nerdylorrin.net

ClipboardShare

ClipboardShare allows you to share textual clipboard data between multiple computers on the network. Data is shared via TCP multicast across the local subnet. So far I have only tested on Windows and Mac OS X, but ClipboardShare ought to run on and be able to share data between any computers with Java installed.

Contents

1. News
2. Installation
3. Frequently Asked Questions
4. Downloads
5. Known Limitations and Future Plans
6. Contacting Me
7. License Information

News

2004-11-27

ClipboardShare is hibernating since I am now using Synergy myself. Although much more limited in scope ClipboardShare does serve a need Synergy does not: using multiple computers with a KVM and a single monitor (Synergy assumes (at least) one monitor per computer). Thus I'm open to to doing more development on ClipboardShare if there's interest.

After long delay I've added all the file releases to SourceForge in addition to the source code added last year. They're still available on this server as well.

2003-11-14

I'm in the process of setting up ClipboardShare on SourceForge.

2003-11-05

ClipboardShare 0.2.2 released. Improve OS X support.

2003-07-23

ClipboardShare 0.2.1 released. Fix Win98 crash.

2003-07-01

ClipboardShare 0.2 released. Switch to multicast instead of network folder.

2003-02-05

ClipboardShare 0.1.1 released. OS X support added (mostly documentation updates).

2002-09-21

ClipboardShare 0.1 released.

Installation

1. You need Java. See the FAQ for more information.
2. Download the ClipboardShare archive.
3. Extract the archive to a convenient directory.
4. Run the script file appropriate to your platform (ie, clipboardshare.bat for Windows or clipboardshare.sh for *nix based systems like Mac OS X)
   • On *nix platforms you may need to manually make clipboardshare.sh executable.

     chmod +x clipboardshare.sh

   ClipboardShare should launch and look like this:

   ClipboardShare 0.2.1
   Hit return to close window and exit ClipboardShare.

   ClipboardShare is now running; messages will appear indicating when clipboard data is sent or received.
5. Repeat on other computers on your network.
6. Copy text to the clipboard on one of the machines. It should be copied onto the clipboard of the other machines. If you look at the ClipboardShare window you should see a message like

   [2003-07-23 14:58:27,053] Successfully sent clipboard data over the network.

   on the machine where you copied data to the clipboard and a message like

   [2003-07-23 14:36:07,693] Placed data from 192.168.123.11 on clipboard.

   on the other machines. Once ClipboardShare is working properly you can minimize the terminal window and ignore it. Do not close the window since that will cause ClipboardShare to exit.

Fine tuning

• ClipboardShare's behavior can be tweaked by editing the .properties files in the ClipboardShare directory. Normally these files do not need to be changed to make ClipboardShare work. All the settings are described in the files themselves.
• Have ClipboardShare launch automatically when your machine starts up. To do this on Windows, create a shortcut to clipboardshare.bat in your Start Menu's StartUp folder.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Why should I use ClipboardShare?

  Because my dad says "If you work on networked PCs and thrash text all day, you're crazy not to get this program."

• How do I know if I have Java installed?

  Mac OS X comes with Java installed. On other platforms, if you open a terminal window and type java -version you should see something like this:

  java version "1.4.1_01"
  Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-39)
  Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-14, mixed mode)

  If you get a command not found error instead, you don't have Java installed.

• Where do I get Java?

  You can download the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) from Sun Microsystems.

• Does ClipboardShare provide functionality to maintain multiple items on the clipboard at once?

  No, there already are applications that can do this and ClipboardShare should be fully compatible with all of them. When you place an item on the clipboard on one machine, it gets placed on the clipboard of all the other machines. Any clipboard management program you are running should behave the same as it would if you had pasted text from a local application instead of receiving it from the network.

• I keep getting the error Sorry, can't parse current clipboard contents. What's wrong?

  Nothing. ClipboardShare is telling you that since it doesn't know how to handle what you just pasted into the clipboard (for example, a file or an image) it cannot send the data to other computers. Try putting text on the clipboard instead.

• Where do I get the source code?

  It's in the archive along with the binary.

Downloads

Current

Version	Date	Notes
ClipboardShare 0.2.2	2003-11-05	Fix launch script to work with Mac OS X 10.3. Fix Mac OS X shutdown bug. Fix Mac OS X bug where data received from other machines was re-broadcast.

Previous releases

Version	Date	Notes
ClipboardShare 0.2.1	2003-07-23	Fix Win98 crash when a corrupt clipboard is received from the local system (Error message was "Transferable can't serve requested flavor! java.io.IOException: system clipboard data unavailable"). Also switch from random numbers as machine IDs to IP addresses.
ClipboardShare 0.2	2003-07-01	Data is now broadcast via multicast instead of written to a network volume. This improves performance a little and makes configuration much easier.
ClipboardShare 0.1.1	2003-02-05	I just got an OS X box to play with and ClipboardShare works. This new release includes documentation changes to assist with setting up on OS X. There are some minor outstanding issues; see the readme.txt for more info.
ClipboardShare 0.1	2002-09-21	Initial release

Known Limitations and Future Plans

• ClipboardShare can only share text. If you put anything else on the clipboard you will have access to it locally but it will not be written to the network. I would like to add support for images as well, but since Java has no understanding of the different native image formats used on various computer platforms, I would have to write code to read and write image data for each platform. This is feasible but I might not get around to it.
• ClipboardShare sends data as a serialized Java object in a single UDP packet. I'd like to switch to using an XML message potentially spanning multiple packets to fix the following problems with the current approach:
  • ClipboardShare releases are not compatible with each other because each time the class get recompiled the "protocol" changes.
  • Large clipboard transfers are not possible, probably because the single UDP packet gets unwieldy. (Look for java.io.EOFExceptions)
  • Debugging is tricky since the data going over the wire isn't human readable.
  • Compatibility with non-Java implementations is not possible.
• Spurious "Type code out of range" errors on old G3 running Mac OS X 10.2.8. Don't see on OS X 10.3 or Windows, so maybe not a bug in ClipboardShare.
• Occasionally seems to stop monitoring and listening under OS X. Haven't seen this happen enough yet to track it down.
• Need to set up a SourceForge (or elsewhere?) code repository
• No support for the multiple clipboards in Mac OS X's X11 environment. (Java API limitation, no fix planned)

Contacting Me

Please contact me with any bugs, suggestions, etc. I'd also be glad to hear about situations where ClipboardShare does or does not work that I have not tested (other platforms, old Java versions, large numbers of computers, etc.).

If you wish to actively do development work for ClipboardShare I'd be glad to talk about setting up revision control and bug tracking systems so we can collaborate.

License Information

ClipboardShare is distributed under the GNU Public License and is copyright © 2002-2003 Lorrin H. Nelson. 3rd party components distributed with ClipboardShare have their own copyrights and licenses. The ClipboardShare license as well as the 3rd party licenses are contained in the file license.txt inside the installation archive.

Last modified 2004-Nov-29 @ 22:30 PST