Send clipboard contents
complete
O
Oskar Boethius Lissheim
Great feature from https://tuple.app, that lets you send text that gets added to the host's clipboard.
One fun tweak they made is also that pasted URLs automatically open up in the browser.
Log In
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
complete
Clipboard contents are automatically sent over from the guest to the host when the guest is in control:
- As a guest, copy text from your local computer and you'll automagically be able to paste it to the host.
- Also as a guest, copy text from the host computer, and you'll be able to paste it to your local computer.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
We already support clipboard sharing, it should just work (let me know if it doesn’t). Special casing URLs is a good idea.
O
Oskar Boethius Lissheim
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Aha, so that's implicit when doing copy/paste I guess then. The nice thing with tuple's integration is that it's explicit, and otherwise the clipboard isn't touched if I copy something locally on my end.
URLs would be nice as well yes.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Oskar Boethius Lissheim: Is there a downside to the implicit approach?
O
Oskar Boethius Lissheim
J Sherwani (Pop Team): implicit == hidden and could sometimes be confusing :) just in general in UI design. but please check out Tuple's approach (https://tuple.app) and see if you think it could be valuable insight.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Oskar Boethius Lissheim: We considered both the implicit and explicit approach for Screen, but believe that the implicit approach is better (it’s also what Screenhero used). Here’s why:
- When you copy/paste on your own computer, there’s never a UI notification for it. It just works. With Screen, we’re trying to bridge the host and guest computer, and we want you to feel like they’re the same.
- When you copy something on your computer, and then move to the shared screen, there is no cost to sending the clipboard implicitly. If you don’t ever use it, and someone else takes control, they wouldn’t be able to access it (Screen keeps track of every participant’s clipboard).
- So the benefit of the explicit approach is it forces you to confirm the transfer, which is also its downside — making you click an extra button for no apparent advantage.
What I’ve also seen time and time again when launching a new product is that users always have an instant reaction to want what they had before.
My ask to you is: sit with the new approach, and let me know what you think after you’ve used it for a few more days. You may think of a third option which is actually better than either of the two we’re currently discussing, which we would never figure out if we just mimic the options we’ve seen before.
O
Oskar Boethius Lissheim
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Thanks for the very insightful response! Will definitely evaluate it more, it's how it usually works in screensharing apps in my experience. I've only seen one app do it slightly differently and that's Tuple.
How would you fit in the handling of URLs differently in this implicit method?
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Oskar Boethius Lissheim: Since we won’t get to URL sharing for a while, I’d recommend for now you copy/paste a URL from your computer to the other person’s browser and manually navigate to it. It’s not ideal, but it’ll at least work. We will get to this once we’re done with our high priority bugs & feature requests are taken care of (realistically a month or longer).