Duet Air is pretty cool

A while back, I posted about a tool called Duet, which allows you to convert an iPad or Android tablet (or even phone) into an external laptop display.  It actually works quite well, and allows you to use either WiFi or USB connections for your tablet monitor.  It also support using the touch screen on the tablet to control your desktop, which is pretty cool.

However, I did eventually discover an issue with it.  It seems that, on my work laptop (but not my personal one), the "energy efficient" setting doesn't properly support all resolutions.  It's a really weird bug, as the other two performance settings ("high power" and "pixel perfect") both work fine, and everything works fine on my personal laptop, but "energy efficient" only works when the resolution is set to maximum on my work laptop.  On the up side, their support people have been very responsive and I can just use a different setting, so it's not a big deal.

Anyway, as part of trying to collect more info on this bug for Duet's testing team, I signed up for a trial of Duet Air to see if I could reproduce the issue through that (spoiler: I could).  Duet Air enables Duet's "remote desktop" feature, which allows you to use not only mobile devices, but other laptops as external displays.

It's actually a pretty slick feature.  You just create an account and sign into all of your devices with it.  Then you can go to the "remote desktop" tab in Duet and choose the device you want to connect to.  The paradigm is that you use the "display" device to select what you connect to.  So, for example, if I want to have four monitors for my work machine, I can open up Duet on my home laptop, select my work laptop, and the home laptop becomes a wireless display.

So far, it's working pretty well.  It's easy to use and set up, performant, and it's a tool I'm already using.  It's also fairly cheap at $25/year.  I think I'll probably continue using it after the trial.

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