Macworld staffers Christopher Breen and Ben Long wowed attendees at iPad Supersessions during Macworld 2011 last week, illustrating their talks with pristine images projected directly from their iPad’s screen interface.
Breen revealed their dirty how-to secret, which had been the subject of some oblique chatter in the Expo’s Media Center after their talk, in a post Monday on the Macworld website: they used a jailbroken iPad and “illicit” software to accomplish the feat.
In his web posting Breen wrote “only Apple [has] the secret for projecting an [iPad’s] entire interface,” suggesting there may be a method for projecting images from an iOS device using “display out” data transmitted to a standard projector without jailbreaking. But so far as anyone interested knows, Apple treats that as proprietary information.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, however, and into the breach, as usual, goes Cydia and redsn0w.
Breen gives detailed instructions in his blog post, but the gist of the idea is that a tethered jailbreak, Apple’s $29 iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter, and Ryan Petrich’s $2 Display Out app will get the job done.
The larger question is, with Apple positioning its iOS devices (especially the iPad) increasingly as Education and Enterprise solutions of the Future, why would the company drive people to jailbreak them in order to use them in what may be the most ubiquitously required functionality of those disciplines?
