Dual Screen App Challenge

One of the areas that I have spent a bit of time on in the past year is the use of Presentation to display alternative content on an external display, such as monitor or TV connected via MHL, HDMI, Miracast, or SlimPort.

As an adjunct to that, I am participating as a judge in Silicon Image’s “Dual Screen App Challenge”, a ~4 month, $100K development contest specifically for apps that support such external displays. Silicon Image is the firm helping spur adoption of MHL, MHL3, and WirelessHD external display protocols.

I have also released my current chapter on Presentation under a Creative Commons license, in support of this contest.

Note that I am not being compensated for my work with this contest; I am doing all this out of an interest in getting more apps (and devices) working with external displays.

I will be updating my book’s content in this area over the contest duration, though those updates will be in the full book, not in the free excerpt that I released for the contest. In particular:

• I will be expanding coverage of MediaRouter, including MediaRouteActionProvider

• I will be attempting to cover Chromecast development, including how to support both external displays and Chromecast-style devices from a single app (though all of this is limited by Google’s bugs)

• I will run some experiments with lower-level access to external displays, to get past the Presentation-is-a-Dialog limitation, per this StackOverflow answer