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Unveiling our partnership with Citrix Ready Worx Verified
Today at its Citrix Synergy™ conference in Anaheim, California, Citrix launched its new Citrix Ready Worx Verified program. We’re delighted to announce that Avatron has partnered with Citrix to deliver Worx Verified editions of our most popular mobile productivity apps: Air Display®, Air Sharing®, and Air Login®. The apps will be available in Citrix’s new app marketplace, called Citrix Worx App Gallery, along with other Worx-enabled apps.
With the Worx-enabled editions of these three apps, enterprise professionals will be able to use Air Display to turn an iPad into a wireless computer monitor with touchscreen, view documents on the go in Air Sharing, and to use Air Login to connect back to a home or work computer from an iPad or iPhone.
Citrix’s MDX technology centralizes all of the IT configuration and device management, allowing employees to use our apps within a controlled, secure environment. The Worx App SDK magically adds such features as data encryption, password authentication, secure lock and wipe, inter-app policies and micro VPNs to mobile apps.
Citrix’s Worx App SDK made it possible for us to wrap our apps in enterprise-ready goodness, without having to implement our own IT configuration tools. As a Citrix Ready Worx Verified program partner, Air Display, Air Sharing, and Air Login will soon be available to over a quarter million existing Citrix enterprise customers.
To date, Avatron has concentrated primarily on the professional consumer and small-to-medium business markets. Our partnership with Citrix Ready Worx Verified will help us get our foot in the Enterprise door without having to hire our own enterprise sales force or even, frankly, to dress respectably.
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Air Display for Windows 8
GREAT NEWS: Air Display’s Windows 8 support is no longer in beta.
As of version 1.8.7, the Air Display drivers for Windows includes our patent-pending accelerated video driver. This means Air Display now supports Aero and Direct X, and is GPU-accelerated for screaming performance and high-quality visual effects.
The new driver is active on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.
OBTUSE TECHNICAL DETAILS
Let’s introduce some concepts here:
XPDM Mirror Drivers: This is the Windows XP Driver Model. The regular install of Air Display Connect for Windows implements a mirror driver. This is how most virtual-display products extend your desktop. One advantage of these is that they work on Windows XP, which still sports a large installed base in the Windows world.
WDDM Drivers: Modern Windows video drivers use the Windows Display Driver Model, which was introduced in Windows Vista. These drivers talk directly with the video hardware to use the GPU for special effects.
WDDM Filter Drivers: Some other products implement “WDDM filter drivers.” Filter drivers fools a real WDDM driver into thinking that a hardware video display is connected to a video card’s secondary video output, and then redirect the pixels to the virtual frame buffer. These drivers offer some of the benefits of real WDDM drivers—they do support Aero and Direct X—but they come with some serious limitations, which is why we didn’t go this route. For example:
- WDDM filter drivers are deprecated by Microsoft as unsafe
- They aren’t reliable on cards with only one output
- They can’t be used as a third or fourth display
- They don’t work on SLI configurations (multiple video cards on one machine)
- They don’t work in virtual environments like VMWare and Parallels
- They are not very resilient to changes in the physical video drivers, and often require emergency updates when those drivers are updated.
Virtual WDDM Drivers: The new beta Air Display Connect implements real WDDM Drivers, using patent-pending virtualization methods. None of those limitations of WDDM filter drivers apply to Air Display’s new accelerated drivers.
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Air Display Windows Drivers: Windows 8 beta
A lot of people ask us about Windows 8 support in our software. We have a few different Windows 8 efforts going on now:
- The Air Connect app, which is the host software for our new Air Login remote-access app, will support Windows (including Windows 8), but that will come a few months after the Mac version. (If you haven’t heard of Air Login, check out our demo video or see Air Login in the App Store)
- The Air Display for Windows client app runs well on Windows 8 now (although not on the new Windows Surface RT, which has a different hardware architecture and would require a complete rewrite).
- And Air Display Windows Drivers, the host software that runs on your main computer when you connect to an Air Display client app, is the one that is in beta now. Supporting Windows 8’s video driver spec has entailed a major rewrite of our video driver. We even have a patent pending for our hardware-accelerated virtual graphics driver.
We completed a first beta release a few weeks ago. We found and fixed one issue in this beta, but we’re going to have to do another beta to gather more information about another possible issue.
