24 and the Comic Book Archive

I’m an avid 24 watcher and one of my favorite parts of the show (offsetting the fact that Jack never so much as cracks a smile let alone giving us a nice “Wahoo! I did it! I rock!“) is when one of the technies “sends her screen” to another computer. Man! I want that! It’s so often the case that I’ve got a bunch of morning news sites and documents I’m reading through that I get onto one computer in my house and want to send to another computer for reading (maybe it’s the computer downstairs or the Tablet), but there’s no way to do that. I want a little glyph next to the Minimize button called Send that lets me pick a computer to send the screen to.

And what does that have to do with the Comic Books Archive, which was archiving digital images of almost 3000 comic books at last count? These are folks that have figured out how to digitize a specific media and provide a specialized format (the Comic Book Reader format) and provide a specialized reader (cdisplay), which would make an excellent thing to send to a Tablet PC, along with PDFs, Word docs, web sites, 18,000 books from Project Gutenberg, and anything else that you’d like to share between your own computers or those of your friends and colleagues.

In April of 2005, Paul Thurrott mentioned something called “application sharing” that would enable sharing of individual apps via terminal services instead of entire winstations. I don’t know if we’re actually building such a thing, but I in addition to being able to reach from one computer to another to grab an app, I’d also like to send one.

Wouldn’t that make Jack proud?