Thursday 12 March 2015

Using my iPad as second screen for my Windows laptop

Last day I was looking at some hands-on Pluralsight videos (which I can highly recommend by the way) on my laptop. I had to constantly switch between my source editor and the browser where the video was playing as my screen on my laptop is to small to have both windows on at the same time and still be practical.

Then I noticed my iPad lying just besides me and started the pluralsight app to watch the video on it. Et voila, problem solved.

Although the app is very user-friendly, I found it annoying to having to take my hands of the mouse and keyboard when I wanted to pause/restart the video on the iPad.

A quick search lead me to iOS apps that could extend my screen to my tablet using a Wi-Fi connection.

First in line was the Air Display app by Avatron which most people are really positive about. My efforts were nonetheless fruitless. Disabled my firewall, checked my router, checked traffic with Wireshark, everything looked ok but still no connection. Even with the very helpful support of Avatron I wasn't able to setup the connection between my Windows 8.1 laptop and iOS 8 iPad. At least not in the allotted time I gave myself.

Second in line was the iDisplay app from SHAPE. Installed the app, installed the client on Windows, the client found my iPad in the network, clicked connect... Boom, everything worked.

The app costs 9,99€, which is a bargain for this productivity gain in my case.