Avatron

Air Display for Windows 8

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:02:00 -0400

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.

Air Display Windows Drivers: Windows 8 beta

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:02:33 -0500

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!

Ergotech’s Versa Stand

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:22:00 -0500

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.

Pro Tips for Awesome Siri Dictation

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 19:49:00 -0500

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

Air Connect: software as a service

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 21:01:00 -0500

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!

Blatant Piracy in the App Store

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 12:32:00 -0400

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.)

Portland tech startups meet the lawmakers

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:58:09 -0400

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!

HoverBar from TwelveSouth

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 20:35:00 -0400

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.

Bug fix for kernel panic on Mountain Lion

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 21:06:00 -0400

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.

Accelerated Windows Driver

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 16:38:00 -0400

NOTE: THIS POST IS OUTDATED. OUR ACCELERATED DRIVER IS NO LONGER IN BETA. See this more recent post for details.

Air Display is now compatible with Aero and Direct X, and is GPU-accelerated by screaming performance and hardware-quality visual effects.

Version 1.6.4 of the Air Display Connect software for Windows includes an optional beta installer for the new patent-pending accelerated video driver.

OBTUSE TECHNICAL DETAILS

Let’s introduce some concepts here:

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 the Air Display Connect accelerated drivers. Since this is still in beta, it is an optional install. But so far feedback for the new drivers has been great!

HOW TO PARTICIPATE IN THE BETA

Everybody on Windows 7 or later can try the new accelerated video drivers in Air Display Connect. But please understand that this is beta software. As such, you should be sure to exercise caution. Back up before installing the beta. Back up frequently while trying it. And please send lots of feedback (good and bad) to support@avatron.com.

Here’s how to install the beta:

First, make sure you’ve updated to at least Air Display Connect 1.6.4
Select Start menu > All Programs > Air Display > Install Accelerated Beta Drivers
Install and reboot

If you decide you don’t want to use the beta any more, you can select Start menu > All Programs > Air Display > Uninstall Accelerated Beta Drivers. If you encounter serious issues, reboot in safe mode and then uninstall.

Enjoy!

Kernel Panics, Mountain Lion, and Bluetooth

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:28:00 -0400

UPDATE: We isolated the bug and implemented a workaround in Air Display Connect version 1.6.5. If you’re running Air Display on Mountain Lion, please Check For Updates. All will be well.

We discovered a fascinating obscure bug in Mountain Lion. Fortunately there’s an easy workaround. Here’s the bug:

Sleep your Mac (either explicitly or by closing a laptop).
Turn off all of your Bluetooth devices.
Wake your Mac.
Watch helplessly as your Mac goes into a Kernel Panic.

The workaround:

Don’t do that. At least not in that order.

If you turn off your Bluetooth devices before sleeping, you’ll be fine. If you don’t turn off the Bluetooth devices at all, you’ll be fine. It’s only if you turn off the devices while the Mac is sleeping that this happens.

Some people have also noticed that they can make the kernel panic go away by uninstalling certain third-party kernel extensions. Among them is Air Display. But don’t remove Air Display! It’s awesome!

We’re expecting that Apple will fix this soon. It’s probably related to the half-finished work on Power Nap, which still (as of right now anyway) isn’t enabled on the Retina MacBook Pro. Since the bug appeared in the Mountain Lion GM, and since Power Nap still isn’t really finished, we’re guessing that the bug is the results of some stressful late-night code thrashing in Cupertino, and that Mac OS X 10.8.1 will address this.

UPDATE

We have more information. The above description is accurate if you have this option enabled on your Mac: Allow Bluetooth Devices To Wake Your Computer. It’s on by default. If you turn that option off (in System Preferences > Bluetooth > Advanced), the system will kernel panic even if you don’t turn off the Bluetooth devices.

So if the above workaround isn’t effective for you, make sure this option is turned on.

RADAR

If you’re at Apple, you can see more details at rdar://11977211.

Air Display on the Nexus 7

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 19:44:00 -0400

When we received our brand new Asus Nexus 7 tablet earlier this week, we opened it eagerly, bought Air Display and tested it on the new 7” Android tablet. We were happy to see that it not only ran without any problems, but it was much faster than on any other Android tablets that we’ve tested. It was screaming fast, even faster than the Retina iPad (of course, the new iPad has three times as many pixels as the Nexus 7).

