AirParrot
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So you've been Sherlocked: AirParrot developers respond to new Mavericks features
On Monday, Apple introduced OS X Mavericks, their next-generation operating system for Macs. One feature Apple demoed on stage enables users to use an HDTV as an extra monitor, courtesy of Apple TV and AirPlay connectivity. If that feature sounds familiar, you may already be an AirParrot customer. The US$9.99 app allows you to stream your screen or individual windows to Apple TV and it also offers extra screen support. The app's popular extended desktop features have been around for a while. After Monday's announcement, we contacted Sidney Keith of Squirrels to get his reaction to the Mavericks feature. Today, he provided the following, thoughtful response. We're continuing to innovate and develop at our own pace. Just because Apple released one of our features as its own doesn't mean we quit. We're still striving for quality applications that solve our customers and users needs. Honestly, we're glad Apple finally caught up. It gives us that much more motivation to innovate and create cooler applications that users want and need. Software is about progress, and that's what this is going to give us. Not only do we have the motivation to keep innovating, we now have the opportunity and obligation to help those that can't or won't upgrade to 10.9. We have a large and loyal customer base that we'll continue supporting. We don't plan on dropping support for 10.6, even though we've now seen three major releases since then, and not everyone is as loyal to Apple as we may think. Upgrades can be costly for institutions and businesses that have hundreds of systems that need to be upgraded. We're here for those users, and we're here for the ones that don't trust the first iterations of Apple products. Whatever the reason for not upgrading, we have their back. Apple has a global audience to attend to, and while we also have users all around the globe, our feature set is much more focused. We're able to focus solely on one group of features instead of an entire operating system. While Apple might add a feature, it's likely they'll not change that feature significantly in any future releases. We saw the addition of AirPlay desktop mirroring in OS X 10.8, but that feature hasn't changed since its initial release-roughly a year since the beta. We've got the ability to focus our entire teams attention on that one specific feature if we need to. That's something you'll be seeing over the next few months. We'll be doing a lot of innovation and creation in this area, and while we hope Apple doesn't steal our new features, we know it's inevitable. It's almost an honor. If you want to see what Apple's going to to include AirPlay-wise at WWDC 14, you can probably bet our next few releases will be a preview. Squirrels is also the developer of the Reflector app, which nearly all of us at TUAW have purchased. It allows you to stream AirPlay to your Mac or PC. Note: in case you're wondering what "Sherlocked" refers to, here's a definition. Looking for other examples? Here's another for your delectation. No downeys, millers, cumberbatches, lauries, bretts, etc. were hurt in the preparation of this article.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Disappointed over AirPlay Mirroring hardware cutoff
Dear Aunt TUAW, With the new launch of Mountain Lion and its new features, I have somehow started looking at my old mid-2009 MacBook Pro with disdain. One of the features I looked forward to was AirPlay Mirroring which unfortunately my older model can't support due to hardware limitations. [This is causing no small amount of consternation among Mountain Lion upgraders, many of whom expected the feature to work universally. –Ed.] So my question now is, do I really need a new laptop? My hands are itching to get one. Maybe my question should be, what should be the cycle for upgrading laptops (but this is probably more personal). Would appreciate your help and guidance. Thanks. Your loving nephew, Dare Dear Dare, It's never the wrong time for a nice new Mac, if you can afford it. If not, AirParrot is just ten bucks and gives you the same kind of AirPlay mirroring, albeit with more burden on the Mac's CPU and some quality tradeoffs. In return for your $10, AirParrot offers two killer features that Mountain Lion does not. First, you can limit mirroring to a single window. Second, you can use it with an HDTV/Apple TV combo to extend your desktop! Why just mirror to your HDTV when you can use it as an extra monitor? As for Auntie's laptop upgrade cycle, it goes like this: she only buys hardware when she absolutely utterly cannot avoid doing so. It looks like a new Mac mini is in her future, although she hopes to hold off for a 2012 refresh. If not, she's buying a refurb 2011 mini and upgrading it to within an inch of its life. It will fit in perfectly with Auntie's lace doilies and Precious Moments figurines. Hugs, Auntie T. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Reflector app goes live, brings iOS screen mirroring to your Mac
