I’m a teacher (and ex-professional programmer) and I use my iPad in class a lot - especially with Keynote for doing presentations by hooking it up to the HD TVs that we have in the classroom using the HDMI connector. But, there is only so much you can do with slides. Having played around in Codea for a while (since launch, actually) I’m now able to make things in Codea really quickly and easily so I’d love to be able to create small educational games in Codea for use in class.
Now I know that it is possible to do native mirroring with iPad 2 and up, but I have the original model so I can’t do that. Other apps like Keynote, some games, note apps and web browsers allow the original iPad to mirror through the HDMI connection kit. If I could render different displays to the iPad screen and to the TV (like what Keynote does with the current slide on the TV and the presenter notes / next slide etc. on the iPad) that would even better as I could create all sorts of interactive activities that the students could come up and put in “secret” information on the iPad, hidden from the rest of the class (imagine a Hangman game, for example, where a student inputs the word on the iPad but it’s hidden on the TV.)
Maybe it could be done in a context switch in the draw method. I.e:
set the context to the iPad and do your drawing calls
set the context to the screen (mirrored to the TV) and do differ drawing calls
If you want it quickly, and are still under IOS5.2, i suggest jailbreak (with Absinth) plus the TV mirror app. Cost a few euros only, very simple to do, and works fine on my ipad1. And jailbreak gives you the total (=normal) control of your files with iFiles (I was getting so mad about Big Brother locks, that i was about to through my iPad in the garbage can and to switch to Honeycomb on Asus Transformer Prime tablet, when iFile saved me).
Thanks, but I’m not really wanting to jailbreak. I’m more looking at having some programmatic control of things so I can turn the display on/off as necessary and (hopefully) have different things displayed on the 2 displays through Codea.
Developers? Any comments? With the amount of people making game-like things in codea, I would think having the ability to use an external display would be a good addition to the feature set.
I agree that it would be a good addition, but there are many questions about how it would work (what would be shown on the external display, do we allow configuration, what do we show on the iPad display, how does it effect performance, and so on).
At the moment, the basic mirroring through Airplay or via cable is probably best until we have time to design a more detailed solution.
Judging from the highly simplified display that keynote gives on the iPad display while doing a presentation, I’m sure there will be a severe performance penalty on the iPad side but if, at some point, being able to draw on both screens it would be so useful in the classroom! I hope it makes an appearance some day
