Show HN: MeowDisplay Is iPhone Mirroring, but in Reverse
Github: https://github.com/raiseCatError/meowdisplay
MeowDisplay is my take on the control your Mac from your phone scene. Available on iPhones, iPads and Macs, with Android rn in closed testing.
The website has interactive illustrative demos if you'd like to see the app demonstrated.
I think MeowDisplay does a few things differently, some of which I prefer and you might too.
Such as Window view: allowing multiple tabs in split-screen type panes. Traditional Mirror/Extend views exist as alternatives. Floating windows: coming in the 2.1 release.
Touch input approaches: Direct Touch(Classic or Natural), experimental Smart Touch, and Trackpad mode alongside Apple Pencil support. Doesn't sacrifice display space for a trackpad, use all of the phone's screen with your preferred mode.
Stage Peek: shows a scrollable and searchable list of your Mac's windows on your phone along with an app drawer when you hold and pull on the left edge of your screen.
It's free and open source so you can try it and see if it's for you without having to commit to it or anything.
Meow, Jai
Only RDP has felt truly responsive to me, and my understanding is that it cheats by not sending raster graphics and instead drawing primaries directly on the remote system and then updating the state based on the server?
As far as the latency on MeowDisplay, In my testing on Wifi, I measured around 14-17ms median from capture to receiver handoff, not e2e. I've also seen occasional spikes around 50-90ms and some stalled frames, you do notice the stalls but overall it's pretty responsive.
I've preferred to show the cursor as it is on the mac instead of rendering it locally on the phone which may make it feel smoother but the trade-off is that it may not accurately represent where the cursor actually is on the mac if things lag or hang.
Then again, it does depend on the connection.
EDIT: Yes, the feature is called Sidecar.
I'd have expected that to be declared in an announcement for this community.