linux, copying and pasting images between applications doesn't work at all. On Windows it only half works (for instance Outlook can only paste uncompressed bitmaps)
This will open a whole lotta more security issues. Who's pen you want your computer to touch, who is allowed to drop the files from your pen, what if you loose your pen or find a pen, etc, etc
Disclaimer: As a Mac user, the "cut and paste" metaphor for copying files around does not exist on my primary platform.
If I want to send a photograph to my mom (for example), I've usually navigated to the folder where I keep the photos so I can preview them in the Finder. When I find the one I want, I switch over to my email program, compose a new message, then drag that photo into the mail window. Done.
Breakfast served all day!
Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would probably Copy and Paste, not Cut and Paste, since I tend to want to keep my copy. But when it comes to e-mails, I usually use attachments which require no cut, copy, or paste. But maybe I've been doing it all wrong all these years.
Will we need pen shaped condoms?
Like it says in the subject line:
This is old news- the Newton did this. This is how it managed the analog to cut-n-paste. It worked quite well, a good setup. My only complaint was that there was no provision for having more than one item clip'd, but then again, sans extra software, it's the same deal on today's desktop OSes for the most part.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Cutting and pasting to attach files? How absurd! I simply drag and drop. Why the hell would anyone want to use cut and paste for this? With KMail I can even drag an image from an external webpage and onto the composer windows.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If I recall correctly, Timbuktu allowed me to do this in the 1990's
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I had to work on a terrible web client some years ago, and called my interface Pick and Plop ... strangely enough, management did not seem to mind.
Best humor I can manage today, nazis^Wmoderators.
Infuriate left and right
'pick and drop' sounds terrible. They should call it 'pick and place'
This is sort of silly. The pen is not the transport mechanism. Both computers simply retrieve the file from the same place. This implies that both systems already had access and rights to it. You're just copying the URL to the resource on a file server somewhere. You can do that with copy and paste in an email, but that's not what pasting a photo in an email is, at all.
This is a lot different then walking up to a stranger at a trade show, and having your PDAs swap business cards over IR. That is actually the transfer of new data.
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
looking forward to being able to pick and place the goatse guy on your boss's monitor, and he doesn't know who did it, because you're all carrying pens?
"Similarly, teachers can prepare lecture notes (a list of texts and graphic elements) on their PDAs, and attach them one-by-one during their lectures." - From Jun Rekimoto's paper
They're dreaming if they think that schools are going to have the money to replace chalk and whiteboards with touch screens. Furthermore, what's wrong with transparencies or powerpoint presentations? I'd even argue that buying tablet PCs for each teacher would be less expensive than installing big touch screens in each room and purchasing pens and palms for each person.
Slightly offtopic but this story reminds me how far the linux "desktop" still is from happening. We're still far from getting even the very basic copy/paste-functionality straight (there was a story on here recently...) and drag'n'drop tends to be more attempt-to-drag'n'curse in most situations.
I'm just ranting because just a minute ago I was trying to copy/paste a block of friggin' plaintext from mozilla to an editor.
Guess what, the block of text was too long (try it, highlight a whole webpage and attempt to paste...) so I had to drag it over paragraph by paragraph.
My message to those involved with gnome/kde: Screw all the bloat and eyecandy. Go back and fix the very basics. Thanks.
The Mac zealots are going to have a field day with this one.
Sorry to break it to you, but Mac users have been happily dragging and dropping since 1984.
This also looks like another piece of sony pseudo-science which really doesn't mean anything.
From what the article says, this looks like little more than cut-and-paste via bluetooth/802.11/ethernet. So here's how it would work:
User taps screen with special 'pen'. Host computer determines what is being tapped, records the unique ID of the pen, and copies it to a special clipboard.
Clipboard starts broadcasting the availibility of an item and the ID of the pen via something like Apple's Rendevous.
User taps the recieving device with the pen. It records the ID of the pen, and looks via Rendevous for an item with the matching Pen ID.
Recieving device connects to host, downloads clipboard contents, host stops broadcasting.
Now, the tricky part comes from the fact that most devices do not have touchscreens. Fortunately, the accuracy of such a touchscreen wouldn't need to be really high, and the pen ID could be handled in a similar manner to how wacom tablets identify the various tools and styli.
All in all, I'm not 100% sure if this would be practical. The costs of adding a touchscreen to every device are just too high for something so simple. Why can't we just add another option - copy to network -- paste from network.
