Dynamic GUI Window Redirection? 51
Chris Tyler asks: "Picture this: you're sitting on the couch surfing on your tablet. You find something interesting (or funny or informative), so you say, "Hey! Look at this!" and send the window to the video projector shining on one of your walls. Or you are surfing for a hotel reservation and want to show it to your spouse before you click on 'book it'. Or you're viewing a report on your PC and the captain orders, 'on viewscreen!' With viable tablet PCs inching ever so slowly towards market, 802.11b an established technology, and more programmable pixels blinking at us then ever before, redirection capability for GUI windows will become a more and more desirable feature. X11 has some great network capabilities, but doesn't easily send to multiple displays or enable a window to be switched between displays. VNC is cross-platform and does permit disconnect/reconnect, connection initiation from either end, colourdepth mapping, and multiple views of the same desktop, but it is desktop-oriented (as opposed to window-oriented) in most implementations. Are there any good solutions for dynamic window redirection? What features would a good redirection solution include?"
Essentially all you're showing is information... (Score:5, Insightful)
Enter the unifrom resource locator, a new invention of mine. All you need to send is this nifty string, and the target device will not only get the information, but it'll start an appropiate viewer for it. I'm selling them cheap, too. You can buy a hundred of these bad boys for a mere penny. There are greater discounts in quantity, but please be aware that the license requires payment for each transmitted URL (ie, it's not royalty free once you buy one URL)
Seriously, this problem has been solved, though the actual mechanics of it needs to be smoothed over.
For those thinking, "Duh, but it only works for web pages." slap yourself silly. A Uniform Resource Locator is exactly that, whether it's pointing to a server, a jpeg, an html file, any kind of document, or a port on your system which has a video stream coming from it. They can point to programs, current X sessions, windows, processes, etc.
Let's not go reinventing the wheel, ok? Good.
-Adam