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iPad Full monitor support on Apple website, M1
- Thread starter magicschoolbus
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Didn't read it, did you?
"Curious if you can try it with a monitor - there are those who believe that Thunderbolt miraculously "fixes" the 4:3 aspect ratio mirroring by using the full screen for all displays (I don't)."
"Just tried it. It did not fill up the screen, black bars on both sides."
I don't get why anyone thinks a Thunderbolt port should change the aspect ratio. Modern monitors you set the resolution, the aspect is automatically handled. As a developer I was "second screening" iPad apps to monitors back with the iPad 3, I was outputting at 1280x720 to a widescreen TV, there were no black bars in my app.
I've been curious as to why developers have not made use of those hooks already in iOS.
Probably because so few people actually use their iPads with a monitor or TV, developers don't think it's worth the extra time to create another interface and test with a few different displays. Back with the iPad 3, I was working on an iOS game that only required periodic tapping of the screen (didn't care where on the screen you tapped), and for fun I made it also run on your TV natively if you hooked it up, but the company I was working for wasn't really interested in promoting or supporting that feature; I think it still ended up in the game but more as an Easter Egg, if you happened to plug your iPad or iPhone into a display using an adapter it'd fill your screen at its native resolution, with a different interface on the phone/iPad screen.
It's a chicken/egg scenario, developers won't support it until more users are hooking up to external monitors but users won't do that without apps that take advantage of it. Of course, I think it's better now, because iPad OS supports mouse and trackpad, so developers don't have to worry as much about controlling the app on the external display. Because of that, I could even see Apple adding native external display support for the OS itself in the future (maybe iPad OS 15?)
Thanks for the reply and it makes sense. I don't think most users are aware that the capabilities are already in place, just rarely used.
The only way Apple can revamp external monitor support for iPad to support extended displays instead of mirrored is to require mouse+keyboard to be attached since the user can't touch the external display. I can only see this happening at the OS level, like DreamPod mentioned, devs won't support the existing external monitor APIs because it's really only useful for showing content like video, not apps, and most people don't use it.
If Apple allows for extended displays that can be manipulated by mouse+keyboard only, then you could have multiple screens with home screens on each with different apps running at the same time.
If Apple allows for extended displays that can be manipulated by mouse+keyboard only, then you could have multiple screens with home screens on each with different apps running at the same time.
Assumption : keyboard and mouse attached
features : external monitor full resolution extended mode. Apps run in ipad resolutions which may result in multiple apps 'windowed'. Possibly also macOS apps running like this either on ipad or external monitor (like you can run ipad apps on mac).
features : external monitor full resolution extended mode. Apps run in ipad resolutions which may result in multiple apps 'windowed'. Possibly also macOS apps running like this either on ipad or external monitor (like you can run ipad apps on mac).
Apple pulled a little sleight of hand in that video showing LumaFusion using the full monitor - there were a lot of posts pointing to that as evidence that full monitor support was coming. Guess a mirrored 4:3 display wouldn't have been as attractive ...
Wait til Apple comes out with a 4:3 XDR monitor.
