One of the big new Mountain Lion features is AirPlay Mirroring. This will let you beam your Mac’s desktop, videos and Keynote presentations to any screen connected to the Apple TV. This feature alone will probably sell zillions of Apple TVs into conference rooms the world over. But who wants to wait until OS X 10.8’s summer launch? With a couple of apps, you can use AirPlay on your Mac right now.
AirParrot is a new Mac app which will send your Mac’s screen to your Apple TV. That’s it. Right now it doesn’t work with audio (that’s coming), nor will it play nice with Apple TV passwords. But at just $10, it could be exactly what many business-types need for Keynote presentations, or for you or I to quickly throw a movie onto the big screen.
Even better is another app which has been around for a while. It’s called AirServer and it turns your Mac into an AirPlay receiver. This lets you send audio and video from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac. You can use it to play Spotify through the speakers connected to you Mac, or to watch iMovie videos from the iPad on you iMac’s giant 27-inch screen. AirServer is $8, and you have to pay before you download it, without a trial version.
I haven’t used AirParrot, as I own neither a TV nor an Apple TV, but I bought AirServer a while ago and it just keeps getting better. I use it all the time to play music through bigger speakers, but the video and photo slideshow functions both work flawlessly too, with you Mac showing up as an AirPlay destination in the standard iOS AirPlay chooser.
[Via the Verge]
