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!"

Comments

Chrome OS + Android?

[Anonymous Freak]

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.

Tasks

[TheMeuge]

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?

Serialization

[Spikeles]

"The app works by taking a photo of your computer's screen, and, using pattern recognition algorithms, it ascertains what program you are currently running and the document you have open."

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.