So we’re trying to gather more beta testers for the Windows 8 version of our Air Display Windows Drivers. If you’re interested, just send an email to notify-win8@avatron.com and we’ll send you beta instructions.
Thanks!
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Ergotech’s Versa Stand
Today we got a new iPad stand called Versa Stand from Ergotech. Our CTO tried it out for a couple of minutes and said, “It’s like the one I have but it doesn’t suck,” and promptly left the office to go buy one. True story!
It really is pretty cool. The iPad rotates freely. It snaps securely into place with a combination of magnets and a clasp. The whole thing weighs less than a pound.
Ergotech’s Versa Stand is a great stand to use with Air Display. The regular price is $99 but this Amazon vendor has it for just $79.
Visit Ergotech’s web site for more information.
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Pro Tips for Awesome Siri Dictation
Although Air Dictate is no longer available, we did get something out of the project. And not just a reserve of reusable code, like the graphical computer picker that we later used in Air Login. We also learned a lot about using Siri for dictation on the iPhone.
Besides the obvious conversion of spoken words into text, Siri dictation also features a wealth of secret commands that you can employ to do rich spoken text entry. For example, you probably already know you can speak the word “period” at the end of a sentence. If you say…
“hello period good day period”
…the resulting text will be “Hello. Good day.”
But there’s a lot more. Here you go. Enjoy it in good health.
Cap or Capital capitalizes the next word: “his name is cap mark” -> “His name is Mark”
Caps On and Caps Off are for titles: “check out the caps on air display caps off app” -> “Check out the Air Display app”
All Caps, All Caps On, All Caps Off capitalize all letters: “are you all caps crazy or is it all caps on just me all caps off” -> “Are you all CRAZY or is it JUST ME”
No Caps, No Caps On, and No Caps Off disable auto-capitalization: “the white house is a no caps on white house no caps off” -> “The White House is a white house”
Space Bar inserts a space. It can also prevent auto-hyphenization: “the bug space bar infested the bug-infested pond” -> “The bug infested the bug-infested pond”
No Space, No Space On, and No Space Off let you run words together.
New Line starts the following text on a new line (inserts one return)
New Paragraph begins a new paragraph (inserts two returns)
Begin Quote and End Quote (or Quote and Unquote) for “double quotes”
Begin Single Quote and End Single Quote for ‘single quotes’
There are also a quite a few special characters. Here’s what you say to produce a variety of punctuation, symbols, and other characters
- ~ tilde
- ! exclamation point
- @ at sign
- # pound sign
- $ dollar sign
- % percent sign
- ^ caret
- & ampersand
- * asterisk
- = equal sign
- + plus sign
- ÷ division sign
- - minus sign
- ± plus or minus sign
- | vertical bar
- / slash
- \ back slash
- µ micro sign
- ™ trademark sign
- © copyright sign
- ® registered sign
- § section sign
- ¶ paragraph sign
- ¢ cent sign
- ° degree sign
- £ pound sterling sign
- € Euro sign
- - hyphen
- – dash or en-dash
- — em-dash or hyphen
- _ underscore
- … ellipsis
- ( open parenthesis or left parenthesis
- ) close parenthesis or right parenthesis
- { open curly bracket or open brace
- } close curly bracket, close brace
- [ open square bracket
- ] close square bracket
- < open angle bracket
- > close angle bracket
- . period
- , comma
- ; semicolon
- : colon
- ? question mark
- ° degree sign
- :-) smiley
- :-( frowny
- ;-) winky
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Air Connect: software as a service
I’d like to introduce you to Air Connect. You, Air Connect. Air Connect, you. There, with the pleasantries out of the way, here’s some background on our new service.
AIR CONNECT
Air Connect is the software-as-a-service platform that backs our Air Login app. At the heart of Air Connect is a sophisticated service called Avoxy (from AVatron prOXY), which lets one of your devices find and connect to one of your other devices, even if one or both is behind a firewall or has a dynamic IP address. Avoxy does this by employing technology similar to that used by Skype and other peer-to-peer services. It also implements enterprise-level encryption and is backed by the stability of Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).
