One of my biggest peeves with iOS is the inability to connect multiple devices together to control my music. Having an iPod touch in a sound dock means having to either use the crappy remote that ships with it, or getting up from the desk to change the music. Neither option is optimal, and both are equally a chore. Why Apple hasn’t decided to let me control my iPhone’s music from the remote app on my iPad is beyond me.
It turns out I’m not the only one annoyed with the limitations of the remote application and AirPlay. Clement Vasseur has put together an application called AirView that lets you stream video content from one iOS device to another, as well as from your Mac to an iOS device. The application worked well from one iOS device to another, and from iTunes to iOS device, but for some reason I was unable to use AirPlay for music. To be fair, the application doesn’t list music access in its description, so it does exactly what it says it will.
I also noticed during some quick testing that certain applications will see the iOS device and others will not. For instance, the Movies and YouTube applications had no problem seeing my iPhone as an AirPlay device, but the iPod application wouldn’t acknowledge the connection with my iPhone.
I was also pretty amazed to see that this application worked so well with my iPhone 3G. The videos are slow to load, but they do eventually show up for playback.
If this interests you in any way, you should probably download it right now. This is one of those applications that might not last too long on the App Store.
