AirDisplay
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Avatron launches ad-supported Air Display Free app
We've been fans of Avatron's Air Display for quite awhile. The iOS app lets you turn your iPhone or iPad into an additional monitor for your Apple desktop or notebook -- a productivity guru's dream come true. However, the app's US$9.99 price might have prevented would-be customers from jumping on board, because they're never seen it in action. Air Display Free changes that by offering a no-cost, ad-supported experience to show potential buyers how it works. The free version also includes a handy introduction tutorial that lays out the benefits of using your iOS device as a second (or third) monitor. The ads pop up every few minutes at first, but after several hours of use, an ad will remain on a small portion of the screen until either the app is upgraded to the paid version or the connection to your computer is closed.
Daily iPad App: Air Display lets you add an HiDPI monitor to your Mac
We've covered Air Display from Avatron ever since it landed in the iOS App Store in early 2010. The popular utility lets you use your iPad as an external monitor for your Mac or Windows machine. Just like any standard external monitor, Air Display lets you extend your desktop or mirror it onto your tablet device. With the release of the retina iPad and a new retina-capable version of the iOS software, Air Display just became a lot more compelling for new iPad owners. To get started with Air Display, you'll need a small app that runs on your desktop and a companion app for your iPad (or iPhone). Setting it up is as easy as firing up the app on both devices and then selecting your iPad in the desktop software. The desktop app then manages the connection between the two devices and extends your desktop to the iPad. I use it to keep my browser open on my MacBook Pro and drag both my chat client and Twitter client to the iPad. The latest version of Air Display takes advantage of the native 2048 x 1536 resolution of the new iPad which means you can fit a lot of content on the screen of your iPad. More is usually better, but, in this case, content on the retina display will be small and difficult to read because of the iPad's high-resolution display. This isn't a problem if you have a Mac with OS X Lion or Mountain Lion. You can take advantage of the hidden HiDPI mode which provides a comfortable resolution and exceptionally crisp text and images. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's absolutely gorgeous. Beside the stunning UI, Air Display's also been optimized for faster performance, so the overall feel of the latest version of the app is snappier than previous versions. I've been an Air Display user for over a year now and this version is an excellent upgrade for retina iPad owners. Text is crisp and clear and visual elements from the desktop look gorgeous. At US$10, Air Display is pricey, but it's a must-have for those who occasionally need an external monitor. I would rather pay $10 for the ability to use my iPad as a portable external display than spend over $100 for a stationary monitor. Air Display is available from the iOS App Store for $9.99. The companion desktop software, Air Display Connect for Mac, can be downloaded from Avatron's website for free. The Mac desktop version supports the Retina display, while the Windows version does not. A retina update for the Windows client is in the works. %Gallery-152134%
Avatron soldiers on with Air Sharing after removing Air Dictate
Avatron's Elliot Chase just shrugs when asked about Air Dictate, an app his company had to remove from the App Store after Apple discovered it made use of Siri that they didn't approve of. "There's no good news," he said while talking to us at Macworld | iWorld 2012. The main issue is over Air Dictate's interface. Instead of using the standard, tiny Siri button on the native keyboard, Avatron hid the keyboard and used its own button. Apple would rather it used the standard UI, however unfitting. "If we make some changes, they might put us back," says Chase. But outside of that issue, Avatron is continuing to update its popular Air Sharing and Air Display apps. In fact, the gang was showing off Air Sharing's beautiful new PDF viewer in San Francisco last week. It features an iBooks-style page flip and a scrubber for quickly scanning a document's pages. Chase said that many users are reading PDFs with the app, and his company saw an opportunity to create a better PDF viewer. The next update, which should be out soon, will add Egnyte to the list of cloud services that Air Sharing is compatible with. Avatron is also working on Air Display updates. An Android version is in development, as is a Mac update that will allow it to work on older versions of Mac OS X . The current version requires the latest version of the Mac OS, but Avatron will release a downloadable version on its website that will work with previous versions, so you can share a display screen with your iPad from nearly any OS X build. There's a beta available now, but the software should be finalized in the next month or so. Air Dictate was certainly a setback (Avatron even had the software's picture marked out on its booth at Macworld as "not available"), but it sounds like Avatron is keeping busy nevertheless.
