DrHouse
iPF Noob
Hi all,
Working mostly from home on a laptop, I was thinking of getting an external monitor to make my daily work a bit more comfortable. Anyone coding, testing and debugging will tell you that more screens is better.
Since my current desk is not very big, putting an external monitor would have been tricky. On the other hand, I didn't felt like spending 200$ for that, knowing that in a few months I could be on the road or at a customer location and that second monitor would be gathering dust at home.
Then I remembered that there is surely an app for that
A a matter of fact, there are more than one. The most popular seems to be AirDisplay (9.99$) but it has a lot of bad reviews with the last update so I looked again for an alternative. I found iDisplay (4.99$), which is compatible not only with iOS, but all kinds of devices. But the best argument was the price!
After installing the software on my Windows7 laptop to render a virtual screen, I launched iDisplay on my iPad and voilà ! I was actually really surprised how smooth the screen refresh was. It works great, over wifi, and does not seem to use a lot of CPU on the laptop. Marvelous!
Only glitch: my laptop's wifi sometime fails, losing the connection with my iPad, but I can work several hours before it happens, so not a big deal.
I was also surprised to find out that I could zoom in and interact with the displayed applications on my iPad. Cool!
It may not be as fast or as large as a real monitor, but I gained the benefit of being able to monitor remotely a running process, putting that second screen where ever I want and bring it with me when I move to my favorite chair to write some documents on my iPad (switching the monitoring to my iPhone).
Of course there is VNC to do remote monitoring, but having only softwares that needs monitoring in that screen and not everything is perfect. And when I move back to my laptop, I just put it to the right of my laptop screen, going back to whatever code I was getting lost into, without loosing sights of the monitored apps.
My 499 cents!
VicoPad addict!
Working mostly from home on a laptop, I was thinking of getting an external monitor to make my daily work a bit more comfortable. Anyone coding, testing and debugging will tell you that more screens is better.
Since my current desk is not very big, putting an external monitor would have been tricky. On the other hand, I didn't felt like spending 200$ for that, knowing that in a few months I could be on the road or at a customer location and that second monitor would be gathering dust at home.
Then I remembered that there is surely an app for that
A a matter of fact, there are more than one. The most popular seems to be AirDisplay (9.99$) but it has a lot of bad reviews with the last update so I looked again for an alternative. I found iDisplay (4.99$), which is compatible not only with iOS, but all kinds of devices. But the best argument was the price!
After installing the software on my Windows7 laptop to render a virtual screen, I launched iDisplay on my iPad and voilà ! I was actually really surprised how smooth the screen refresh was. It works great, over wifi, and does not seem to use a lot of CPU on the laptop. Marvelous!
Only glitch: my laptop's wifi sometime fails, losing the connection with my iPad, but I can work several hours before it happens, so not a big deal.
I was also surprised to find out that I could zoom in and interact with the displayed applications on my iPad. Cool!
It may not be as fast or as large as a real monitor, but I gained the benefit of being able to monitor remotely a running process, putting that second screen where ever I want and bring it with me when I move to my favorite chair to write some documents on my iPad (switching the monitoring to my iPhone).
Of course there is VNC to do remote monitoring, but having only softwares that needs monitoring in that screen and not everything is perfect. And when I move back to my laptop, I just put it to the right of my laptop screen, going back to whatever code I was getting lost into, without loosing sights of the monitored apps.
My 499 cents!
VicoPad addict!
