Sharing files between people and computers in the same physical location is often a frustratingly complicated task involving a few too many steps. At HackMIT 2016, some friends and I created a much more streamlined solution for file sharing and collaboration. I realized that the gesture of moving a window between two screens connected to the same computer is extremely simple and that having that work between two adjacent computers would be an elegant solution to this problem, so we built Window Share, which allows users to drag a window onto the screen of a nearby computer, sharing the file and instantly opening it without requiring context switching from the file to the file browser to the web browser, and then the reverse on the other computer.
Since this was a hackathon project, it wasn’t explored to quite completion – there are unresolved issues around how it interacts with Windows’s snapping gesture at the sides of the screen and how to select which computer to share to, but the core idea was selected as the grand prize winner of HackMIT 2016. Source code is available here.
Window Share
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Window Share

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