Helios IPad Air 2 and Air Display
-
Any one got any experience with this setup that can help out how to make it work?
-
I also have an IPad Air 2 and have been trying to find out if you have to have an App like “Duet for Windows” or something to get Helios to work. Any advice on the subject would be greatly appreciated.
-
Hey all, I gave this a try using the demo version of XDisplay and an iPad mini 4 a few weeks ago. It kind of worked. The buttons were only responding to swipe-type movements and not presses. I ran Helios in the VS debugger and discovered that Helios was only being sent mouse events (mouse move, mouse button up/down) events and not the “normal” touchscreen TouchUp/TouchDown events. I emailed the developers of Duet Display to see if their product also behaved this way. Their response was yes, and that in order to make a product that works for both PC and Mac, they have to emulate a mouse instead of creating true touch events.
So what this means is that when you do a single touch on the iPad, the mouse cursor moves to where you touched and Helios gets a mouse move event. It never receives any type of “button pressed” event and so never activates any buttons. If you swipe, then Helios gets a series of mouse move events that it can interpret and it activates the button, but this is annoying for momentaries. The other thing I found is that why Helios kind of worked initially, if the mouse was moved away and focus given to other windows, that Helios on the iPad would quit responding. I don’t know if this is a Helios problem or an XDisplay problem. I wanted to try Duet but didn’t feel like spending the $20 given that it doesn’t produce true touch events either. At any rate, using Helios on an iPad display isn’t really functional at this point. There might be a way to modify Helios to better handle this. I might look into this.
Another thing that I tried a couple of years ago is to have Helios, instead of rendering to a display, to instead start an HTTP server and render the controls as a web page. This allowed the iPad to use Safari to connect to Helios and show the controls in the web browser. This worked pretty well but was a bit laggy. I haven’t really used it since. I could dig this code up if anyone is interested in it. Maybe someone with better web development expertise could make it more responsive.
-
Another thing that I tried a couple of years ago is to have Helios, instead of rendering to a display, to instead start an HTTP server and render the controls as a web page. This allowed the iPad to use Safari to connect to Helios and show the controls in the web browser. This worked pretty well but was a bit laggy. I haven’t really used it since. I could dig this code up if anyone is interested in it. Maybe someone with better web development expertise could make it more responsive.
how laggy?
can you elaborate a bit?