A couple weeks ago, I attended a user group where Danny Warren from InterKnowlogy presented on Windows 8 (Danny is @dannydwarren on Twitter and blogs here). He showed some really cool Windows 8 contracts including Search and Sharing. (For more info on Sharing, Danny points to a blog article about sharing here: Windows 8 and the future of XAML: Part 5: More contracts in WinRT/Windows 8.)
My brain puts things together slowly sometimes. I could tell during the presentation that Sharing was a very important feature. And over the last week or so, the idea has really settled in, and I'm really looking forward to having that feature available in my day-to-day activities.
Before Windows 8 Sharing
We love to get data from one application to another: in a photo album, we can send a photo to Facebook; in a browser, we can email a story to a friend. And historically, it has been up to each application to support the sharing. This meant that we were locked into whatever systems the application supported. I don't know about you, but after I find an application I like, I tend to hang onto it for a while. And even though it's really cool that my photo album supports sending to MySpace, it's not very relevant anymore.
This leaves me with a hard decision: do I look for another photo album and learn a new interface? Or do I settle for doing manual uploads to my favorite sharing site? Neither option is very appealing. Wouldn't it be cool if I could keep my photo album application and add whatever sharing I want?
Share Target: I Love This Idea
In Windows 8, Microsoft has separated the responsibilities of this process. The sharing application (a "Share Source") just has to expose some piece of data (whether it's text, an image, a URL, or something else). Then any application that knows how to consume that data (a "Share Target") can get access to it -- with the user's permission, of course.
I think of this as the "Send To" menu that we had in Windows XP. You could open up the "Send To" folder (under the user profile) and add shortcuts to applications. I would always add "Notepad" to my Send To options. That way, I could always right-click on a file, and, regardless of type, I could "Send To" Notepad. This was great for bypassing the default editor for a particular file. (As a side note: I've been weaned off of this functionality in Windows 7. I'm sure there's a way of customizing the Send To menu, but it's not as obvious as it was in XP).
The Share Target takes this a step further. Now, I can have any number of applications that are designated as Share Targets for photos. From inside my photo album, I just have to "Share" a photo, and then I get to select from all of the applications that can accept that photo. This means that 2 years from now when everyone is using a new photo sharing site / social network, I just need to get the latest Share Target application, and my original photo album gets to stay exactly the same.
To me, this is a brilliant idea. Several of the phone OSes have integrated Facebook, Twitter, or G+ to make it easy to post photos or send updates. But those are still bound to the OS. With Windows 8, we can share with whatever we want (assuming someone has written an application for it), and we're not locked down to whatever was popular at the time a particular piece of software was written.
Steal My Idea: Share With Grandma
So, I thought of a good idea for this feature: Share With Grandma. This would be a Share Target application where you could configure how tech-savvy Grandma is -- from Pony Express to Gadget Granny. The application would decide how to get the shared information to Grandma based on these settings.
For example, let's say that I want to share a picture with Grandma. If she has limited technical skills, then the application could send an email attachment. If she is a little bit more comfortable, then maybe it sends her a link to a Facebook update. If she's a Gadget Granny, then maybe it posts to a shared photo stream that automatically shows up on her tablet. The same type of thing could be done for text or URLs.
In all honesty, I probably won't get around to programming this. So, feel free to steal my idea (but at least give me a mention in the credits).
I see Windows 8 Sharing as a huge opportunity to come up with some really creative and useful ways of using the data that we've already got. It's time to start busting out some code.
Happy Coding!
No comments:
Post a Comment