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Windows 8 Introduces a New Cross-App Data-Sharing System
There's been a lot of attention to the way Windows 8 looks; reader aabelro writes with an interesting look at one way it behaves. The article begins thus: "Microsoft has created a new mechanism for sharing information between applications in Windows 8 called Windows Share. Apps can share text, bitmaps, HTML, URI, files, and other type of data, and the usage scenarios are numerous. For example, the app receiving the information can post it to Tweeter or Facebook[, making] it easy to post information to a social network without actually visiting it." Here's a short (video) explanation at MSDN, too.
are obsolete now?
I guess I won't watch it.
(Or you can download 312M)
When will MS work out that what we really want is a simple, stable platform, not more and more OS-integrated bells and whistles that, by the very nature of software itself, must introduce further bugs and resource consumption.
Not to mention all the wonderful opportunities this opens to script kiddies. Imagine having all your emails posted to Twitbook by the inevitable malware infection.
I would argue this is not a new idea. The same basic concept exists in Android as Intents.
this sounds a bit similar to dbus. just more desktop & social media oriented.
Well, this sounds almost exactly like BeOS's Negotiated Drag and Drop. I remember Leo Laporte doing an episode of (IIRC) The Screensavers where he showed the BeOS, and demonstrated this by dragging an unsaved piece of data between three or four applications and manipulating it in each. But, all I could easily find was this classic scene from a demo video demonstrating the concept between Tracker (the desktop application) and the Book application.
That's nothing like this system. Well, they're both generalized clipboards, but in different ways. In Publish and Subscribe, "changes to the original published document would be noticed and updated by the subscribers". In Share, the link between the source and target app dies off as soon as the data finishes transferring. No further updates are sent after the "paste" finishes.
Every time I get close to the meaning of your post it slips away from me. Are you worried about some sort of privilege escalation attack carried out by a malicious program sharing things? A larger code base basically always exposes more attack surface, so I don't see why somebody would bring that up unless there was particularly good reason (which I don't see here). Sharing seems user-initiated in all cases, so such an attack would be awkward. Ah, perhaps shared information could be inspected by a malicious background program, sort of like a keylogger for the clipboard? That has nothing to do with admin privileges, though....
Maybe I'm looking too hard. Perhaps your post is just what it looks like: "[words that say Microsoft is evil and will give me a metaphoric high-5 with some social acceptance]". If not, what precisely did you mean?
Seriously, it looks like the "Share with" feature in the Android browser as well(which leverages the Intent system).
Not saying it's a bad thing(I love the idea)...I just fail to see how this is a "New Cross-App Data-Sharing System"....heck, if Google tended to play this game as dirty as Apple and MS do, they'd probably be doing a software patent suit by now O_o
The "short (video) explanation" is an hour long. If you just want some demos, they start at about 10:33, 12:19, 14:14, and 17:44.
I've already got this in my CLI... it's called a pipe.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Looks more like DDE than OLE to me. Hopefully they've fixed the misfeature that makes the whole desktop lock up along with the sending program if the program that is supposed to receive the DDE request doesn't process it right away.
You just.. Please just stop using the $ in the Microsoft abbreviation.. I'm asking nicely. It makes it really hard to take your point seriously. I know it was all cool and shit a decade ago, but come on.
Thank you.
In the end, your application will tweet and use facebook with your friend's application while you can go and do something entertaining.
It's like buying two chess computers so they can play against each other while you go to the movies.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sounds great. So your wife can read posts like "Just opened gaybuttfucksex.avi in wmplayer.exe" "Rewound to 18:55 of gaybuttfucksex.avi" "Rewound to 18:55 of gaybuttfucksex.avi" "Enlarged 18:55 of gaybuttfucksex.avi to 250%"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's yet another publish/subscribe system, of course. The new thing will be that it's "social" or tied to every social network and advertising system within reach.
Hopefully it does not continue the Microsoft tradition of executing anything executable that appears in any data stream or comes in any data port. Microsoft has had trouble with that on everything from Word documents to USB devices.
OLE has the problem of having to run some other process's code in your own address space in order to read the data.
OLE never did that. If you were passed a COM object implemented by some other process, then your method calls would simply be marshaled across processes, in the same way as they are when you e.g. access Word from VBScript (between winword.exe and wscript.exe).
You do realize sharing the data this way requires explicit action from the user, right? He has to bring up the system menu and tap a button inconspicuously labeled "Share" on it, then select the target app.
It kinda helps to RTFA and watch the linked video, so you have some idea what it actually is before posting (this also applies to moderators, BTW). Hint: it's exactly what we've had for 3 years now on Android, only there it's called "intents".
Indeed, the whole point of this feature is to otherwise sandbox the apps completely so that they don't get any access to user's file system outside of their sandbox by default, not even read access (they can get access to standard folders such as "Documents" and "Pictures", but this requires an explicit confirmation from the user). Without such sandboxing, it's very typical for desktop apps to all run under the same account (on all platforms), and therefore their config files - with passwords, history, and other interesting stuff in them - are completely exposed. With a sandbox, like in Win8 (or WP7, or iOS, or - partially, if you forget /sdcard - Android), you need some way for apps to communicate for those scenarios where a task involves passing data from one to each other - and this thing is what enables it while, again, requiring explicit user interaction for every such communication.
Too bad. ;) Information wants to be free.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I rendered predictions on Windows Vista and 7 in the past. I predicted Vista to be the next Windows ME largely because of all the features which were removed, the steep hardware requirements and the ridiculous DRM support. Despite the logical reasons, quite a few people modded my comments to that effect as troll -1. Okay. Who's troll now? I also predicted 7 as a "return to Windows XP but with a Vista look and feel." Not too far off. 7 is still different enough that you can't call it a return to XP exactly, but it will "stay" as long as XP has, I believe.
My predictions on Windows 8 are that the industry is pretty annoyed with Microsoft and it will not matter how awesome the new things Windows 8 will have are. Developers will be reluctant to use them with their updates of the current software as they will want to keep doing things the way they did in the past and whether or not it is completely true, they will claim the need for backward compatibility as the cause. IT shops are stuck and entrenched with Windows XP as many have still not migrated to Windows 7 and 64 bit is still a bit of a dream for them. IT shops are simply too occupied with establishing a stable and reliable environment with what was new a few years ago to risk destabilizing things further with what's new tomorrow.
Microsoft's days of "innovating" are pretty much over. The people DON'T WANT IT. What's more, people have long since gotten over the idea that "newer is better" and are more interested in actually getting work or play done than using the newest methods of doing it.
Try to find out something useful about it by typing "Windows Share" into google (or bing).
Microsoft has a long history of this, as well. Let's call our groups of computers "domains," and our top programming language...let's give it the same name as a top level domain on the Net. That way, our developers will have to weed through a crap load of bad results to find what they are looking for. Developers, developers, developers (throws chair).
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Funny enough, Penny Arcade already commented on this... nine years ago.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.