Intel Corporation

Albert L Beard

William C DeLeeuw

James E Thompson

David L Anderson

A method and apparatus for synchronizing the display of the output of one or more applications being shared on participating host and guest computers, where the respective areas available for display of the output are unequal. In one embodiment, the host or a guest may alter the output display on the monitor's of all other guest participants. The host issues a command receivable by participating guests to alter the displayed output on the guest monitors corresponding to display output surrounding a point movable within the output display on the host monitor. A guest wishing to alter the output display on other guest monitors issues a request receivable by the host which in turn issues a command to all guests to update their output displays. The guests can be instructed to update the displays on their monitors to display output surrounding a point, movable under control of the requesting guest, within the output displayed on the requesting guest's monitor. In another embodiment, the output displayed on a guest monitor is updated automatically, as a shared cursor is moved from the boundary of the output displayed on the guest monitor.

Automatic viewport display synchronization during application sharing

Host translation of guest keyboard events is blocked to effectively isolate a guest keyboard from a host keyboard during applications sharing. A guest keyboard driver translates guest keyboard events which are transmitted to a host for use in shared applications. A patch instruction is written over a host keyboard event module which causes a jump to a patch subroutine when an attempt is made to deposit host keyboard events in the storage queue. Host keyboard events are marked by the patch subroutine and the marked host events are deposited in a shadow queue which is disposed in parallel with the host storage queue. Translated guest events also are deposited in the shadow queue. Raw host and guest keyboard events are stored in the host storage queue. When a shared application requires data from the host storage queue, a call for a translation of the outgoing data is made. In the event that the data is guest data, a second patch instruction on the module supervising the translation call causes a jump to a second patch subroutine, which bypasses the translation call and causes entry of the pretranslated guest event from the shadow queue into the shared application. If the outgoing event is a host event, the second patch instruction jumps to the second patch subroutine, which writes the translation instructions over the second patch so that the translating module can execute the translation. The translated host event then can be entered into the shared application. The second patch instruction is rewritten over the module supervising the translation.

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Portland, OR, United States of America

Albert L Beard