Ever wanted to use AirPlay mirroring to show the screen of your iPad 2 or iPhone 4/4S on your Mac? Just released, Reflection (now renamed Reflector, $14.99 for a single license, $39.99 for a 5 pack) offers a well-featured mirroring receiver for OS X, ideal for education and demos -- and a great way to eliminate the Frankencable for iPad video capture. I've been beta-testing Reflection for several weeks. I watched as David Stanfill (developer of AirParrot, which I introduced a few weeks ago on TUAW) refined and stabilized this app. With Reflection, you can project app demos to your Mac in real time. This is a great feature for any developer or teacher, or even for business folk who would like to bring along their presentations on their phone. I first wrote about Reflection a few weeks back on TUAW, and it received quite the warm welcome -- many of our readers asked when it would debut, and how they could purchase a copy. At that point, the app was just in its initial alpha release. It barely supported multiple resolutions and provided few options. What you get today is full mirroring, including audio, with orientation updates and many video optimization features as well as pseudo-frames that make the video on your desktop look as if it's running on an iPhone or iPad -- just as it would with the Xcode iOS simulator. It's not quite at a bulletproof release, but for day-to-day use for those of you who need these features now and are willing to deal with the occasional crash, it's a great solution as-is. AirParrot ($9.99 for a single license, $29.99 for a 5 pack), the app that mirrors your OS X desktop to Apple TV, has also undergone major changes since I first wrote it up. In the latest release (approximately version 1.2.1), you can now use your Apple TV as an separate external monitor, not just for mirroring desktops. AirParrot also now supports audio mirroring and perceptual smoothing. These are great feature bumps to an already useful app. Here's a handy demo video from our friend Shawn "Doc Rock" Boyd, showing how well Reflection holds up versus the hardware HDMI ingest options from Blackmagic Design. Correction: only the iPhone 4S is supported for mirroring, not the iPhone 4.
AirParrot mirrors your Mac display to Apple TV in real time
A short while ago, I wrote about David Stanfill (of Napkin Studio) and his work on creating an AirPlay Mirroring receiver for OS X. Work continues on that project. At the same time, he's also building a tool that creates live mirroring from your Mac display to Apple TV. Called AirParrot, the new app allows you to select a Mac display and an AirPlay destination (typically an Apple TV). It then uses H.264 encoding to build a live video stream from your selected display. This allows you to work directly on your laptop or desktop system and mirror it to an HDTV display, just as you would using iOS's built-in AirPlay mirroring features. AirParrot is still in its early days. As yet, there is no subsampling (i.e. you cannot just pick a portion of your screen to mirror) and no audio mirroring. Stability can be a bit iffy as well and the developer is still working on a way to keep the Apple TV from going to sleep while mirroring. Built-in options allow you to control underscan (fewer pixels overall, so more encasing black space but better responsiveness) and compression quality (choose from low to high). The app is super useful for anyone who works in groups or in front of audiences. If you can live with the early adopter drawbacks, it will well be worth your money. You can produce live slideshows through Keynote and Powerpoint, demonstrate apps, collaborate with an audience at a corporate meeting, and more. Here's a video showing it in action from the Apple TV side of things. The biggest drawback in its current form is the natural H.264 compression, especially when working with larger screens. So many of us are used to working with high quality presentation on our main computers, which doesn't translate well to Apple TV resolutions. To deal with this, I ended up reinstalling Avatron's AirDisplay back onto my Mac. Using my iPad as an extra display and mirroring from that smaller screen. I was hoping to use Avatron's new Kindle Fire build for testing, as I felt the screen size (which falls between iPhone and iPad) would be an ideal resolution but their app is unfortunately stuck in Amazon review. I was unable to get early access to try it out. You can, of course, also downgrade your primary monitor resolution but I believe most people will find that a big pain in their daily workflow. The following screen shot is from the Apple TV side, mirroring a Keynote presentation set to an iPad via AirDisplay. To finish off, here's one more video, this time of the app's primary menu. That's an EyeTV HD screen just below it that's presenting the output of my Apple TV. Since I mirror my main display in this video, you end up with a nice recursion produced by displaying the data that's being mirrored, which is in turn resampled. AirParrot ($9.99) requires OS X Snow Leopard or Lion. NVidia or Intel HD graphics chipset are recommended for best performance.
