Hi! I know that there are apps to let an Android device serve as a mouse and keyboard for a PC or Mac. But is there anything to let an Android device do the same thing for another Android device? I feel like someone must have done this, but I can't find such an app. (I'm interested in getting an Android HDMI stick PC to use with my TV, and I'd much rather control it with another Android than with a keyboard and mouse.)
I found one app, Tablet Remote, which does _much_ of what I'm looking for, but it doesn't actually act as a mouse (instead just giving you arrows to move the selection point), which means that there's no way via Tablet Remote to do lots of basic things that require key taps.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
Alan
I was thinking of the coolness factor of just having one device, a phone, to which you could connect an external display and have an extended desktop. I am not finding any reference to this on Android (only the MS Surface). From what I have been reading, and remember/understand (may be confused), Jelly Bean brought the ability for windowing apps. However, the apps have to be coded for the capability, unless you root your phone and installed an app that provided windowing for all apps. Also, I have not heard of the possibility of having an extended desktop in Android.
I would like to ask WHY? Why not have windowing and the ability for an extended desktop, on an external display? A bluetooth keyboard and mouse just follows. Does google have to play nice with the manufacturers that stand to loose from people only needing one device? Is there a reason I'm not thinking of? Most phones are fast enough for this these days.
At the turn of the century, I was running GPS software Deluo Routis on a Sony Vaio 505 Pentium 200Mhz laptop running Win98. The 2-D graphics were smooth even while playing mp3's through the car speakers. The mapping software showed the map clearly, and effectively gave me navigation. People have lost sight of how much you can do if you give up the bloat and bling.
Also, I am pretty confused with the merging of Android and Chrome. I never liked Java to begin with; my experience with it is in MS Windows, and it runs slow as molasses. I believe my phone would run much faster if they had not chosen Java. I understand this to be because you have an operating system running on top of another operating system. It just makes more sense to me to have less layers and run apps natively, for better performance. I thought maybe they chose Java for its level of security. Is the screening process for Google Play not foolproof enough?
I like the philosophy of Google better than Microsoft**, so if one of them is going to win, I hope it's Google. I'm hoping Google won't end up with a convoluted Android/Chrome operating system because Lawyers forced them to (the idea I get based on the latest news). I don't understand: do they want to keep their OS architecture simple, but are being forced to make the OS complex for different reasons?
**Apple doesn't even want to compete. They have never wanted to dominate, just make huge profits. Unless they break up the marriage of hardware and software, they won't win. Then again, if Samsung keeps dominating, there may not be much hardware diversity?
Oh, and my main question was: "Why not have windowing and the ability for an extended desktop?". Wouldn't that be a big deciding factor for anyone that wanted to simplify and just have one device?
Anybody? Tell me I'm crazy at least. There has to be a strategic reason, that Google does not introduce full windowing and extended desktop support.
Its coming eventually. though you could do it right now. Motorola tried something like this with their atrix lapdocks.
Sent from my Samsung i437p using Tapatalk and CM 10.2
E_Phather said:
Its coming eventually. though you could do it right now. Motorola tried something like this with their atrix lapdocks.
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Click to collapse
Can you do it right now with any android device having a video port?
Well lets look at how we could achieve this with todays technology.
Input:
Bluetooth Mouse & keyboard.
Output:
Wireless display with support for older displays using something like Chromecast.
Graphical User Interface:
A secondary Launcher/Application (Which could potentially see companies like MS & Canonical developing their own UI's and Charging for them if required).
Home & Office use with one device:
Home would be the default UI, but when your device has used NFC to log into the office it would automatically enable your Office profile/UI for a certain length of time (requiring you to log back in after a set time or manual log out via another NFC tap).
This would be very useful as it would enable you to take your "desktop" environment anywhere with you and connect to any HDTV with Wireless display/Chromecast support.
Applications:
So if like me you are finding your phone to become ever more a better solution to your digital needs and you only require your desktop for apps which work better with larger displays (Videos & certain games) you will find this very useful.
Games:
Now games could become ever more better as they could be controlled using standardised control inputs (game controllers could use standardised input methods allowing you to select any compatible controller to best suit your needs) or even a driving game could allow you to see the game on a HDTV yet be controlled with the accelerometer for steering and the right of the devices touch display would be the accelerator and the left of the display would be the brakes for example.
More Business Solutions:
If you could wirelessly connect to the office display then show a powerpoint style presentation that would be great because the very device which stores the file would also be your controller to move to the next/pevious slides.
Media:
Music could possibly be stored in the cloud so when your on the move you can listen to your music as many of us do now, but when connected to a large display it could utilise the large display and speakers to show a music video too!.
Photos could be viewed on the large screen and the next one to be displayed could be select on the device (allowing the use to avoid showing anyone pictures which they don't want other to see - ie: pitcures of you and your friends whilst your parents/grandparents are in the room...).