So it was a little surprising when we started hearing from people on Twitter and via email who were unable to purchase Air Display for their Nexus 7. They were either not finding Air Display at all in Google Play on the device or they were seeing that it was incompatible on their computer.

So that was weird. We didn’t see any problem on our end. But then a few hours later, we started seeing the same thing. We double-checked our Google Play Portal and confirmed that it said Air Display was compatible with the Asus Nexus 7.

And now today it’s just fine again.

We still don’t know what was wrong, but we suspect it was sloppy cache synchronization on Google Play. But it’s all working now!

Blue screen on Mac after updating Air Display

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:32:07 -0400

A handful of Air Display users on Mac OS X have reported seeing a blue screen after updating the Air Display Connect software. The main screen turns blue, and the Finder never appears. To most users, the Mac appears to be unusable. This is a pretty serious problem. Fortunately, (1) it has only affected very few users, and (2) there’s an easy workaround.

The problem is simply that Mac OS X occasionally corrupts its kernel extension cache. If you boot to a blue screen, you can recover with these two steps:

THE FIX

“Safe Boot” your Mac: Select  > Restart, then press and hold the Shift key immediately after you hear a tone. Release when the Apple logo appears.
Restart again.

All should now be fine and you should not see the blue screen again.

Using Air Sharing to transfer remote files

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:00:00 -0400

The latest Air Sharing (version 3.1, in Apple’s review queue now) features a streamlined interface for copying and moving documents. Every time we can get rid of an extraneous gesture or decision point in our workflow, we’re happy, so we’re pretty excited about Air Sharing 3.1.

Here’s how it works. When you want to copy a file or folder (or multiple items) from a remote server to your local My Documents folder, you can simply (1) tap-hold to select it, and (2) tap the File Transfer button.

That pops up a menu that lets you choose whether you want to Copy to My Documents or Add to Pasteboard.

If you choose Copy to My Documents, that, well, downloads the file or folder to Air Sharing’s My Documents folder. If you add it to the pasteboard, then you can transfer the selection to any writeable location, local or remote.

When you select Add to Pasteboard, you’ll see the selected item(s) jump up into the pasteboard. You can then go to some other folder, tap the pasteboard icon, and choose what to do with the pasteboard contents.

Please note that in Air Sharing 3.1, you cannot Move an item from one server to another. If you want to do that, you can simply Copy it, and then go back and delete the original. We did make inter-server Move available at one point, but removed it until we can work out some stability kinks. We definitely don’t want anybody to lose any personal data due to bugs in one of the various remote file-access libraries or in our own code.

That screen saver bug on NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:44:00 -0400

We posted about a week ago about the Mac OS X Lion bug that causes the screen saver to engage even when you’re actively using your Mac. To summarize:

This only affects the 15” and 17” Mid-2010 MacBook Pro (models MacBookPro6,1 and MacBookPro6,2), and only on Lion.
It is most common when a third-party video driver (like Air Display Connect) is installed. Removing the driver can make the problem go away. But it also affects some people who don’t have a driver installed. And not everybody using third-party drivers on these systems sees the problem.
It apparently only happens after a Mac OS X upgrade, not after a fresh Lion install.

In our previous post, we recommended turning off the screen saver and using Display Sleep instead. This generally fixes the problem. But we’ve heard that it’s not a good solution for some people. Specifically:

Some people need to use the screen saver for one reason or another.
Some app features, like 1Password locking and Adium status, still have problems because they depend on the system idle state, just like the screen savers do.

So we’ve learned of a better fix. Topher Kessler says in CNET’s MacFixIt blog:

If this problem is happening to you, first try adjusting some of your Screen Saver settings by either changing the screensaver, adjusting its activation time, or setting various hot corners that you may have previously used for activating or inactivating the screensaver. If this does not work then the next step would be to remove the screensaver preferences file, in case it is corrupted or otherwise contains settings that are incompatible with Lion.

To remove the Screen Saver preferences, press the Option key and select Library from the Finder’s Go menu. In the library, go to the /Preferences/ByHost/ folder and delete the file called “com.apple.screensaver.NUMBER.plist,” where NUMBER is a string of alphanumeric characters that will be unique to your computer.

After the preferences have been deleted, go back to your Screen Saver system preferences and configure your screensavers again.

