It’s rather annoying to have two PC screens on the background when this happens, blinking away as they mirror what you do in the wrong resolution for those screens. I often use Splashtop at home in order to view my PC screen on a much more portable iPad mini, giving me more freedom. The irony is, there is a built-in gesture for hiding/showing the toolbar itself, it’s just that even if you use that gesture, it still shows the on-screen buttons all the time. This either leaves you moving the buttons constantly, or zooming/panning to try to get to what you need. The placement of these buttons means it will either cover the Start button or the system tray on a controller Windows machine, both places you really need access to. You can move this between the bottom left and bottom right corner, but you cannot hide it completely, unless I’ve missed something critical. Splashtop displays a couple of buttons on the screen at all times, specifically a keyboard button and a toolbar button. Connect an external display, and it will mirror the screen using the standard mirroring system in iOS, nothing else. You could connect your iPad to a projector, connect to your computer via Splashtop, and use the full power of a PC presentation app in dual screen mode.īut nope, that’s not how Splashtop works. Imagine the possibilities with for instance PowerPoint, which actually has a dual screen presentation mode. Or, if controlling a dual screen computer, put one screen on each display. Connect a keyboard, use the iPad only as a trackpad, and have an awesome setup right there. Run the controlled computer at the resolution of the external display, and really get a remote controlled computer. You could use the external display as the actual monitor, placing a trackpad and keyboard on the iPad itself. If ever there was an app that would benefit from iOS’ ability to let apps use external displays in dual screen mode, it would be Splashtop. This is another one of those gigantic gaps in Splashtop’s functionality that makes me wonder what on Earth the developer is doing. First off, why the mouse issue? Also, why not change the resolution of both screens to make switching easier? Or allow the user to display both screens side by side, either by zooming out, or having one hidden off to the side so you could just pan from one to the other? Or, offer the option to automatically disable extended display mode when connecting with Splashtop that way the PC itself would fix the issue. There’s so many ways to fix this problem that it makes me wonder if Splashtop is trolling me. No matter what I do, it just moves the screen around, and does nothing to switch displays. To top it all off, the three finger swipe that the gesture help screen promises will switch displays, simply doesn’t work for me. That means you can’t just move the cursor over to the other monitor, grab the window (which is easily done blindly), and pull it back where it belongs. If you switch from touch to mouse mode in Splashtop, trying to move the cursor off screen will just stop it at the end of the display. As you probably know, moving the mouse between screens on a dual screen monitor setup is as easy as moving it off the screen on one screen and it appears on the other. To make matters worse, you cannot use Splashtop’s mouse mode to move the cursor over to the other monitor. I often find myself having to change monitors twice just to move the bloody window I just opened back to the display I opened it on. This is a fairly massive problem when you’re remote controlling a dual screen setup all the time, since many apps are set to open on the secondary display, as that’s where they were closed. This makes it a massive pain in the butt to switch screens, since it then has to change the resolution of the second monitor, switch to display that, and revert the monitor it just “left” back to its full resolution. If you remote control a computer, it will change the resolution of the primary monitor, and let you see that, while leaving the second monitor alone, running at full resolution. Splashtop’s dual screen support is so horrible I sometimes wonder if the people who designed it actually ever used the finished product. Here are my biggest annoyances with Splashtop, and the reasons I’ve started looking for a replacement. However, the more I use it, the more obvious the issues with the app becomes. Splashtop is one of my all time most used apps, and one of my key tools for using the iPad mini as a portable computer.
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