Posted by on Oct 26, 2011

Ever since I started working on the Android platform and Android phone and tablet applications, I found it challenging to show my ideas, designs, and prototypes to a group of people, no matter how small that group was. Naturally, I wanted to not just explain concepts and behaviors but to show a live demo on a phone. However, the screen-size of a phone can be a serious obstacle when presenting to a small group. Moreover, the phone often gets covered by my hand when interacting with a mobile application.
I have tried to capture the phone’s screen with a video-camera and showing the live-view on a bigger monitor but reflections, glare, and insufficient lighting resulted almost always in an even worse experience and only in an controlled environment (light-box etc.), filming worked well and I was able to capture footage with a reasonable quality.

For the last couple of weeks now, we have started experimenting with USB-tethered Android screen capturing in combination with TiffanyScreens.


TiffanyScreens is a presentation tool, capturing the content of the presenter’s screen and sending it to multiple other computer screens at the same time. Any computer can seamlessly become the presenting computer, no matter if connected wirelessly or through an Ethernet cable. The self-contained solution does neither require nor use a server. It automatically detects all computers on a local network, running the software and those computers can watch the presentation projected onto their screens. Best of all, with a single button click, any computer can switch from watching into presenting mode.

 

Today we are announcing

TiffanyScreens with Android ScreenCasting.

TiffanyScreens can now share the screen content of an Android phone that is connected via USB-cable to your PC or Mac, with every one else in the room, running TiffanyScreens. Think how this is going to change your UI/UX design meetings, your mobile engineering meetings, your product management / marketing meeting, or your seminars and demos.

 

You don’t need to have an Android SDK installed on your computer nor do you need to run any special application on your Android phone. If you present from a Windows PC, you may need to install the appropriate USB driver and USB-Debugging needs to be enabled on the phone.
With these small pre-requisites out of the way, a presenter will see a small drop-down on the lower-right, allowing him to easily switch the presentation’s source, between computer and phone screens.