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Google and MIT Enable Task Transfer Among Devices
An anonymous reader writes "A new software app by Google, developed in cooperation with MIT, enables one-step task transfers between Android Smartphones and PCs. If you are like me, you transfer tasks from smartphone to the desktop the hard way at least once a day, so let's get together and crowd-poll Google to commercialize this app so it's as easy as taking a picture with our smartphone!"
Still, for about 70% of uses I think Dropbox would work more elegantly.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
...lets get together and crowd-poll Google to commercialize this app so its as easy as taking a picture with our smartphone!
Commercialise? Commercialise?!?
How about we get together and crowd-poll Google to release it under a FOSS license so we can take it and make it do whatever the fuck we want it to, and then share it with a couple million of our closest friends?
I'd ask the anonymous submitter to hand in their geek card, but I can't bring myself to believe they ever actually had one....
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
For those who can't be bothered to RTFA
Darn, I'd hoped from the title that there was live migration of running applications between phone and PC so getting back to the office was as easy as switching the current app over to the non-portable's VM. Oh, wait, this is still 2011, we don't have the displays for that mobile work yet. Nevermind folks, nothing to see here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"A new software app by Google, developed in cooperation with MIT, enables one-step task transfers between Android Smartphones and PCs.
This whole thing sounds geeky to me. I cannot think of a task started on a phone that I would like to transfer to a PC.
Please enlighten me...or else I will be one of those who will propagate the fact that Android *is* indeed meant for geeks.
Yah, I know, Chrome OS isn't a "desktop" OS, but I could see integrating this with "bookmark sync". Put one device to sleep, and when you wake any 'paired' device, it opens to the same thing. Google Docs, Maps, random website, etc. Chrome OS is a good candidate for this since it's nearly all web-based already.
I could also see Apple doing this with iCloud. Edit a Pages document on your iPad and put it to sleep, and when you get home and wake up your iMac, it has that document already open. Reverse, too. Have a web page open in Safari on your MacBook, put it to sleep, unlock your iPhone, and that same web page is right there.
Heck, Microsoft could do this between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, while they're at it... Pretty much anywhere the mobile and "desktop" are the same ecosystem.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
How about Google release a functional Tasks app for the Android which tens of millions will use, as opposed to this long-unneeded functionality.
Seriously... no dedicated Tasks app that works offline on Android? What in the world are they thinking?
They're saying it will probably only work for web pages, not native apps (unsurprising, since you can't run the native apps on your phone anyway, whatever file you have open may not be synced to your phone, etc.), but that's ok, because mumble mumble cloud mumble.
But it already exists for web pages, it's called a qrcode bookmarklet for your browser, and any qrcode scanner for your phone (which, unlike this Google-only gimmick, exist for platforms other than Android). And just like this, it's extensible to any other app as long as you can settle on a URI scheme for that app and get the devs to add a qrcode button.
Unlike this, it won't be fooled by misleading screenshots. (If this takes off, I'll screenshot a browser open to goatse, photoshop a hot pornstar in place of hello.jpg, and set that as my screensaver.)
FYI the qrcode bookmarklet I use is:
javascript:void(location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chld=M|2&chl='+location.href)
It sounds vaguely similar to the new feature in HP WebOS, where two devices only have to be tapped together in order to be synced. That's still only for phones and tablets, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it makes its way into PC's when the promised WebOS PC's appear in a few months.
I thought this type of transfer is baked into next week's HP Touchpad and webOS phones. Less of an innovation than catch-up for android.
I've already been doing this, at least for web browsing tasks, with Firefox Sync. It's really the killer feature I think Firefox has over anyone else.
That sounds like a post from TheDailyWTF.. print it out on a sheet, then take a photograph then paste it into a word doc. Why don't they actually do something innovative, like creating a cross platform VM that uses shared memory across multiple devices, so that apps and memory can move seamlessly across them?. Or maybe just implement some kind of serialization into apps. But nooooo.. They had to go and use SCREEN SHOTS and OCR.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
If plan9 would come to fruition then that's actually easy to implement. Since processes are files you could just zip it's little memory space over to a new compute node while it's running.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Mod parent up! (Though please don't put WTF and idiot in your subject, or you sound like a troll)
Why are we wasting our time with screenshots when this barcode technology has existed for ages. I'm actually surprised that QR codes haven't really taken off in the US--I guess if the iPhone doesn't support it, nobody cares.
Thanks for that bookmarklet--it'll come in handy.
