Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Duet Display

Duet Display (via Kif Leswing):

Duet is the first app that allows you to use your iDevice as an extra display for your Mac using the Lightning or 30-pin cable.

Sounds great, though it’s not yet approved by the App Store. I’ve been using Air Display for this, but due to Wi-Fi it’s slower and doesn’t always work.

Update (2014-12-18): Rob Griffiths:

Those two options also reveal my only real complaint about Duet Display as of today—it can be a real CPU hog. When set to display in retina mode at 60fps, the CPU usage on my 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro with attached retina iPad mini exceeds 120 percent. With this much CPU going to the extra display, I noticed some lag when switching between apps and launching new programs.

Setting the frame rate to 30fps and disabling retina mode drops that figure to around 30 percent, which is still quite high.

Juli Clover:

Along with the Retina issue, potential buyers should be aware of some other small issues that we ran into. Even in non-Retina mode, on a 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, there was some slight cursor lag, and we also had problems with visual artifacts on some apps. When watching YouTube videos, for example, there were some occasional performance blips.

Update (2014-12-22): Dean McNamee looks at how Duet Display works (via Milen Dzhumerov).

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

An alternative take on this is something like the recent Packed Pixels kickstarter. Ok it's not a reuse of your existing iDevice, but you won't have to compromise on resolution or anything else.

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