Patent ID: 7487454

Claim:
A method for managing arbitrary regions of a window on one or more display screens, comprising: in response to a user enabling surrogate window selection, identifying by use of a graphical pointing device a region of interest in a source window, the region of interest having a smaller area than the source window and has content that is dynamically changeable by the user displayed on the one or more display screen, creating for display a separate local surrogate window that the user may interact with containing the region of interest by: creating a device context; rendering exactly the contents of source window into the device context; copying the region of interest from the device context to the local surrogate window, the local surrogate window containing only the region of interest; duplicating the local surrogate window as a read-only remote surrogate window at a different network location specified by a user upon selection by the user to share the region of interest; updating content in the surrogate windows to keep the content consistent with content in the region of interest in the source window by: periodically rendering the contents of the source window into the device context; copying the region of interest from the device context to the surrogate windows; and providing a common visual space for display of multiple remote surrogate windows originating from respective source windows of different remote network locations.