Samsung put a similar - but somewhat limited - version in their own Android market. It involved installing software on Windows. On the phone you'd take a picture of the file or filer in explorer, and it would copy that to the phone (the actual file, not the picture).
Neat idea, but I don't use windows, so no use to me. Can't find it back on my Gingerbread phone, but with Froyo it was in the list.
I can wait the minor amount of time to update ED on what color my shit is right this second
Whoever moderated this informative should be banned from moderation forever.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This app is interesting, because it doesn't require the PC to know anything about the phone picking up its state, or that the transfer is happening. The phone needs only recognize the URI that the PC is displaying, using the phone's camera and the software.
But what about PC state that isn't in that URI? Like when the onscreen state is composed of more than one URI, like a single window with multiple frames each pointed at a different URL? Or like multiple windows, each pointed at a different URL? Some of which windows are hidden by more foregrounded windows, a fullscreen foreground window? How about all the local state of the PC that's not stored at a network location that a URI can point at, for the phone to retrieve?
What I'd like would be an app that registers the PC and the phone to each other, or rather to a remote registry server that can authenticate each of PC and phone. On either phone or PC press/click/tap something that sends the current state (of current foreground app, or all apps) to the server; on the other device of the pair tell it to pick up the state (or a subset). Or an ongoing "checkin" of state of both devices to the server, from which either device (or a new authorized device) can pick up state.
Indeed, that feature would be excellent for even a single device. When I close apps or shutdown a PC (or phone), to recover from a crash or to save power, when I'm back up I want to restore all my app states (especially open window positions and their contents - from the network or from files). I want to get last state, or a bookmarked "favorite" state from some previous time - even on the same device, but later. And I want to be able to grab state from remote devices I can't snap with a photo, like my desk in another part of the office when I drop into another office.
In Linux this would seem to be easy to implement for windows (which apps have which windows open in which positions), because X makes that state storeable and settable. The OS network stack could track the URLs retrieved by each app and register them, and (depending on the app) reset app windows to a stored URL. Other app state storage for retrieval would need app changes. But a revision to GNOME that installs tools in the toolkit available to all apps would make this easy for the next version of every app to implement. In Android I don't know; maybe the windowing or app widget toolkit makes it even easier. If not, then Android is new enough that a new version of the OS could offer these features. Google seems very interested in getting the features, because it's working on this camera based approach, so Google could put the version I describe into the OS.
--
make install -not war
Some of the suggestions such as "perhaps you were viewing your destination on Google Maps and want to transfer that to your smartphone" are already trivially easy from Chrome or Firefox. Using Chrome to phone I can transfer my Google Maps view to the phone with a single click. Using the phone to take a photo of the screen sounds like just another way to make an easy task hard for the sake of flashy use of technology.
this as: "Google and NSA Enable Data Mining Trojans Among Devices" ?
I read the article but it looks to me like they are just doing OCR on a URI to "capture" the link to an applet. It then wraps the link into an "icon". Am I wrong?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Well, it's probably only feasible with some type of virtualization. There's been a lot of work done on this in Java, mostly for parallel computing, but it's certainly possible to move a running Java process to another JVM on another computer. With mobile devices we now have the "why" so I think this will happen fairly soon. But it's kindof a hack. There's been work on global address space operating systems, such as Phantom OS, which has a single global address space. If you further abstracted that to be a single space across a cluster (or between a mobile and desktop set of devices) you could just basically move the process to a new address space. Obviously you have to connect it up to the new peripherals and network, so it's not just peaches and cream.
With plan9 and the compute nodes, the idea is that processes are always considered remote, there is no local, so it just makes it transparent by default. And then to connect up the peripherals, they have a file for that as well. So it makes it easy to think about and program, but probably not as efficient as a global address space.
Finally, stuff like IPv6 and service orientated architechures make this stuff more an exercise in networking than memory management. With IPv6 or an even larger network address space (maybe 256 bit), every process (in the world) could have it's own network interface and IP. Then you could just essentially move the whole thing, including the network endpoint, between devices. This could be done with a micro virtualization framework such that each process has a self-contained operating system. Of course, you're getting dangerously back around the circle to what Java does already ;)
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Funambol is an implementation of industry standards like SyncML, OMA-DM and others, which is why it works with everything from Nokia and Sony Ericsson feature phones to the iPhone. ActiveSync is a Microsoft abomination that should hopefully die out with Windows Phone and Nokia.