A Daunting Task – Tiffany goes to Cupertino

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Jan 20, 2013 in Java

TiffanyScreens in the Mac App Store

I never really liked going to “PowerPoint Meetings”, sharing the screen content with others during a meeting, usually requires to connect a projector to the presenter’s laptop. In a lengthy process, the laptop’s screen resolution and refresh-rate needed to be manually adjusted to synchronize with the projector. What follows is a lecture style presentation, featuring slides being projected, hugely magnified onto one of the meeting room’s walls; often, lights need to be dimmed, and listeners either doze off or start checking email.

A couple years back, I wrote TiffanyScreens, which allows you to share presentations (or any screen content), without requiring a projector.
Imagine a scenario, where every participant brought a laptop computer to a meeting and watched the presentation on that laptop’s display – participants sit on a table facing each other, instead of the wall. No adjustments are necessary; images are scaled automatically on arrival, to best match the receiver’s display-capability. To support lively meetings, everyone participating, can with a single button click, turn his computer into the presenting device.

During the development, I had small engineering groups in mind, but it became more and more obvious that instructors, educators, and educational institutions would appreciate TiffanyScreens the most. Listening to users’ feedback, TiffanyScreens has been iteratively improved, refined, and optimized.

Tiffany meets Android

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Oct 26, 2011 in Android

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 – Astoundingly Faster

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Oct 20, 2011 in Java

I never really liked those meetings, sitting in a room with slightly dimmed lights, participants facing a wall, watching power-point slides, and trying to follow a mostly boring presentation. A discussion – if at all – would most likely happen after the presentation. Changing laptops is too cumbersome with all the disconnecting and re-connecting of cables involved – not to talk about syncing the laptop to the projector’s max resolution.

Since most participants seem to bring a laptop, to those meetings to check Email, IM, etc. I had the idea to instead of the wall, use the laptops’ screens as a presentation canvas, i.e. we could all sit on a round table again, facing each other, instead of the wall.

I wrote a small self-contained (doesn’t use a server) multi-platform application a.k.a TiffanyScreens, to capture the presenter’s screen content and send it to the other participants. Best of all, with a simple push of a button, an observing meeting participant becomes a presenter, showing her screen’s content to the other team members.

Up to now, TiffanyScreens was implemented in pure Java. While the installer was implemented and compiled on the native platform, the application itself did not take advantage of OS native capabilities.

TiffanyScreens 3.0 – A major leap forward

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Sep 6, 2009 in Software

TiffanyScreens is a presentation tool that continuously captures the content of the presenter’s screen and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. Best of all, any computer can seamlessly become the presenting computer, no matter if connected wirelessly or through an Ethernet cable.

The User Interface has been refined and many new features like password protected screen-sharing or refresh-rate regulation have recently been introduced to and tested by TiffanyScreens’ loyal user base. Most importantly however, TiffanyScreens 3.0 got faster – a lot faster. When installed on Apple’s new OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for instance, TiffanyScreens makes full use of the underlaying 64-bit technology and becomes screaming fast but even on OS X 10.5 or Windows XP, the performance improvement are very much noticeable.
TiffanyScreens 1.x and 2.x licenses continue to work with TiffanyScreens 3.0.

Ad Hoc TiffanyScreens

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Jan 21, 2007 in Software

You may already have heard about or even used TiffanyScreens, the multi platform application that seamlessly captures your computer’s screen-content and sends it to multiple other computers at the same time. TiffanyScreens is great for sharing PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations, or in fact for sharing any screen content at interactive group meetings.

Jeffrey Peacock of the Orange County Embedded Java Users’ Group for instance, organizes and chairs weekly meetings, to discuss topics, news, and current projects. The group meets at the local Panera Bread in Irvine, California and uses TiffanyScreens to collaborate. Besides the tasty sandwiches, the group enjoys the free wireless Internet access, which certainly is one reason why the group chose that particular venue.

On the other hand, collaborating, sharing presentations with TiffanyScreens doesn’t require Internet Access nor routers, hubs or switches. A wireless network between two or more computers can easily be created using ad hoc networking. Obviously, each participant needs a computer, equipped with a wireless network card and while it doesn’t really matter which specific WiFi protocol each one uses, the ad hoc network will be performing best, if everyone uses 802.11g.

On my PowerBook for instance, I start a Computer-to-Computer wireless network, using the Create Network..Airport menu item. The network’s name defaults to my computer’s name (wpBook) and the channel defaults to 11.
Everyone else in reach can now connect to my machine but only Macs or Windows computer’s with Apple’s Bonjour service installed would be able to use TiffanyScreens’ convenient autodetect feature, which detects all machines running TiffanyScreens without the need to configure a proxy.

However, with a little extra work, the PowerBook can be configured to not only span a wireless network but also act as a DHCP and Name Server, for the temporary wireless network we want to build.

In System Preferences, click on the Sharing icon and then on the Services tab. Choose Built-in-Ethernet in the Share your connection from drop-down, and check the Airport box, before hitting the ‘Start’ button. This method provides assigned but private addresses to all computers on the ad hoc network.

TiffanyScreens’ auto-detect as any other of its features will work on Windows and the Mac. Ad hoc networking isn’t right for every situation but it’s really cool for those group meeting at your local Micro Brewery.

Wolf Paulus

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