New Microsoft idea: Clipboard for the Web

Is that a hoax? That sounds terribly 80s.

What about reinventing the CSV file? Across the web, of course

Aah, it still relies on the OS\’s clipboard - so you still need clipboard extenders like ClipMagic: http://www.clipmagic.com/ (Freeware) especially if you want to copy more than one item from app A and then pasting them all into app B - no need to swap back and forth …

How about drag n drop?

Would anyone be excited about this if it had not come from Ray Ozzie, been written up by Dave Winer and Robert Scoble, and caught the interest of Ross Rader (whoever he is. No offense intended, Ross)?

Cut and Paste comes to the Internet. Woo hoo.

I don\’t need it and I haven\’t lost any sleep over not having it.

Would someone now please open the envelope so that we can hear what the Next Big Idea is? Thanks.

Seems pretty stupid and too MSFT-centric. No great technology here. Also - it\’s amazing that you have to log in with passport just to view Ray\’s blog.

Err welcome to at least 8 months ago:

http://www.geekpedia.com/tutorial126_Clipboard-cut-copy-and-paste-with-JavaScript.html

David: you shouldn’t have to. I didn’t log in and I got in.

Also why is the icon a pair of scissors? Is it cutting and not copying? Why not one icon for copy and one for paste with a simple OnClick event attached to them?

This is hardly new as above but it just isn’t in widespread use as there is no real use for it.

Actually I think this is sheer brilliance, particularly the live linking with RSS underneath. But the best thing is you guys have not spoilt the idea by making it proprietary and Microsoft only. I love the way it uses Microformats, pure gold. And get this they use Firefox in the screen casts instead of IE that just kicks butt, Look out everyone Microsoft is coming to the party and they will be bringing some awesome toys this time.

We will be implementing this in our up and coming products, If your in the web biz I would take a very good look at it.

PS. Our products are not Microsoft based at all, most are written using agile backends with Java, Groovy and run on Linux. Our development platform is primarily Mac and linux based. You will also notice most of our posts critisize MS recent announcments due to high dissapointment and lack of trust from past experience before you cruxify me for overzealous here. I have also posted about LiveClipboard on the blog, I can’t see why so many comments are negative about this idea.

It’s amazing how quickly people post comments dumping on this idea with no real grasp of the idea.

The link by Jason proves that he has no concept of what is being discussed and didn’t even bother to check the demo.

I can’t see any real benefit of this feature for me, but I like that folks at Microsoft are trying new ideas.

Cures for diseases are rarely found as the result of trying to cure the disease directly. Instead, lines of inquiry into seemingly un-related areas have often resulted in stumbling upon a new discovery. The treatment of diabetes with insulin was discovered by folks who weren’t trying to treat diabetics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin).

This web clipboard may or may not lead to a revolution on the web, but at least some people are trying new things. You never know what they will stumble on.

Oh, Joy. The Lotus Notes guy comes up with yet another miniscule detail that the Xanadu project invented about two decades ago, and the hoardes of .NOT fanboys act like it’s the second coming.

This isn’t an invention, it’s an exercise in paleontology.

Actually I did look at the demo (not the marketing video the actual demo) and quickly perused the Javascript - http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclipsample/control/script.js

It is basically just extending the idea in the link I posted but using XML instead of just innerHTML, still the same concept just taking it a bit further.

Thanks for the interest, Al and Thomas. When designing the prototype for the Live Clipboard control, we decided to stick to techniques that will work cross-browser. We didn’t use the execCommand method of accessing the clipboard that’s described in Jason’s link, because it doesn’t work in all browsers and it raises security concerns. The control as shown in the demo only gets the value of the clipboard when a user explicitely “pastes” using the build-in browser UI.

Thanks Matt
I also left a comment at the base of that link for the guys perusing there to check your demo examples and see how it can be done cross browser.

I would really like to see some more simpler examples to make it easier to implement but I understand you have only just put this thing together for Ray’s demo. Let me know when you have more samples, my eamil is on our blog. Also if you are setting up any kind of blog around this with rss as oppossed to the maillist I would love to know about it.
Thanks

Rgeards
Al

We just added a short introduction to the technology that includes a step-by-step explanation of how to add the control to a page. There’s a link to it from the sample page, but here’s a direct link: http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclipsample/techPreview.html.

We will be adding more examples etc. in the days to come, and we are working on setting up a site to put everything related to Live Clipboard, complete with RSS feed.

As for simpler examples, how about I do one that just uses the clipboard control to copy and paste microformat data directly into a page display element? You can’t get much simpler than that, which I guess is what the microformat crowd has been saying all along. Actually, if you look closely at the demo page we have up now, the presentation of the contact and calendar information is just plain hCard / hCal with CSS for formatting.

I looked at this and thought ‘so what?’ As someone said earlier - what’s wrong with drag ‘n’ drop?

More important, I read through Ray’s words around this. Talk about geek speak gone mad. Make it so the masses can understand - that’s what thrills customers, isn’t it?