Unicorns

In the world of productive, inventive Mac apps, you can often sense when an app is born out of the need to hurdle some specific obstacles. Chat with a few developers and you’ll soon find that a difficult moment or odd situation led to a dreamt up solution, which turned into a weekend coding project, which turned into an app shared amongst a dev team, which turned into an app shared with Mac users all over. Unicorns feels like it fits this mold; it allows you to quickly share a live video feed of your iOS device with others with minimal effort and inventive, professional polish. The true genius of Unicorns lies in the stunning ease with which you go from nothing, to a unique URL with an active live stream that you can pass along to anyone at all. Plug your device into your Mac, initiate a broadcast following Twitter authentication, and click Stream to get a live view of your iDevice and a link to share – that’s all. Users that receive your link can visit the visit and comment on your stream straight away. The only discernible weakness in my testing with the app was the significant lag between what I was doing in live time and what was being displayed in the stream; this feels like the kind of gap that gets closed with continued development. But in idea and execution, Unicorns streams the dream effectively and with style.

Warning. Does not work unless youngive up your Twitter username and password.

A well polished app that is very easy to set up and get going but lacks a set of features that would make it an outstanding app. I can't increase the screen/window size of the mirrored display on my mac which would be useful when I conducting a presentation on a large display in a boardroom. The streaming quality is really quit low and cannot be configured. I was getting 20-30fps and the indication that the quality was "low" however I was just browsing through my iPhone home screens. Is this dependent on the twitter servers? How is this managed? Can I not run it over a local network? The communication/collaboration pane is very good. I could see a benefit of this when working with colleagues overseas however again the streaming quality and lag were a huge issue. I love the polish and aesthetics that have been put into this app. The functionality is almost there. I hope it continues to be developed and refined and I could see this has a really good tool to assist with the production of anything mobile related or even helping my parents who live interstate by remotely showing them how to use their iPhones. Will definitely be keeping an eye on this app and would happily pay something that addressed the above points.

In the world of productive, inventive Mac apps, you can often sense when an app is born out of the need to hurdle some specific obstacles. Chat with a few developers and you’ll soon find that a difficult moment or odd situation led to a dreamt up solution, which turned into a weekend coding project, which turned into an app shared amongst a dev team, which turned into an app shared with Mac users all over. Unicorns feels like it fits this mold; it allows you to quickly share a live video feed of your iOS device with others with minimal effort and inventive, professional polish. The true genius of Unicorns lies in the stunning ease with which you go from nothing, to a unique URL with an active live stream that you can pass along to anyone at all. Plug your device into your Mac, initiate a broadcast following Twitter authentication, and click Stream to get a live view of your iDevice and a link to share – that’s all. Users that receive your link can visit the visit and comment on your stream straight away. The only discernible weakness in my testing with the app was the significant lag between what I was doing in live time and what was being displayed in the stream; this feels like the kind of gap that gets closed with continued development. But in idea and execution, Unicorns streams the dream effectively and with style.