The TV Guide:
The TV Guide would become a very interactive thing which allows you to see what is available on other TV channels without other people in the room being limited to viewing the content they are trying to watch in a small box in the corner of the display...
These are just some ideas of what is possible, but I know that you could do so much more with this and with 64-bit technology coming to many mobile devices soon that will make it so much easier for devices to process all of this data at once without any serious lag!.
I would love to see a group of developers on XDA team up on an open desktop (secondary) launcher to run alongside the users primary (phone) launcher. if there was a project like this with an open framework to develop apps for I'd be happy to start developing apps for that or separate UI's to run alongside my current (Phone/Android) apps UI's.
Edit:
Also remember that this could be utilised in other ways too eg:: connecting your device to your car and your device could deliver your navigation & music to your vehicles display whilst getting important traffic/weather news using your devices network connection!.
Isn't this exactly what the Ubuntu phone intends to do or have I got the wrong idea?
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Yes, but with Android already having a large ecosystem it would make a lot of sense to build upon that.
Chromecast is not "open" to third party apps. http://www.minyanville.com/sectors/...eeds-to-Tread-Lightly-With/8/28/2013/id/51502
Do they have a displayport version of Chromecast? *cough*
quote from: http://www.tested.com/tech/set-top-boxes/457036-testing-google-chromecast/
"Chromecast is also not a particularly good desktop mirroring option, either. It actually can't do full desktop mirroring, and instead works solely with the Chrome browser. In beta right now is Chrome tab streaming, which sends to Chromecast everything that can be rendered in a single Chrome tab, including web pages, flash embeds, and even full-screen MKV video files if you have VLC installed. I like that Chrome tab streaming works independently of what's showing on your laptop or desktop's screen--like with YouTube and Netflix, you can multi-task and switch to other tabs or windows while one tab is being streamed. The only thing that matters is the window size and screen resolution. Chromecast will automatically scale the aspect ratio of your window to fill up your TV screen, adding black bars on the sides to avoid stretching. A full-screen resolution of 1440x900 looked good on a large 1080p TV, but streaming from a 2560x1600 monitor at full-screen made the text unreadable on my 70" TV."
Wow... I thought only displayport was capable of 2560x1600 (edit: hdmi v1.3 brought this). Even if I hook it up to my 2560x1600 monitor, it won't really display anything but entertainment. Chromecast doesn't seem to be a way to have a monitor, to use your Android phone as a PC replacement.
AllCast !!!
http://www.geek.com/android/chromecast-reject-becomes-allcast-public-beta-now-available-1578674/
However, I still need to add some kind of wifi enabled device to my 30" lcd monitor (like with chromecast). Really, I don't mind a cable connection from my phone to my monitor, if that was an option. If Google continues to be closed like this, then I would go for Ubuntu phone.
Displayport:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyDP#SlimPort
Any phones have this besides the Google Nexus 4? Actually, I'm not getting a new phone until I know what the hell will happen with Android / Chrome OS
Quote from: http://www.tested.com/tech/android/457205-mhl-vs-slimport/
"SlimPort's support for the DisplayPort standard--specifically Mobility DisplayPort--means it can output video at the same 4K resolution as MHL, though not via HDMI (yet, anyway). And here SlimPort hasn't really made good on its potential, yet; though it's based on the flexible DisplayPort standard, the only SlimPort adapters currently available are for VGA and HDMI connectors. The upshot is that you won't be plugging a Nexus 7 into a 1440p DisplayPort computer monitor anytime soon." http://www.slimportconnect.com/
Chromecast May Get Screen Mirroring With Android 4.4.1
Evidence in Android 4.4.1 indicates that screen mirroring is coming to Chromecast.
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http://www.tomshardware.com/news/chromecast-google-screen-mirroring-kitkat-android,25345.html
It could start with mirroring a primary display, but gradually result in mirroring something that a GPU has rendered for a secondary display.
A dock from Samsung Galaxy phones. Has USB ports, HDMI, and audio.
http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones-accessories/EDD-S20JWEGSTA
mraeryceos said:
A dock from Samsung Galaxy phones. Has USB ports, HDMI, and audio.
http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones-accessories/EDD-S20JWEGSTA
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Click to collapse
I tried that myself with my previous Galaxy S4 (i9500), It was a great dock and when I connected my wireless KB & Mouse USB dongle & connected the HDMI to my PC monitor it was a good experience when doing things like playing GTA3 on the bigger screen (it was better than the windows version in some ways).
But the device just needed a separate home screen UI to be output to the PC screen to look perfect and to work better with the KB & Mouse input type.
It shouldn't be too difficult to make a UI that simply changes the size of some buttons to a smaller size, enabling more widgets to fit on the home screen and if they could simply force the apps to run in either windowed or full screen that would enable better multi-tasking, then the browsers would just need a small update to detect if the device is running in Desktop Mode if so, then simply zoom out of the page a little to emulate the desktop browser experience.