Users have reported success when following these steps. We’ve yet to hear from anybody who tried deleting the ScreenSaver preferences and still saw the issue.

Hope this helps!

Air Display over USB

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:13:00 -0400

Q. Can Air Display communicate over the USB cable to my Mac or PC?

A. Yes and no.

In order for iOS apps like Air Display to access the USB bus via the 30-pin dock connector, its developer must be part of Apple’s Made for iPod/iPhone/iPad (MFi) program. As Avatron is not a hardware shop, we are not eligible for this program and therefore cannot support USB. So the answer is No.

On the other hand, Yes. A user named Aaron Nelson over at HijinksInc.com details a nifty workaround to allow Air Display to run over USB. But only on jailbroken iPads.

To set up Air Display over USB you’ll need:

• A jailbroken iPad

(WARNING: We’ll leave the jailbreaking details up to your Google skills. We’ll also mention that Avatron doesn’t advocate jail breaking your your Apple device, nor will we take any responsibility for any damage incurred by your device through attempting this)

• An app to enable USB tethering

An example is MyWi 5.0 from the Cydia App Store. USB tethering turns the iPad’s USB port into another network adapter, and assigns an additional IP address to both your iPad and your Mac.

After installing MyWi on your iPad, enable USB tethering and connect your iPad to your Mac using a USB cable. MyWi adds a status to the toolbar, and you can see that there is one client (the Mac) attached.

Back on your Mac, if you look at Settings > Network you’ll notice a new network connection called iPad USB. You’ll also see the IP address that has been allocated to the Mac. In this case it’s 192.168.20.2. As this is essentially a point-to-point network we can safely assume the IP address of the iPad is 192.168.20.1. That IP address can be used later in Air Display to “Connect to Other” if necessary.

On your Mac, momentarily disable your Wi-Fi or wired network; otherwise a bug will prevent you from connecting. Start Air Display on your iPad, and then connect to it from your Mac as you would normally. At this point you can re-enable your Wi-Fi or wired network again.

It’s as simple as that! Thanks again to Aaron for posting such a useful workaround.

(We should also point out that our Tech Support team doesn’t have jailbroken devices and can’t actually support this clever technique.)

Air Display on Lion with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:27:00 -0400

While we’re talking about Mac OS X bugs that plague third-party video drivers like Air Display…

Besides the drag-drop bug that affects users of 15” and 17” MacBook Pro models from late 2008 to mid 2009, there’s one other known bug that we first saw in Lion:

This only affects the 15” and 17” Mid-2010 MacBook Pro (models MacBookPro6,1 and MacBookPro6,2).

The issue is that when a third-party video driver is installed, these Macs will go to sleep even when they are in use. So for example if you set your Computer Sleep time to fifteen minutes, then after fifteen minutes your computer will sleep regardless of whether it’s idle or not.

Unfortunately there’s no way for us to fix this Mac OS X bug. But we can recommend this simple workaround: Set your Computer Sleep time to NEVER, and use Display Sleep instead.

This will clear up most of the manifestations of the bug. There are some others that affect particular apps, including 1Password and the Adium Idle status.

We will continue to pester our Apple contacts about this bug (and the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M/9600M one) and keep you posted about the status.

Air Display on Lion with NVIDIA 9400/9600

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:18:00 -0400

When the first Lion previews came out, we discovered a bug in the Mac OS X Event Manager. The bug was very specific, affecting only certain Mac models with NVIDIA 9400M video chipsets, only on Lion, and only when a third-party video driver (like Air Display’s) was installed. Apple’s fixed the bug to some degree over the course of a few Lion updates, but it still affects three Mac models.

Here’s the current status: IF you’re running Lion AND if you have an NVIDIA 9400M/9600M chipset AND you have a third-party video driver installed, THEN you will not be able to release the mouse button while drag-dropping something.

This only affects these Mac models:

MacBookPro5,1 (15-inch, Late 2008)
MacBookPro5,2 (17-inch, Early or Mid 2009)
MacBookPro5,3 (15-inch, Mid 2009)

Until Air Display 1.6, we intentionally disabled Air Display on these Macs, so that people would not find that drag-and-drop was broken. Of course we tried to clearly describe the hardware requirements in our app description and web site.

