Pretty interesting feature of Windows 8 that allows applications to exchange data directly.
full story over on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/09/Windows-Share
Microsoft has created a new mechanism for sharing information between applications in Windows 8 called Windows Share. Apps can share text, bitmaps, HTML, URI, files, and other type of data, and the usage scenarios are numerous. For example, the app receiving the information can post it to Tweeter or Facebook make it easy to post information to a social network without actually visiting it.
Billie Sue Chafins, Senior Program Manager Lead, and Steve Seixeiro, Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Corporation, presented the session “Share: your app powers the Windows 8 share experience” at BUILD 2011. They detailed the new sharing feature coming up in Windows 8. Windows Share is sort of a universal live clipboard, allowing applications to transfer information between them, but it is much well integrated into the system and richer compared to the traditional clipboard.
Windows Share accepts the following standard data formats: text, RTF, bitmaps, storage items (e.g. files), URI, HTML, but there is also the extensible format that can be used to transfer any stream of information: addresses, contacts, people, geo-location, etc. When the user wants to share some information from an application, he is presented with a list of applications accepting the respective type of information, and the data is transparently transferred upon selecting one of them.
The Share features defines the following types of participants to the process:
- Source – any application that has information for sharing with other applications
- Target – any application consuming the information shared by other apps
- Broker – the transfer mediator between the source and the target