Unlike the unprecedented surge of interest that the Vista public Beta programme, Mirosoft's betas are usually received with a ho-hum feeling. One such underlit product was the SharedView. This is essentially a free application, living in the context of the Office Live product line even though it doesn't require any of it, allowing you to share your view of a window with another person.
This isn't really new, you could actually go do that with earlier versions of the msn messenger and -depending on the country in which you downloaded- the live messenger. It's a handy feature when you need to help someone with an application and worked preety well with support requests from family members and associates.
Apparently it's consolidation in Messenger was also it's bane, since you really had to dig in order to pull it out.
Well now it's about to be given new life and attention with the free download of the free but ad supported SharedView. The following screenshots (you can slide these quickly from the photocast in your top right of the page) are detailed guide of how this works and what you can expect to get by it.
Once you launch the app, your top of the screen is covered by a glossy (and moderately tasteful) menu bar. It's form and function is clearly inspired from the Office 07 ribbon, but I would argue it takes simply too much of the screen in both height (look at the wasted pixels) and width (entire freaking screen). Honestly I thing this would be much better served by a column of options.
So you click share and you can start a session. Or you can add me to your messenger contacts and join the army of the blocked. So be nice.
So then you send an invitation. This can be done via
If you go by im invitations, which I did, you get to choose your contacts, shown in groups as you have organized them, or just flat if you're lazy.
And then you wait while watching an ad. I didn't click it and neither should you ! Ads are evil and should be killed before they grow up and take up all of your screen. Seriously with Microsoft's animated and colourful ads, it's no wonder why everyone prefers Google's textual and more subtle ones.
This is what happens when the other party is using Pidgin or some other multiprotocol IM. What you don't see is my blood-shot eyes after the agony of waiting for >1 minute to get this warning. This behavior is smart though, imagine the confusion of multiple requests stacking on top of each other and them triggering.
Ok that's not smart that's common sense.
The session menu lets you leave/restart sessions and odly enough change options !
Options don't let you configure much. Just clipboard sharing behavior, showing pointers of the other people's mice and a preview window, shown below. I suppose there isn't much to change anyway. Though sharing resolution would be nice. Or maybe screen recording of the session, but then they would get sued by the makers of Camtasia for being too competitive.
The preview window lets you see how the other people see you app. Greyed out areas are overlapping windows. Seriously this should be fixed especially given that in Vista we have desktop composition. There is no real overlapping people !
The share menu lists all your open windows and allows you to share them. I would prefer is if the sharing option went away. It's best to have that in a single place.
When you try to share your entire desktop you get a warning. That makes sense I suppose, besides you don't to inadvertently share formula of the substance you pour in the office coffe maker or your pr0n.
That's 'porn' for those who don't speak 1337.
And this is where we get into the real juice. When you observe an app, you get it in a window. I should be able see the whole of it, but there's an overlaping window on the left. The viewing speed is actually slow, like 3-4 fps on my 1mbit DSL connection. So it's ok for static stuff, but you won't be seeing Youtube ensemble. Just send them the link.
On the window's top bar you can see an indicator showing which window is shared. I think is looks a little junky.
Sure enough you can also see a whole column ad. It's colourful, it's animated, and it's propably written in flash cause it scales very beautifully. Still don't click it !
This is my friend's word. It makes you wonder sometimes how people work in this mess. It also proves the point that Office 2007's ribbon actually saves space for many people.
This is me typing the obvious in his word session.
In the top of his toolbars you can also see this
. When you click it, it launches the SharedView app and immediatelly begins sharing the open document. Unfortunately this is less usefull than it seems, since you can't have many people active on the window. I suppose apps that support multipoint (many mice or pointing devices at once) should behave right, but I doubt this is supported by the infrastructure of SharedView.
Handouts are shared files really. You choose some and then they are available for all to get, and that's all there is to it. I actually uploaded my password recovery file and felt a strange rush. Thankfully that was a one man session.
So this is ShareView for you. My general feeling is that this is a usefull little app which should prove usefull at least once in your lifetime. I view a great opportunity for companies that want to deploy it as part of their internal support, but it's got to loose the ads.
It's still ok for when your parents or grandparents call for help and you prefer to show them rather than go though the "It's on the upper right of your... no below that.. lower.. to right I said" thing.
Finally It's a tiny download of 3.2mb, therefore you have no reason whatsoever not to use it.
And some suggestions to the Microsoft team behind the project:
Still nice job.
Special thanks to
Stelabouraswho played the role of 'the other party', and who I hear is working on a screencast to be available later this week.