The title could clarify it's for MacOS X.
Small FYI: it’s just called macOS now
DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
61–70 of 167 posts
Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#62I think the problem I have is more so that people want my font sizes to be 3x what I have them. Usually I’m presenting a spreadsheet (financial statements and such) and people ask me to zoom in. Which I can but it breaks the whole thing and throws me off because I can no longer read my document anymore and I’m trying to present it. For that reason, I evangelize that attendees use the Zoom feature on their device if i…
I often call into meetings where I am also presenting twice. Once on my phone and once from my computer. I use my computer for sharing, audio, video, etc. I use my phone to see what the other people see. Shared screens are always difficult to predict. If you have a 4K screen, it will almost always get downsampled somehow for meetings… it can be too slow otherwise. In my experience, the problem isn’t that the font is…
+1 to learning how to share a window, doing it fast when you’re changing windows, and reducing the size of the window. It shows that you care for the audience.
Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#63This is great; though I have less need for it day to day now. I used to have 49" 5120x1440 display. We started with Zoom, which under Advanced would allow partial desktop sharing. I would draw a 1920x1080 box and move windows in and out of the box. We moved to Teams and Teams only supports Window or Screen sharing. DeskPad would work great for that situation. Create a virtual display, share it and then use it on righ…
Why do change the resolution instead of the scaling?
Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#64Oh lawd I’ve had to say ‘sorry you’ll have to bear with my ultrawide’ during pairing at least 10 times in the last week. You are a lifesaver.
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Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#65I've gotten away with simply firing up OBS and "screen sharing" the virtual camera. Has worked fine on Zoom and Slack huddles, with the added benefit of giving me other things that OBS can provide: easy recording, scenes, text, source management, plugins, etc. For a casual conversation it's somewhat overkill, but when you're doing something more serious or formal, or need to switch between a keynote/Powerpoint and a screen share, or a video capture device, it's wonderful, and actually rather easy to get going in.
Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux users probably already have some weird workflow with X11 virtual buffers to do this.
This is how I do it under Sway (Wayland): #!/bin/bash swaymsg create_output OUTPUT=$(swaymsg -r -t get_outputs | jq '.[].name' | grep HEADLESS | tr -d '"') # No need to reduce res, it defualts to 1080p #swaymsg output "$OUTPUT" resolution 1280x720 wl-mirror "$OUTPUT" swaymsg output "$OUTPUT" unplug When I was still in X11 land I used to just use Xephyr.
Ooh, creating a headless display and then wl-mirroring it is incredibly smart! Have been looking for something like this!
Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux users probably already have some weird workflow with X11 virtual buffers to do this.
This is how I do it under Sway (Wayland): #!/bin/bash swaymsg create_output OUTPUT=$(swaymsg -r -t get_outputs | jq '.[].name' | grep HEADLESS | tr -d '"') # No need to reduce res, it defualts to 1080p #swaymsg output "$OUTPUT" resolution 1280x720 wl-mirror "$OUTPUT" swaymsg output "$OUTPUT" unplug When I was still in X11 land I used to just use Xephyr.
I just realized formatting is a bit broken. :(
Fixed:
#!/bin/bash
swaymsg create_output
OUTPUT=$(swaymsg -r -t get_outputs | jq '.[].name' | grep HEADLESS | tr -d '"')
# No need to reduce res, it defualts to 1080p
# swaymsg output "$OUTPUT" resolution 1280x720
wl-mirror "$OUTPUT"
swaymsg output "$OUTPUT" unplug
Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#68What an intriguing idea. I wonder if I could do something similar on linux by placing a second monitor on top of my current one with xrandr.
On Linux, you can try Xephyr ( https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Xephyr/ , https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xephyr ). It's not as nice as DeskPad, but you can basically achieve the same thing.
Xephyr runs a whole new X server - it's not as easy to drag and drop an application into the nested server, it has to be launched with DISPLAY=:1.
Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#69I think the problem I have is more so that people want my font sizes to be 3x what I have them. Usually I’m presenting a spreadsheet (financial statements and such) and people ask me to zoom in. Which I can but it breaks the whole thing and throws me off because I can no longer read my document anymore and I’m trying to present it. For that reason, I evangelize that attendees use the Zoom feature on their device if i…
I often call into meetings where I am also presenting twice. Once on my phone and once from my computer. I use my computer for sharing, audio, video, etc. I use my phone to see what the other people see. Shared screens are always difficult to predict. If you have a 4K screen, it will almost always get downsampled somehow for meetings… it can be too slow otherwise. In my experience, the problem isn’t that the font is…
> Telling viewers to zoom in if they can’t read anything sounds like you’re blaming them for the problem
yeah I wouldn't disagree, have been ignorant to the solution on this one. It's a recent concern as I'm new to Teams and working at a company with an older demographic than I'm used to so I'm kind of new to getting this request so much tbh. When people complain about having "aging eyes" my default response has been to zoom up to 150% but beyond that I can't even use my own computer as a presentation device for myself which is a showstopper, so my initial thought was tell them to use the Zoom, it's what you do on your phone to read small text, browser to read news, etc. and honestly I zoom in when I can't read someone elses screen (I've never asked someone to increase a font size mid-presentation). Part of the problem is the content kind of requires a lot of columns of data to be visible at once. Bouncing around from YTD to MTD sections by section kind of breaks the flow of the meeting, especially because while I'm presenting they are all individually consuming the content differently (one guy only care's about Margins, one guy only cares about Expenses, etc so it helps to have a lot on the screen at once and let them zoom into what they care about)
All said, I'm definitely going to try out all the suggestions here and see if I can figure out a better solution. Thanks HN!
Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing
#70This looks great - really useful! I have always wondered how these virtual desktops work. A cursory looks shows that this is using some undocumented APIs. How do people learn they can create a virtual desktop in this way if the knowledge to do so is hidden/obfuscated? Does apple allow distribution of an app that use these "private" APIs? Is anyone aware of what mechanisms are there for achieving something similar in…
> Does apple allow distribution of an app that use these "private" APIs?
In the app store, sure, any other way, what can they going to do about it?