Are there any plans for full-blown data conferencing, including shared whiteboards and remote control? How about IP Telephony?
At 12:34 PM 1/28/99 -0800, you wrote:
I have a question...what is the purpose of the 'remote' connections under Squeak (in morphic projects)? The most I can get it to do is to share
pointers
between two machines running squeak, but the desktop is not shared (like
Self).
Another thing I noticed: I could only 'share' between a Windows Squeak
and a
Unix squeak...Unix to Unix did not work (produced a debug window).
This was part of a quick hack that John and I did for OOPSLA '97. The
idea is:
As long as a bunch of machines start running the exact same configuration
of Morphic, and each runs all the other remote hands, then in theory, they will all remain synchronized without any need for serious data synchronization. In other words it is possible to run a multi-user painting program with no more net bandwidth than mouse coordinates, because the high bandwidth work (painting the screen) is being done locally on each machine (we demoed this at OOPSLA). Similarly we lashed up a techno music generator that could play music in real time with multiple users, the key being that the only info that had to be transmitted were the mouse events that implied that a given sound object was being picked up or dropped in a given place.
It's clear that there are ways that this will fail, and it's clear what
more is needed to do more with multiple users, but this is the answer to your question about where this feature came from and what it does.
I can't tell you anything about why it works or doesn't with different
platform combinations -- I'm amazed it still works at all ;-)
- Dan