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Comment by zyklonix | Hacker News Reader

Any idea how the author was able to have multiple desktop screens? What app is he using for this? I thought it only allowed you to mirror one screen per Mac and from my experience it is quite laggy.

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This is the problem(with Apple); this device, like iOS devices, is fenced off, so you cannot run vscode etc if you don’t connect a MacBook. For this device it’s actually worse than an iPad to disallow that: it’s 4x as expensive as a MacBook Air here but I cannot run most apps I want on it while that would make me buy one today. I don’t want another iPad (which I bought because it’s nice and small and great battery, but if I cannot code on it normally, what’s the point).

>is fenced off, so you cannot run vscode

No, the only reason you can't run vscode is that no one has put in the effort to port it. It's a problem of financial incentives and not a problem of "fences."

So visionOS is more open than iOS? That would be good. I read it was similar.

Edit: so it is indeed similar/same; cannot run normal desktop software even though desktop cpu.

iOS could get vscode too

Edit: Desktop software can be ported to other operating systems. Just because an operating system can't run a different, desktop operating system's software that doesn't mean it can't run desktop software. The CPU is used in iPads too. It is used between 3 different form factors.

Only the ‘shell’; not all the rest that make it practical. There are a lot of blog posts (a yearly one here) of people trying to code on iPads; they all end badly because Apple allows nothing. It’s fenched off. Nothing to do with lack of incentive to port Xcode; there are plenty of code apps on iPad, they just cannot run real envs (docker, anything other than toy interpreters etc) without rooting.

"fences" is definitely not the best analogy. "spikes and minefields" would be more appropriate as Apple has explicit rules against apps that compile and run code, third party extensions would also probably be prohibited, and the terminal would have little use.

At the end of the day what's possible under the current rules aren't that different from just running it in Safari, so why bother ?

Port it? What's different with the hardware on this device that requires ports of existing software? Is it a completely new CPU with new architecture?

It is a new operating system with a different api and security model. Binaries on one operating system with the same processor does not necessarily run if you run it on another operating system using the same hardware.

Interesting, VisionOS. Strange choice when they could've just wrapped the "windows" in iOS and leave the rendering to the device.

Probably what they do and it's most likely more marketing than a really new OS with breaking changes to how apps run, but I haven't looked into it.

I use the iPad Blink Shell app, it can have multiple windows and renders using the VisionOS UI, making it sharper than mirroring a Mac's display.

It helps that I have optimised a great part of my workflow due to me liking tablets.

Like others have said, AVP is like strapping an iPad on your head - I happen to like my iPad, too.

Does the "multiple window" support of Blink work seamlessly on the helmet?

That's great! It even supports VS Code. How did you manage to use the mouse? My AVP refuses to pair with a bluetooth mouse.

It only supports the Apple Magic Trackpad: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213998

Looks like iPad apps!

You can tell by the icon floating at the top right of the windows, which appears for "compatible apps" aka iPad apps.

Yes you can only mirror one screen from a Mac, but he's using the AVP as the computing device itself.

So it's not multiple desktop screens it's multiple windows from locally running apps.

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