Well, it turns out that the drag-drop bug only manifests itself if you haven’t done a Wake From Sleep since your last Log In or Restart. So there’s a workaround: After each Log In or Restart, close your MacBook Pro, wait for it to sleep, and then open it again to wake it. It’s a little bit of a pain, but it’s there as a workaround if you want to use Air Display on one of these Macs.

Given that workaround, we have now enabled Air Display on all Macs on Lion. If you have one of those three MacBook Pro models, you might want to decide whether the sleep/wake workaround is worth the hassle for you before purchasing Air Display. But at least now it’s your choice, and if you already own Air Display, you can continue to use it on Lion.

Air Display on the Third-Generation iPad

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:53:00 -0400

If you’re like us, you haven’t slept since March 16 because you’ve been enraptured by your new iPad with its stunning 264-DPI Retina screen. And you may have been wondering when Air Display will support the 2048x1536 resolution.

Performance Tuning

After Apple announced the new iPad on March 9, we worked like mad to add Retina resolution to Air Display. We got done in time, but of course we couldn’t ship the Air Display update until we had tested on a real iPad. Just in case.

It worked like a charm in the iPad simulator. Unfortunately when we got our new iPads and tested performance, we realized that the 4x increase in pixel count was killing our frame rates. So our engineers rushed back to the laboratory to experiment with codec settings, image filters, color spaces, threaded decompression, and god-knows-what-else.

Frame Rates

Finally we’ve got it working with good speed. What’s more, through all of this performance tuning and profiling, we’re delivering dramatically better frame rates on other devices as well. Especially the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, which have dual-core CPU like the new iPad.

Not only that, but this update will let you take advantage of Retina resolutions on iPhone 4 and 4S as well. And by the way, you can

HiDPI

So you will be able to use your new iPad as a 2048x1536 computer monitor. But that’s not all! On Mac OS X Lion or Mountain Lion, you’ll be able to turn on HiDPI mode. HiDPI is a hidden feature in Mac OS X that renders with double-resolution on a double-density screen.

Here’s what it looks like:

To turn on HiDPI, you just go to the Displays Preferences and select 1024x768 (HiDPI).

HiDPI has been shipping with Mac OS X for some time. But it isn’t enabled in the System Preferences, because until now there hasn’t been a mass-produced computer display with high enough pixel density (DPI) to do it justice. That’s where Air Display and the new iPad come in.

So, stay tuned. We need to wait through another Apple review cycle before this goes live but we think it’s going to be worth the wait.

UPDATE: Air Display 1.6 is live in the app store now. Response has been fantastic. It’s the #25 top-selling app in the iPad App Store today, ahead of Words with Friends and Angry Birds HD.

A Week on Android

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:50:00 -0500

We released Air Display on Android a couple of weeks ago. Here’s how it’s going so far.

First observation: Sales on Amazon’s Appstore for Android are much, much slower than on Google’s Android Market. And Android Market is in turn much, much slower than Apple’s App Store. Now, part of this may be that Air Display really shines on a tablet, a form factor on which Android hasn’t been particularly successful. (Frankly, I think this is because tablet users actually want to get things done, while phone users primarily want to make phone calls and be entertained. A glance at the top-grossing lists for iPhone and for iPad supports this.) We’re hoping some of the Ice Cream Sandwich-based tablets are more popular in the market than the current crop of Android tablets.

Second, Air Display’s user ratings are great on Android. But as expected, some Android users are absolutely appalled that we are charging $9.99 for Air Display. One user comment says, “why are you charging $10 while others charge $.99 or $1.99? don’t you think $10 is a little steep for this program? Just seems like if i wanted it i would go and find a download for it. lower the price and you might make some kind of money. you can safely charge $1.99 $2.99 or possibly $3.99 at $10 you might as well just expect little people paying for it and mostly download it elsewhere. just a tip. hope you listen :P”

Allow me to paraphrase: “Why are you people charging a reasonable price for your product, when I can get a stolen copy from a thief for nothing? If I want it and your price doesn’t work for me, I will steal it from you. Might burgle your home too. Watch yourself.”

But in general user feedback has been very positive. Our first released version had a bug that made Air Display unusable on certain devices. It was embarrassing. But once we heard about it we scrambled to release a fix within twenty-four hours. Now we have had several user comments complimenting our tech support team. That feels pretty good!