There's also the security concern. This makes it really easy for someone to sneak into your office while you're not looking and steal files.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This is a great idea. I have often been confounded by wanting to "cut and paste" files, text, or whatever, only to realize, right after the cut, that where I want to paste is actually a different computer. I pop back and forth so much, I forget where I am versus where I want to be.
I wish there were KVM's that had some sort of clipboard functionality.
I sent this same basic concept in as (part of) my entrance paper to Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science a few months back, and I had never seen this idea or anything like it. Yes, this is perhaps irrelevant, but I'm slightly annoyed. Especially considering I was turned down to go to Mass Academy and apparently the idea may have marketable potential.
they better patent it before Microsoft or SCO calim they innovated if first. Cause you know they will, and then there will be a new chapter in the second edition of the brown book, how a single developer from microsoft invented the pick and drop, while watching her three year old play with a stuffed animal.
This is just Drag 'n Drop, hellooo-ooooo!!
Do we all have collective amnesia? You can pick up a picture and drop it on your freind's laptop screen? Wow! I could never do that! Unless you count Apple's PowerTalk circa 1990. Or any of the MILLIONS OF OTHER DRAG N DROP ENABLED APPS ON THE MACINTOSH YOU UNBELIEVABLE CRETINS.
Please think before posting an article and do not force me to type in all caps again.
Sounds great.... but remember Sony's habit of making a big technology advance then castrating it.
Based on past experience they'll allow you to copy the object from A to B, but the copy on B can't be moved anywhere else. (even if you created it). Either that or they'll make is so expensive that nobody will use it.
Gotta love Sony.
(Hmm... is that +1 cynical or -1 cynical?)
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
There's no reason this has to be more complex than HTTP.
The pen doesn't have to be mass storage. Just put a radio/IR receiver on it. When it touches an object on the screen, the PDA it touches transmits a message to the pen: a URL for the object touched (e.g. <http://xantspda/hugefile.pdf>). Simultaneously it places the object, hugefile.pdf, on a web server (we'll assume the server is public and therefore anyone can pick it up, but point-to-point security for this is actually not hard at all to implement; I just want to ignore it for now).
The point is, the pen only knows what URL it picked up, and the PDA with the object to be transferred is solely responsible for serving the object over the network.
When the pen contacts another PDA screen with the same software and transceiver as the first one, the pen sends the URL down to the screen, and that PDA initiates a transfer of the URL.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Mac OS X. It's called "Apple Speakable Items."
I don't know how good it actually is, though, because I leave it turned off for the reasons sydb (who also responded to your comment) expressed.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I can see this being very usefully. When I was doing cross platform development, I was continually wanting to copy data between computers. But not always whole files. I would have to manually copy to to server and copy it back. This mostly meant saving the original document or file and then when opening it again coping the text or part of image that was needed out.
I had a KMV Switch. It seemed so simple at the time to just have some memory in the KMV that I could send and receive from as easily as copy and past with the key board.
A key grabber on the keyboard could do this for text, but not other data types.
Hell, I like the idea of a keyboard with about a 5 X 80 character display that I could take notes on comfortably and just plug into the computer later and copy them to. But it has been a few years since I went to school. You could not get all your books electronicaly. A laptop is worth it to drop a couple heavy text books. Jim
...would be disconnected operation. Neither machine would need to be networked. Networking isn't always trivial, try getting HTTP data off a machine behind a seperate NAT, or down a congested line.
It would definitely be cool to transfer stuff between your PDA and phone, or phone and computer, or whatever, using this technique.
Hopefully the free software community will jump on this one and implement it, fast, before SCO patents it and starts suing Sony, Xerox PARC, all the Linux users, Microsoft, Apple, the RIAA, and Bill Cosby for using their valuable intellectual property that they invented 100 years ago (but somehow the patent is only filed right now, and in Darl's mind, that's perfectly ok)...
But seriously, this is an intriguing idea. It would be cool to see it work.
Did anybody notice the interface is identical to X selection and middle-mouse paste?
its dated 1997.. 7 years ago.
the used devices look dated, but for that time these things probably rocked.
To me some of the used devices look like a kind of prototype, but I am not familiar with all handheld devices for sale in 1997..
with the current available technologies, different approaches can be used to achieve the same as what these guys did.
This is really very cool. It seems a lot like how the Plan9 OS is able to treat items on the network as if they are local. Its interesting to see someone else recognize the value of the concept.
Of course, I worry about the security of ubiquitous networking.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
I really liked 'cut and paste'.