Avatron retires Air Dictate tool for remote Siri dictation
Avatron is a company well known for their iOS and Mac utilities. We are particularly fond of their Air Sharing apps and Air Display, among others. They have a reputation for building solid, reliable products. I could sense the dismay in CEO Dave Howell's message when he pinged me today to let me know that Avatron would be pulling their Air Dictate app. In order to comply with App Store rules, Air Dictate used a little trick to hide the standard keyboard while offering one-button access to Siri dictation functions. This is distinct from the non-App Store-safe approach I wrote about on Thanksgiving. Howell explained, "What we did was to hide the keyboard and text field entirely. We did that by putting another view in front of the keyboard window. When you press our big Start Dictation button, we map that to a tap on the little microphone button. But how? There's no public method to change the location of a tap event to some other location. The solution to that was the clever part of Air Dictate. We actually changed the position of the keyboard window so that its mic button is directly under whatever point you tapped. Then we move it back again after the event has passed through. Same thing for the Done button." The app relied on interface assumptions that could possibly change without warning in future Apple updates, or could vary with international keyboard layouts. This caused a point of conflict with Apple review. "The cold hard fact is that every update of iOS is likely to break all of our apps for one reason or another," Howell said. "Sometimes new Apple bugs, sometimes intentional changes to their frameworks. You don't have to break any rules for your apps to be broken by an iOS update!" Apple further proposed that Avatron discard their custom interface, which was both eye-catching and streamlined, and ask users to locate and tap the microphone button directly. "Apple's suggestion was that we should throw away our custom interface (sacrificing its convenience for the blind and disabled, who would have trouble tapping the tiny mic button), and just throw up a standard keyboard. We don't want to do that so we're not planning to release any more updates to Air Dictate." RIP Air Dictate.
Air Display for Mac: Turn another Mac into an extended display
One very popular and fun iPhone / iPad app that I love to use is Avatron Software's Air Display. As we described in a First Look back in May of 2010, Air Display turns an iOS device into a small wireless monitor that can be used to display app windows from a Mac or Windows computer. Now Avatron has made Air Display even more useful by creating a Mac app to do the same thing. Air Display for Mac (US$19.99 in the Mac App Store) is a bit more expensive than its iOS sibling, but it's also more capable than the mobile device version -- especially if you have a second Mac with a large screen. Similar to Air Display for iOS, Air Display turns a Mac into a wireless display for extending the desktop of your other Mac or Windows computer. Air Display is available in the Mac App Store, and needs to be installed on the Mac that you want to turn into a secondary display. You then need to visit the Avatron website to download the host software for your primary computer. As noted, that computer can be either a Mac (running Snow Leopard) or a Windows PC (running XP, Vista or 7). You do have to reboot the host computer during the installation process. The same host software works with both iOS and Mac extended displays.
Avatron's Dave Howell on the future of Air Display, Air Sharing and Print Sharing
Last week at CES 2011 we met up with Dave Howell, whose Avatron Software has delivered three apps to the App Store so far. Air Display and Air Sharing are already TUAW favorites, and Print Sharing is a relatively new app targeting one feature specifically: printing to a shared printer directly from your iPhone or iPod touch. Howell walked us through his three apps, then talked a little bit about the future roadmap of each and the rest of what Avatron is up to. Air Display is still Avatron's most popular app; two different engineers are working on it, with one working on solving connectivity problems, and the other ironing out performance issues. Avatron wants to make Air Display more useful, even away from the computer it's sharing a screen with, so the company is working on allowing users to zoom or scale the display as they use it. Video out is also coming soon, so you'll be able to send a shared display out to a TV or any other display. Air Sharing's main goal now is to add as many sharing services and document types as possible. The app lets you dive in and view documents from Dropbox and Box.net already, and Howell says Google Documents is next to come to the service. Print Sharing is a much more focused app, but Howell says it's been popular, too. Print Sharing's current goal is to support as many file types as it can; Howell said Print Sharing would get the same updates that the engineers working on Air Display will provide.
First Look: Avatron Air Display for iPad extends your Mac screen
Avatron Software already has an iPad hit on their hands with AirSharing (US$2.99, $9.99 for Pro edition). Now they're on the verge of releasing a new and useful app that could change the way that you use your iPad and Mac together. We've got an exclusive pre-release look at this intriguing app, called Air Display. The concept behind Air Display is cool -- use your iPad as a small extension to your Mac's display. For example, let's say that you're working on a project and you want to use your entire screen, but you'd also like to be able to check your email in Mail.app. You fire up Air Display on your iPad, move the Mail window to your iPad, and now you have a small portable workspace that's not interrupting what you're doing on your Mac. Apps like this are nothing new; just before iPad launch day, Shape Services released iDisplay ($4.99) which does the same thing. However, reviews of that app have been poor and it's pricey for what it does. Our very own Erica Sadun noted another solution in a post about a week later. Her post mentioned ScreenRecycler ($29.90), which uses a second computer (Windows, Mac, etc...) as an additional monitor for your Mac.