Just a few ideas... If Google's Android team are reading this, I would recommend that you get that dock to experiment with for future Android builds.
Especially now that OS' like Ubuntu Phone are looking at going down this road of the one device fits all computational needs.
Rather than creating a new thread I thought that it would appropriate to bring this topic back up after the recent announcements that several OEM's have made, that they will be releasing desktops with Android as their Primary/Secondary OS.
I hope that this pushes Google into creating a dedicated desktop UI in the future.
I'm trying to use my broken screen'ed Nexus 4 as a XBMC unit. Trouble is, its a bit of a pain to do anything on it because of the screen being broken (touch screen 25% of the area works).
So basically I need some software which allows me to connect from a "client" (ie other phone/tab) to control it. I know i can use Yatse or any of the other XBMC remotes once i'm running XBMC but there are times where i need to do other stuff on it.
Anyone have any ideas? I've tried Tablet remote which does some of the things. But it only really has functionality of a keyboard arrow keys ther than touch/mouse control. Also I know there is another app which seems pretty useful but it has been open sourced called Screen Standby which apparently has a remote control aspect but since its a pay for app that hasn't been updated for nearly a year i'm reluctant to purchase.
anyway. thanks in advance.
The keyboard cover is fun and all, but this is a problem to me, exists on both the tab s7 and my older tab s6. The keyboard does not act as an external keyboard (bluetooth/usb), rather acting like an input service managed by samsung.
What I meant is: some app can capture external keyboard input and make use of them, with or without elevated permissions(root user). With that being said, some apps can't be used without an external keyboard. What I'm aiming for here, is the possibility to use the keyboard cover for games that do not support keyboard input, using panda mouse pro for example. No matter what people say, I found it a very pleasant experience to play games using keyboard and mouse without touching the display, and I don't even play competitive games at all, not like android has much of those. Not all games support it, and even for games that do, very little effort to actually make it easy to use. Last year I bought a wireless tkl just to carry with me to uni so I can play games sometimes. It does help with typing as the tab s6 keyboard being very mushy. Now the tab s7 keyboard seems to improved, minus the *very weird* layout. I haven't tried to dig any deeper while using the tab s6, but now that I kinda like the new keyboard cover, I tried to see what I can do.
So far no luck, as the keyboard itself doesn't connect to the tablet using usb controller. lsusb returns nothing when I unplugged my dongle with usb devices while still keeping the keyboard connected. Being the nature of (?) a cut down linux distro, I can't find any useful package pre-loaded, nor can I find any repo that develops packages specifically for android in this sense. Magisk does help with some user porting packages like nano or sqlite, and there is busybox, but nothing actually helps.
Can someone tell me how the keyboard actually connects and be realized as an io device by the os itself, or is this just another uncrackable proprietary ****? Maybe once I get how the keyboard is connected, I could somehow redirect it to a virtual usb device.
Any help is appreciated, thanks!
PS: I own a laptop, which is also portable, but since the tablet already fulfills much of my needs (eg having vscode on the go with linux deploy) I have no intention of using the laptop as my daily drive device and avoid myself all these hassles.
The keyboard is just a useless piece of plastic until you give it power. The 3 dots where it connects to the side of the tablet is your power source.
Hi...
Shieldtv gamepad has special feature, when app is not made for AndroidTV there is a mouse pointer on screen which can be controlled with right gamepad analog stick (only with original Shield gamepad)...
Unfortunately most of nonnative AndroidTV apps doesn't use this feature...
I investigated a bit about this feature and came to next idea...
If one can make app which will be in foreground with permission to draw over other apps, doing nothing, only 1px height/width (for example in top left corner of screen) and if that app is made as nonnative AndroidTV app then it will activate mouse pointer (on AndroidTV)...
And if that app can be bind to gamepad button (for example through tvQuickActions app or any other button mapping app) for activate/deactivate it (toggle), that way user could activate mouse pointer in any app (native/nonnative AndroidTV app)...
This way we could use nonnative AndroidTV apps with no need for hardware mouse.
What do you think about this idea...?
Unfortunately I didn't find this kind of app (closest to this functionality is Ease Joypad app for persons with special needs, but it has also other functions which limit its use).
Here is the video of Ease Joypad app and whole idea...
Does someone here have knowledge/skills/will to make this kind of app?
I'm willing to pay for that kind of app on PlayStore...
Sincerely...
I'm unpleasantly surprised that no one is interested in this kind of app and that there's no interest even for discussion...
So sad...
hello good sir,
frotna said:
I'm unpleasantly surprised that no one is interested in this kind of app and that there's no interest even for discussion...
So sad...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i made an account just to reply to this, ive had similar needs, on my search Mantis GamePad Pro on Google Play have mouse function on right button, HOWEVER, that feature is sooo unpolish, i have DA controller, and i cannot use it with Xbox/PS/AndroidX4 modes, idk what more else to suggest than that, i may have problems connecting with me since i only tried the 1 phone way to connect it