How long until it stops working? Is there an official cutoff date?
combine this new technology from Sony with this:
http://www.5dt.com/products/idataglove501.html
and throw in some of this:
http://www.universaldisplay.com/foled.htm
and you end up with a REAL version of the interface seen in Minority Report.
pretty f'n cool if you ask me! I just hope I get to play with it in my lifetime!
"I think, therefore I get paid."
A friend and I will occasionally share funny or strange images we find on the web via iChat using a well-developed form of drag-and-drop: I grab the image from the Safari window and drag it to his icon in iChat. Boom... the image zips to him with no intermediate saving of the file on my part. If I want to send him the URL, I just grab the location bar icon and drop it on iChat. Apple is light-years ahead on this.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
By Click and Clack's Russian chauffers, Pickop and Dropov.
He's an idiot.
Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it.
Because you are a moron who thinks email is a filesystem.
It really isn't hard to get web space somewhere, throw a file there and email a link.
Finkployd
Looking for opinions:
Wouldn't this be an easy way to transfer virus's or trojan horses to people's devices? You're on the subway with your PDA and someone taps your shoulder with their finger, you look the other way for just a second while someone else taps your screen with their pen. You don't even know it happened. Possible?
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Like a URL, then? I didn't follow the link, but I bet you could combine tinyurl with file hosting to get the same effect. One uses a web form to upload the file, and a tinyurl could be created automatically, which you could then email to the recipient.
For me, the memories are Duke Nukem 3D and the build engine. I'd play so much, and build (shitty) levels so much, that when I actually got out of the house, I'd define everything in my field of vision in terms of build sectors. It got to a point that I was looking at some building and wondering how they managed to build a room above another room, but yet allow me to look into both at the same time. (If you're familiar with the d3d version of build, you'd know what I'm talking about)
Sad really.
-- All views expressed in this post are mine and do not
-- reflect those of my employer or their clients
Yugo Nakamura of www.yugop.com fame has been showing video of this technology in some of his conference talks since early 2001. It's been on sony's website since at least then as well. Still damn cool though.
In all honesty, and not trolling here, who here thinks this technology will never pick up due to sony copyrighting it and charging outrageous fees to ensure no-one, except them, can use it.
I hardly see this as an "in" thing over copy/paste.
at least copy/paste is free, or if it does have a patent, no-one's bitching, or has claimed it as theirs yet *shifts eyes at microsoft holding a plate of technologies and munching down on them hungrily*
Anyone remember the little plug-in cards to transfer things to different screens in minority report? It'd interesting to see if it were possible to have thumb usb drives attempt something similar
While the technology is certainly "bleeding edge", it's too bad that the fundamental Drag and Drop metaphor they extended is a broken one to begin with.
The dragging part is fine, but the dropping part does not properly communicate state and context. That means, it's not clearly communicated to you what kind of objects are dropped where. Even on the desktop, dragging and dropping *anything* anywhere outside the standard file manager is pure guesswork.
Do you want to copy the file? Perhaps merge it to another one already open? Would you like to move it to the target? Is the target the PDA, or an application on its screen? How do you consistently communicate all this?
In addition, if performed across two PDA users, this also invades personal comfort zones by making *you* touch *their* screen with your stylus. Even spelling it out like this will feel "dirty" to some people.
There's plenty of other obstacles they come across, and certainly a few niches where this will be the Perfect Solution. And as some people already said, until that niche is found this is a solution seeking a problem. And no matter how they'd like to think so, inter-PDA file transfer is not it.
The future is more about finding and sharing than it is about pushing and dropping.
Jouni
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
...pick & drop? Heck we haven't even gotten the hang of cut-n-paste yet!
Young whippersnappers...
Then it will only work with sony devices. What's the point?
I don't care too much for having to "touch" the other person's screen. How about a system where I choose a file and make a throwing or tossing motion.
We could call it, I dunno, maybe "Pick and Flick."
like so many technologies before it, there is this ONE cool scenario that sounds like "ya, I gotta have that." But, in practice, that ONE cool scenario never comes up... more than once.
This is a good point. How does a company like Sony (or Apple, for that matter) make money inventing hardware and then making it "open architecture"?
Patents exist so that inventors may exploit their inventions with an advantageous time-lead or the right to license to others. Is there another model for how to do this so that inventors are actually motivated to come up with new stuff?
I suppose that charging exorbitant licensing fees so that nobody else can afford to compete is "bad," but that's a grey area...
"Anybody can change the world, but most people probably shouldn't." -- Marge Simpson