AirPlay vs iOS API

This post should not be a big surprise. As you might have guessed I had other ideas with my AppleTV.

I think there’s a large, untapped potential in the AppleTV to be used with/from other devices. Collaboration, visualization and of course gaming (think of the Wii U) comes to mind. Sadly several pieces are missing for this to become reality Let’s try to add one of them…

If you played the iOS API for AirPlay you already know it does not really support pictures, i.e. what the (Apple supplied) Photo.app does is not available to developers. In particular:

• The device selector (available thru MPVolumeView) shows every AirPlay devices, including AirExpress for speakers. Photo.app somehow filters them since they can’t show pictures;
• It does not allow you to provide what’s to be shown on the AppleTV, that must be done with the MPVolumeView which is not picture friendly;
• The closest you can get is screen mirroring (only on recent iOS devices) and that’s not quite the same since your (iOS device) screen is not available to other uses.

Note: I know private API exists to do this but, like the jailbreaking, I do not want my app to depend on them.

Like I showed before using .NET to show pictures to an AppleTV is quite simple. What’s needed is a UI for this…

And here’s come Poupou.AirPlay assembly that provides browsing AirPlay devices and sending pictures to them. It works on any iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch (at least everything running iOS5, I did not test earlier versions – feedback appreciated).

To select a AirPlay device the code uses UIActivity, available in iOS 6 (and later).

iOS 6.0 screenshot

But it’s easy to support earlier iOS releases with a bit of extra code. The sample application shows you how to do that.

iOS 5.1 screenshot

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