basic use case:
1) open a contact's message windows from pidgin. (some one who ask you howto use a tool per example).
2) press a button and the curso turns in a cross indicating that you can track a rectangle, track the rectangle.
3)the pidgin offers to your friend to receive the video stream of your desktop area. your friend accept.
4)Now your friend can see like in a webcam windows frame what you are doing inside that rectangle.
easy and fast, without worry about IP, ssh tunneling, permissions, since you can select just the needed area the transmission will occur faster and clear than in VNC, you won't need explain what VNC is, you won't need know what VNC is. Only a simple and useful feature that the people realize by their-selfs how to use it.
VNC shows the entire screen, needs some work to make it work between computers with no valid IPs. it's not transparent like I'm suggesting. Push a button, track a rectangle and it's done (just like we are use to do with the webcam, not in pidgin of course). I have no idea about the easiest way to do it, but I know that is perfectly feasible and useful.
the people are voting down and not saying why. maybe the description is not clear, so tell what is wrong with my suggestion.
cheesehead(Brainstorm admin)
wrote on the 15 Nov 08 at 01:43
Perhaps you could point out a use case or two that VNC-type connections don't meet the need for. For example, I support family members using reverse-VNC and Ekiga (audio instead of text), and I find it's much easier for them to describe the problem verbally than in text.
A good example use case for text might be for Ubuntu support. VOIP (and other apps) sometimes require manual router settings, port settings, etc. But remote-desktop-over-IM should get through defaulted router and port settings while VOIP and VNC will often be blocked.
Another example use case might be visual demonstrations by an IRC bot in a support channel, like ubottu does in #ubuntu. I suppose that should be one-on-one (chat) instead of broadcasting to everyone in the room...