Sometimes you stumble upon software that just works, does exactly what it should, and does it well. One such fine example is Synergy.

The promise is:

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now on Windows systems, and it does exactly what it should. Copy & paste works like charm, too! My congratulations to Chris Schoeneman and the team for such a useful tool!

I have found one smaill issue until now, sometimes Ctrl/Alt seems to stick, but pressing them a few times eliminates the problem.

One thing that I would *love* to see in it: sound sharing. It would be wonderful if one could channel the audio of all the machines to a dedicated one and then have a soft mixer there and hear the combined audio on the speaker/earpiece connected to that machine. Right now I’m swapping headphones if I want to hear the proper machine, but it is as confusing and frustrating as changing keyboards and mice (using loudspeakers is not always an option). I know this is a technically more challenging issue (much bigger bandwidth, latency, capturing the audio out, mixing the incoming streams, cpu load, etc.) but would be a marvel :-)

Joel in his Strategy Letter IV has to say the following about the future of web applications:

What’s going to happen? The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “native” code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compiler writers obsess about performance so you don’t have to. It’ll have all the same performance as native JavaScript with full access to the DOM in a consistent fashion, and it’ll compile down to IE native and Firefox native portably and automatically. And, yes, it’ll go into your CSS and muck around with it in some frightening but provably-correct way so you never have to think about CSS incompatibilities ever again. Ever. Oh joyous day that will be.

Good to see that other visionaries have the same vision, too :-)

Today we released version 20070925 of the PMAP tree view component with some quick fixes.

Highlights:

• Enhanced Opera keyboard support (still with some visuals issues)
• Fixed a bug when clicking to the left of a leaf node (thanks JM!)
• Surfaced getTreeNodeByExternalID() so that you can use it to find a particular node of interest independently of the tree structure or of the actual (language dependent) title of the node (you will have to set the external ID before using this function ;-)
• The demo app displays the version string of the tree control in the Log upon startup.

Our PMAP partners are receiving the latest builds today.

Happy coding!

Today we released version 20070912 of the PMAP tree view component.

Highlights:

• Fully supports Safari and works on Opera (with some keyboard handling and visuals issues)
• A new property (SelectionColor) is introduced to make it easier to set the selection color (no need for editing the css file any more)
• Tree nodes now can be expanded with the left & right arrow keys in addition to using Enter
• The demo app has been updated.

Our PMAP partners are receiving the latest builds today.

Happy coding!