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.

The embedded video is Silverlight only

[hey]

I guess I won't watch it.
(Or you can download 312M)

Android Intents

[bsv368]

I would argue this is not a new idea. The same basic concept exists in Android as Intents [android.com].

What, it took over a decade for this?

[izomiac]

Well, this sounds almost exactly like BeOS's Negotiated Drag and Drop [nyud.net]. 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 [youtube.com] from a demo video demonstrating the concept between Tracker (the desktop application) and the Book application.

Re:I know! We can call it Publish and Subscribe!

[FrootLoops]

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.

"short"

[FrootLoops]

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.

Re:Sounds like a clipboard

[Anonymous Coward]

nah, tweeter [urbandictionary.com] is gay slang for a man (or woman, but this is usually fag activity) that farts while being rimmed. It sounds like a wet 'n juicy shit-my-pants fart due to all the saliva and/or anal lube. It's generally considered rude (do you want somebody farting in your face while you're licking out their asshole?) but some pervs get off on it.

Re:A fully automated social netowrk

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Akonadi

[shutdown -p now]

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).