My iPad Dock Revisited
After discussing My idea for and iPad Dock with a friend, I’ve come to realize that the dock connector probably doesn’t support video in. Well, that’s not going to kill my idea, but there will have to be some re-envisioning.
I still feel like the basic idea would work, but we need a way to get video to the iPad. I foresee a couple of possibilities, both involve some sort of Screen Sharing.
Screen Sharing over Wi-Fi
This should be very easy to implement as Mac OS X already has screen sharing (VNC) capabilities built in. Simply navigate to the Sharing System Preference Panel, check the box next to “Screen Sharing,” setup user access and you’re ready to go. The final step would be to launch a screen sharing application to connect to the Mac Mini.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t do this out of the box, as you’d be forced to connect the Mac Mini to an external monitor until you had everything set up. There could also be issues if your machine crashed and you couldn’t get feedback during Single User Start-up or Target Disk Mode. One of the biggest issues may be performance. It’s not like you could run the latest first person shooter and get a decent frame rate on the iPad display (but can you do that anyway with a Mac Mini?).
All-in-all these may be issues that are acceptable, but…what if we could find a better way?
Screen Sharing over USB
Though not currently available (to my knowledge), screen sharing over USB should be a viable alternative to using the Wi-Fi connection. Of course now we’re talking about developing an App that does things a little different than VNC.
There are advantages to this approach. Generally speaking, computers know what type of device is plugged into them, even during start-up. (Hey, we can boot from a USB device). So, if we used the USB port to redirect the video to an iPad application we could gain many of the features necessary to running a PC.
USB is relatively fast, so display performance would improve. Modifying the OS could allow users to redirect video even during some portion of the start-up sequence. Single user mode could be useful. Not displaying the FireWire icon during Target Disk Mode is probably not very useful anyway.
Since our Mac Mini knows about the device, there should be little to no configuration necessary. Now you’re just left with launching a Screen Sharing application on the iPad, or Apple could just launch it for you if it were connected to Mac Mini Dock accessory.
Conclusion
I’m no hardware guy, and I’m basically a hack when it come to writing software, but I do believe that some genius out there (or even Apple) could develop this combination of hardware and software. Any takers?
Related posts:
- My idea for an iPad Dock The docking station iPad accessories on Apple's website are a little to tame for my taste. I want it all. If I can't run the full version of Mac OS...
- iPad serial cable and terminal application As in IT guy, I’m constantly configuring switches, routers and firewalls. Many times doing it from a console connection. It would be great to have a iPad-2-Serial adaptor, along...
- The iPad’s here, what to do now Trying to avoid yet another one of the 10,000 iPad reviews already out? Here a humorous list of the first few iPad specific apps....
- iPad digital music stand I’ve been around musicians for a long time, but I haven’t played an instrument myself since I was in 8th grade band, but I thought I had a good idea...
- iPad, mobile sales tool This one may not be a huge stretch, but I haven’t seen anyone say much about it so here goes. In a former career I worked in newspapers, first as...
Category: Accessories, Applications
