an idea i had a few years ago, bumped into it while skimming through my documents and figured its better online than offline.

here’s a scenario i’d like to have:

• i’m chatting with someone on IM
• i want to show him something i’m seeing on my screen
• i hit ctrl+apple+shift+whatever, get an overlay control to crop some part of my screen
• click my mouse, boom that part gets cropped and sent to my chat partner
• my chat partner gets a small message embedded into his chat dialog saying an image is being transferred with a progress bar
• when the image is transferred its shown as an inline thumbnail within the chat where the original message for ‘image being received’ was shown, this is chronological
• single-clicking the thumbnail brings up the entire image in a thin embedded viewer, no external stuff
• there’s a button to ‘save to file’

i know i can screen-capture myself, save to a file, send to my friend, he accepts it, saves it to his hard drive and opens it with his default image viewer (which may be photoshop, OUCH). but we all know this flow sucks and that’s why we don’t do it.

what’s needed?

• IM protocol support for dynamic inline images (i think MSN has something like this, others?) this should enable injecting an image into the chat and later changing it. the whole process (image being sent, progress) can be done using solely with images.
• IM client support for capturing/cropping the screen and hiding the details from a the user while the data is being sent to his chat partner.

any ideas? if MSN supports enough of this in the protocol I vouch to get someone to write client support for this in Adium and maybe pidgin on windows.