Besides Avoxy, Air Connect is our first subscription service. It lets you purchase subscription time via either Apple’s In-App Purchase or through a payment service called FastSpring. FastSpring is nice because it is more flexible and lets us give provide free time as an promotion, but on the other hand IAP makes it easy to purchase quickly and painlessly.
LAUNCHING AIR CONNECT
We had a couple of hiccups with our Air Connect launch. Of course we engineered everything for scalability and stability, but like most newly launched Internet services, we ran into snags we didn’t anticipate. First, our ISP limited the number of emails we could send out in a day to 500. We ran into that limit pretty quickly. We got them to bump it up to 10,000 per day but that only bought us a few more hours before the Air Connect validation emails started getting blocked again. So now we’ve moved to SendGrid, which can send millions of emails a day without breaking a sweat.
Then we started noticing that Air Connect would shut down periodically due to the high usage. That one was due to a simple programming error, but it brought Air Connect to its knees several times in the first few days. We’ve fixed it and haven’t had any more problems like that since. But if you were affected by one of those outages, we apologize! Let our support guys know, and they’ll make it up to you.
FUTURE APPS
We generally don’t pre-announce our future apps. So I won’t give hints about exactly what we’re up to. But we’re thrilled about Air Connect because of the powerful remote-access apps that it will enable in the future. More about those later. For now, if you’ve seen the breadth of remote services offered by our older, more established colleagues at LogMeIn and Citrix, you can see that there’s a lot of room for Avatron to spread its wings with Air Connect.
I can say that we plan to release a Windows host for Air Login, and clients for Mac, Windows, and Android. Stay tuned!
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Blatant Piracy in the App Store
NOTE: Apple has already resolved this by removing the offending apps. Thanks Apple!
(Seriously, I reported it over the weekend and got a note Monday morning from our partnership manager explaining that he had escalated the issue to his management. Upon checking the iTunes App Store, I saw that most of the offending apps were already gone.)
(an open letter to Apple Legal)
Dear Apple Legal:
We’ve discovered a number of counterfeit apps in the app store, all of which violate US Copyright law.
The developer is AicooSoft Co.,Ltd (developer ID 557881855).
AicooSoft has six apps in the store. Each of them is a direct, blatant rip-off of another successful app by another developer:
- iFileSharing is a counterfeit of Air Sharing
- FastSSH is a counterfeit of iSSH
- WEB2PDF Universal is a counterfeit of WEB²PDF
- VNC Remote Desktop is a counterfeit of Mocha VNC
- iDocs+ is a counterfeit of ReaddleDocs (documents/attachments viewer and file manager)
- iDrawStudio is a counterfeit of ArtStudio
AicooSoft has copied our various app descriptions verbatim, co-opted quotes about our apps from the press, and pasted screen shots of our apps pixel-for-pixel into their own screen shots.
I haven’t downloaded any of AicooSoft’s apps but I wouldn’t be surprised if they either don’t do anything at all or if they’ve just pirated our apps, maybe replaced an image asset or two, and then resigned with their developer ID.
Can you PLEASE remove all of these apps and ban this developer? This is the sort of offense you’re only supposed to find on Android. After all, we jump through a lot of app review hoops in an effort to ensure a quality, safe shopping experience in the App Store.
Thanks,
Dave at Avatron
(Yes, we reported this directly to Apple too. Just thought other developers and users might be interested.)
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Portland tech startups meet the lawmakers
Great to meet House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi earlier this week at an event hosted by Urban Airship. Pelosi and our local Representatives Bonamici and Blumenauer met with Portland startup tech executives and associations to discuss access to capital, intellectual property and the need to train and retain talent. Thanks to the Reps’ teams for bringing together a lively group of commenters!
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HoverBar from TwelveSouth
We just got a HoverBar from Twelve South. Looks like this:
This is an amazing way to mount an iPad (2, 3, or 4) and make Air Display hover magically beside your computer monitor.
Want more information? Check out the HoverBar in the Amazon store.
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Bug fix for kernel panic on Mountain Lion
We’ve isolated a bug in Mountain Lion’s power manager that can kernel panic on wake from sleep when a third-party video driver is installed.
We implemented a workaround that makes the crash go away. If you’re on Mountain Lion, please Check For Updates as soon as you can, to update to Air Display Connect 1.6.5.
