“The big selling point behind Everydisk is its unlimited NAS-like storage. You get access to your entire disk, not just a special folder, the way you would with Dropbox and not just a standalone drive, as you would with PogoPlug or Transporter. According to the Avatron team, Everydisk creates its own secure tunnel between your computer and your access point, using Diffie-Hellman key exchange, offering you a way to confidently grab the materials you need.”
– TUAW
“Most of the competition like Dropbox or Google Drive are cloud storage that stores it in the cloud, which means they own a million servers or they rent from Amazon. They store it there so you have to pay a lot if you have a lot of files. In contrast we don’t store your files anywhere. The advantage is unlimited storage since we aren’t paying for it and we can’t sell your data or analyze it like the Google business model.”
Five-year-old bootstrapped startup Avatron Software is today launching a Kickstarter project to help develop its new software platform, Everydisk. Everydisk will let people easily access and interact with all their files, on any of their computers, from anywhere in the world. Everydisk is an alternative to costly and high profile cloud storage solutions that may be targets of hackers, spies, and others seeking access to our personal demographic data.
Whereas cloud solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive offer storage space on servers governed by arcane and compromising user agreements, Everydisk establishes direct, secure connections between a user’s devices and the increasingly affordable desktop hard drives attached to them.
How Everydisk works:
Avatron’s web-based server platform maintains a registry of each user’s computers. When a user logs in, they are presented with a menu of their connected devices. Once the connection is made between the user and their remote computers, no data goes through Avatron’s server. User data always stays on machines directly in the user’s control.
“The thoughtfulness of the features, the care in the design and the overall understanding of how people want and need to do work convince me that this is a product worth watching out for.” – TUAW
London-based Middlesex University has put together an infographic guide to some of their favorite (sorry, “favourite”) tools for small businesses.
It’s a good guide. We use several of these tools here. (Including MailChimp, QuickBooks, Zendesk, and of course Air Sharing. Especially Air Sharing.)
Air Display was the first usable app to let you use a nearby device as a wireless second display, and with the recent update to Air Display 2, Avatron Software has streamlined the interface, introduced multiple-display connectivity, and optimized the video drivers to take advantage of Apple’s latest hardware, the iPhone 5s and new iPads.
SHIPPING!
On October 18, we launched Air Display 2 for iOS. We’ve been working on this new edition for a long time, and we’re delighted to have finished it.
MORE MONITORS
Air Display 2 lets you use a number of iPads as extra monitors for your computer. You can mirror your main display onto these extra monitors or you can extend your desktop to get more screen real estate. So far, our Mac video drivers support up to four devices, while the Windows drivers support only one. But we’re working on the multiple-client support in Windows now. Watch this space! (Subscribe to our Twitter feed if you want to be notified when we get the multi-client support in the Windows drivers.)
NEW DESIGN
We’ve also completely redesigned the workflow in the computer host. The old interface was a sort of generic text-based menu. The new design is interactive and much more intuitive.
SMOOTH UPDATES
Maybe the most significant change in Air Display 2 is optimization. We’ve done a lot with OpenGL rendering to speed up rendering. We’re employing the CPU and GPU in parallel to get all of the performance we can out of the mobile device’s hardware.
(Geek Alert!) We’re stunned by the performance of Apple’s new A7 processor. The A7 features 64-bit processing and OpenGL ES 3. Until now, OpenGL ES 3 has been available only on the iPhone 5s. But in two days, the iPad Air and the iPad mini with Retina display will ship, sporting speedy new A7 processors and OpenGL ES 3. For Air Display, the primary new feature is OpenGL’s “tile-based deferred rendering.” This rendering optimization allows Air Display to render the screen much more efficiently. The result is beautifully smooth updates that let you forget that your second (or third) monitor is on a wireless iOS screen.
NEW APP
We decided to release Air Display 2 as a new app, rather than a free update to the existing Air Display app, for a number of reasons. A big one was that we needed to drop support for the first-generation iPad. Recent builds of Apple’s Xcode app development tool have made it very difficult to support both iOS 7 and iOS 5 in a single app. And since Apple dropped iPad 1 support in iOS 6 in September 2012, we needed to create a new app to take advantage of iOS 7’s awesomeness without forcing our engineers perform feats of intellectual contortion.
Releasing Air Display 2 as a shiny new app lets us concentrate on building for the future without having to break existing users. If you already purchased Air Display 1, it will remain available for download in the App Store, while only Air Display 2 is available for new purchases.
We hope you love Air Display 2 for iOS! If you do, please consider leaving a user review in the App Store.
Avatron’s second attempt to provide a solution to wireless monitor extension is all-but flawless in its overall execution, while also arriving practically indispensable in its end results. ~Aaron Hirst, 148apps.com
“On our list of the must-have iPad productivity apps: Air Display.”
How to Augment Your Computer with an iPad
“You have a bunch of different options to turn your iPad into a second display, but we prefer Air Display as the easiest option.”