I like the idea of Live Clipboard a lot, though I've yet to build anything that makes us of the functionality. And I think I like it even more after playing with this web clipboard demo today.
The web clipboard demo shows a listing of blog post headers that can be cut from a web page and pasted to other parts of the page (in the same - or different - window, browser, etc.)
Two landing sites (pasting points) are defined on the page - one that pulls in the actual post content from offsite and displays it in the page, the other that displays a description of the resource. For the blog post item, the content of the post is actually pulled in from outside when the resource link is pasted to that landing site.
This is poorly explained, I'm sorry, (it's late here...) so go an play. Or check out this 2MB movie I made earlier to show the functionality off to a couple of other people: silent web clipboard screencast. Note that the main action takes place in Firefox, although I bring in IE at the end to show how items can be cut from a page displayed in one browser and pasted into a page loaded in another browser altogether.
There's a whole load of stuff going on under the bonnet in there that I don't know much about (and won't really, until I have a proper play and build one or two things myself) but as this demo shows, the web clipboard stuff is getting easier to do with each iteration of the thinking behind it.
The big question for me is - how can we make use of this stuff??? E-portfolios?
Update: walking the dog this afternoon, I wondered whether the web clipboard code could be used in a custom Netvibes tab. This required including necessary styling - and all javascript - in the file (rather than using file includes/style imports) and recasting the onload function to the Netvibes equivalent (NV_ONLOAD). However, while it all worked in simulation, I couldn't get the landing image to load in the live Netvibes panel. Maybe this is easily fixed, maybe it isn't, but I don't have any more time today to spend on this, and other projects beckon for the next week at least. However, I do think that adding webclipboard functionality to Netvibes would be really handy, and provide and excellent playground for tinkering with the idea of the live/web clipboard. If anyone gets a demo of this working in Netvibes, please let me know:-)
Posted by ajh59 at July 1, 2006 12:40 AM