Software Physics

SWS is a small Windows application that takes advantage of Amazon’s S3 service and some simple Ajax to implement basic desktop sharing. The program takes snapshots of your desktop and uploads them to an S3 object that you can tell people to go view.
There are two versions of the SWS application, a “full” version and a “lite” version. The full version is a .Net application and requires the .Net 1.1 Framework.

The “lite” version is a VB6 application. It is designed so that it can run on pretty much any Windows machine running Win98 or later. It has fewer features than the full version but the whole download (including gdiplus redistributable) is under 2 meg.

The .Net executable is small as well but if you don’t have the framework (and a lot of “normal” users don’t) then you have to download a 23 meg install and sacrifice 100+ meg of disk. Given today’s powerful machines, this isn’t a big deal but I felt it was excessive for such a little app. That’s why I bit the bullet and created the lite version as well.

How to Use

To use SWS, you need an S3 account and you need to have created a bucket where your screenshots can land. If you are using the lite version, the bucket must be public-read-write. If you’re using the full version, you only need to provide public read access to the bucket.

To use the applications, just download, unzip and run. There’s no installation required. If you download and run the .Net version but don’t have the framework, the app will die an unnatural death. Sorry.

Both apps are “Alpha” code and a bit rough around the edges. I’ll fix bugs and make improvements as necessary.

The applications have help files that attempt to explain what’s going on. Each program has tool tips as well; I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. The help assumes that you know how to setup S3 buckets and set ACLs.

I may share the source code at some point but I’m not setup to do that right now and, if there’s little community interest in the application, then it may not be worth it. If folks start using the apps and want to help make them better then that’d be great.

Enjoy!

Download SWS

Both downloads are approximately 2 megabytes each.

Full Version (requires .Net Framework) - download

Lite Version - download
Lite Version w/gdiplus (for pre-WinXP machines) - download