I use the app to connect digital signage devices, and PCs that are being revived, to test if output is working. Main benefit for me: an iPad takes up less space on a workbench than a regular display. I use a Newhope HDMI-to-USB C recording dongle which works well (but build quality is so-so). Apart from its practical value, the Orion app is a delightfully designed app with a goofy UI.
Love this sort of "eye candy". Reminds me of the kind of style I was looking for when theming my jailbroken iOS devices. I loved William Silvester's "Jaku", it had similar skeuomorphisms in its design, and the texture of the materials in the icons were pixel-perfect.
iPad was already a good SSH terminal with unmatched 4:3 vertical real estate. Orion made iPads into a fun travel monitor for Linux SBCs and embedded hacking. Next we need a serial console app that can work with the USB-C port.<p><i>> But we held ourselves to a short schedule, we could risk it. If it made a few bucks, great! If not, we could treat it as the quirky art project it was.</i><p>Good budget advice for all science/art projects!
This is not really related to Orion, but is anyone else annoyed by the fact that Apple restricts Sidecar to only work if both devices are signed into the same Apple ID? This is on top of the insult of making it ridiculously complicated to switch Apple ID's on an iOS device (fast user switching anyone?).<p>They could just have an AirPlay server as part of every iPad and make a lot of this possible without dongles and cables. Bonus points for making Airplay an open standard so we don't all stand around for the next 20 years figuring out which subset of devices can stream to which subset of displays ("It just works?").<p>Sorry for the rant, I'm just annoyed by all of the dark-ish patterns around iOS devices that seem to be trying to drive multiple units rather than sharing of fewer units.
> Our research found that those capture dongles only supported 1080P resolution, and this presented an opportunity.<p>I really hoped the rest of the article would be covering the hurdles of them developing a 4K resolution-capable dongle. Instead, they spent the majority of their budget trying to upsell something already ubiquitous with design and marketing tricks. Good job, I guess.
I really like Orion. Comes in really handy on my small 18U home lab rack cabinet when I need to connect to couple of servers and raspberry pis to troubleshoot boot issues. I just connect a 11 inch ipad to a single hdmi cable connected to 4 port hdmi switch.