Many iPad owners don’t realize that you can use the iPad as an external monitor for your Mac or Windows PC. For $4.99, you can purchase iDisplay from the App Store. What is iDisplay? iDisplay is basically an app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. You have to install iDisplay Desktop for free on your Mac or Windows PC if you want to use the iDisplay app on your iOS device for use with your Mac or Windows PC. There are also certain requirements you should be aware of before you decide to use iDisplay.
As written on iDisplay’s website:
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Requires iPhone OS 3.1 or later. Intel-based Mac, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later or Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 (all versions, except Starter). Non-Intel Macs and Macs running OS X in 64-bit mode are not supported.
To setup your iPad as an external monitor for your Mac, you must first go to the App Store and purchase the app iDisplay for $4.99. You must also go on your Mac and go to Shape Services to download the iDisplay Desktop for Mac OS for free. Install the iDisplay Desktop software and restart your computer. Now that you have both iDisplay and iDisplay Desktop, you can click iDisplay Desktop to get it running. The iDisplay Desktop application will not pop up, but will show up on the top right menu bar to show that it is running. Now you can run the iDisplay app on your iPad and an alert will pop up on your Mac display that will say that an “Unknown device is attempting to connect to “iDisplay” on this computer.” You can “Allow always”, “Deny”, or “Allow”. After you either click “Allow” or “Allow always”, the iPad now acts as an external display.
You can now drag windows onto your iPad. The iPad display may be delayed depending on your internet connection speed. You can take advantage of the iPad as an external display for simple things such as IM, Twitter, and weather. It will really keep your Mac monitor less cluttered. The external monitor is great for when you do multiple things and you are running low on space.
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