Collaborative Sharing of Windows between MacOS X , the X Window System and Windows ∗

This paper investigates how one best can share windows between many different computers in a collaborative, cross platform environment. Current collaborative solutions offering users shared application access are limited in that they either share an entire desktop, or that sharing is built into the collaborative application. We present an architecture of a system allowing windows on MacOS X to be shared with computers running the X11 Window System and Microsoft Windows, with windows either being pushed to a shared surface, or pulled from a sharing user’s computer. The prototype implementation supports sharing MacOS X windows with X11 based systems. The windows are shared by sharing their pixel representation. Remote users can provide input to the shared windows. We show that the number of FPS observed by each user degrades linearly with the number of users for constantly changing windows, with our experiments ranging from 1 to 4 users. We also show that the event latency for fairly static windows averages