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AirServer brings AirPlay streaming support to Lion, iOS 5
Streaming audio, video, photos, or slideshows from your iOS device to your Mac is now a lot easier. AirServer 3.0 for Mac (US$7.99) was released yesterday, and gives the popular streaming app Lion and iOS 5 compatibility. AirServer basically streams anything you can run on your iOS device to your Mac. iTunes video and audio? Check. AirPlay-enabled applications? Yep. Audio and video streaming? Ditto. Photo and slideshow streaming? Yes, indeed! YouTube streaming? It'll do that, too. What's the use case for a Mac app like AirServer? It's very useful in those situations where you have something on your iPhone that you want to share with your officemates. With AirServer for Mac running on your favorite Apple desktop or laptop, you can beam content from any iOS device right to the Mac. This has been done before, with BananaTV ($7.99), so AirServer isn't exactly breaking new ground. Fellow TUAW blogger Erica Sadun did much of the discovery work on how to stream to Mac, blogged about it on TUAW, and developed BananaTV a while back. AirServer can be purchased directly from the AirServer website. For a great demo of the app at work, be sure to check out the video below:
BananaTunes beta streams beautiful music from iOS to your Mac
One of the great things about being a buddy of Erica Sadun is that sooner or later, she surprises you with an amazing app. [Ed: This is also known as "assault by beta testing" under Utah's penal code.] Her BananaTunes beta evolves iOS-to-Mac video app BananaTV to the next logical step -- it transmits full stereo music from your iOS device to your Mac. Built around the recent AirPlay reverse engineering, Sadun promises that this capability will eventually be factored back into BananaTV, her iOS-to-Mac video app. For now BananaTunes allows you to bring your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad to the office or a friend's house and use its built-in iPod app AirPlay functionality to stream music to a Mac running this software. BananaTunes is currently available as a limited-time beta app so that Erica can work out bugs as time permits. It requires Mac OS X 10.6 and 64-bit, so be sure that you know what you're running before you try out the Mac app. When BananaTunes becomes part of BananaTV, users will need to bring their own key.pem file for authentication. Want to give it a spin? Either download these two zip files off of Erica's site and follow the instructions, or use this all-in-one installer package. Word of mouth is that the installer package works great, but our standard TUAW paranoia mandates that we warn you that we've been unable to authenticate its contents. (In other words, use at your own risk, but it's probably just fine.) In my limited beta testing today, I found that BananaTunes worked very well with my iPad 2. Tunes beamed from my iPhone 4 experienced some garbling. This could be due to network traffic, so be aware that your mileage may vary. Then again, it was a 1950s Dean Martin recording, so he may have been gargling Scotch while crooning the tune I was listening to. In the end, BananaTunes is a fun Mac app for when you want to control your music world from your iPad.
Banana TV now shipping
TUAW's own Erica Sadun recently announced the immediate availability of Banana TV, software that allows users to display photos and videos from any iPad, iPhone or iPod touch on a Mac connected to the same wireless network. Banana TV closes a notable gap in Apple's AirPlay streaming technology. Typically, AirPlay enables iOS devices to stream photos and videos only to a second generation Apple TV. Now, with Banana TV, customers can easily choose to use the big displays on their Macs to show off content from iOS apps that support AirPlay, including third-party apps in iOS 4.3. The software should be especially useful for customers with Macs integrated into their home entertainment systems. Any Mac can easily be connected to an HDTV directly or with inexpensive adapters. Mac users who wish to wirelessly stream video from an iOS device to their television sets can spend less buying Banana TV and a few adapters than the US$99.00 needed to buy a second generation AppleTV. The software also makes sharing photos and videos on a bigger screen possible in situations where an AppleTV is not available (for example, at the office or while visiting friends and family). To use the software, customers launch Banana TV on a Mac, and within moments, the Mac appears as a valid target for AirPlay sharing on iOS devices within the same Wi-Fi network. It's that simple to enable a Mac to wirelessly showcase the latest music video that you cut in iMovie on your iPad, or the photos you took of your trip to Hawaii using your iPhone 4. Banana TV does suffer from a couple of limitations. Currently, the software supports streaming for photos and video, but audio-only streaming isn't available. Banana TV also struggles with displaying photo slideshows from Apple's "Photos" app. Lastly, video protected by iTunes digital right management (DRM) must be authorized to play on the target Mac. Sadun aims to resolve many of these limitations in future updates to the software. Banana TV is available now for US$7.99. To stream images and video from an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, the device must be running iOS 4.2 or higher. Keep reading to watch a short promotional video for Banana TV.
