I’ve mentioned The
Garage a number of times here on Next and Jay
Greene also wrote a story recently about some Garage projects recently for
Cnet.

Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a free download resulting from a
Garage project. To recap quickly, The Garage is both a physical space in
Building 4 at our Redmond HQ, and a company wide program that encourages grass
roots invention, tinkering, ideas and incubation of projects. In The
Garage,employees get together after hours to build whatever they dream up and
the results are often impressive. 99.9% of the Garage projects either ship as
part of a Microsoft project or remain internal, but every once in a while
there’s a project that doesn’t fit into any existing Microsoft product which
will get a lot of request from employees who want to be able to share it with
their friends and families.  In exceptions like this, the Garage community
will rally together to and publish it as a standalone public download.

That’s what’s happening today with Mouse Without Borders.

mousewithout_lg

Mouse Without
Borders is a project I’ve been familiar with for the last 6 months or
so and it’s a wonderfully useful tool. In a nutshell, it allows you to reach
across your PC’s as if they were part of one single desktop. I have two PCs on
my desk at work connected to 3 LCD screens and using Mouse Without Borders I can
move my mouse between the 3 screens, even though one of them is attached to a
different PC from the other two. What’s more, I can move
files between the 2 computers simply by dragging them from one desktop to
another. In fact you can control up to four computers from a single mouse and
keyboard with no extra hardware needed – it’s all software magic, developed by
Truong Do who by day is a developed for Microsoft Dynamics. The software is easy
to setup and in addition to enabling drag and drop of files, you can lock or log
in to all PCs from one PC, and as a whimsical bonus is it allows you to
customize your Windows logo screen with the daily image from Bing or a local
collection of pictures :) I regularly use it to have
one PC dedicated to social media streams while I work away on my other PC
connected to two screens.

The
video above both explains and shows Mouse Without Borders far better than I can
using words. The project is testament to the power of The Garage which helped
Truong develop the user interface and setup the usability tests that have helped
the tool become very accessible and easy to use. As well as that, The Garage and
its regular Science Fairs inside Microsoft helped expose the project to 9,000
people before it was ready for external release. Now that day has arrived and
I’m delighted to announce here on Next at Microsoft that Mouse Without Borders
is ready for download.

Download
Now [1.1mb]