It has been known for years that Apple develops and supports its products to a very good degree. So in 2015 it introduced new screensavers for Apple TV.
These screensavers were landscapes in various parts of the world taken by drone. Over time Apple began to add video from space as well as under the sea, and the list goes on even today.
Apple TV users immediately loved this feature, and some wanted to get it on the company's macOS devices. But Apple did not develop this feature. So a group of users did this project. And so Aerial for macOS was created (https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial).
Aerial is a project that takes these videos and displays them as screensavers on the device. This is possible as Apple does not store these videos locally on Apple TV, but online on a server and each Apple TV "streams" them whenever needed. The project is written in the Swift programming language and is provided on GitHub for free download.
But soon the users of Windows devices wanted to acquire a similar feature and so the user of GitHub cDima, aka Dmitry Sadakov, along with a team of developers took advantage of the fact that site links where videos are stored can be found and developed the original Aerial for Windows devices (https://github.com/cDima/Aerial).
The project was loved in the early years by the GitHub community, which helped it develop a lot, as well as by the screensaver users. This project, however, lagged behind in many respects
. Choosing which videos from the list to view from the list has never been a feature, while the macOS version has been there since the early days. Still due to the difficulty in maintenance and development for various reasons this project stopped developing in 2017. The application was written in C# and managed to reach version 6.1-Stable.
This brings us to today's 2nd attempt at creating Aerial for Windows. User Orange Jedi on GitHub, dismayed to learn that cDima's Aerial development is being discontinued, decided to build his own, which reaches the feature level of the macOS counterpart (https://github.com/OrangeJedi/Aerial).
The application this time is written using HTML, JavaScript and CSS while utilizing the Electron Framework to work as an application in Windows.
The application has the ability to "stream" videos from Apple servers, while it can also "Cache" in order to avoid buffering during playback. The user can also select from the list of videos, which one wishes to view and have stored locally to avoid network delays.
There are also options for creating a profile with a video list, as well as text overlays during playback which the user can configure with text of his choice, time / date as well as information about the video being displayed (location, etc.) .
The application is still in Beta, but it works satisfactorily with minimal bugs.
Updates with new ones are also frequent characteristics and performance enhancement upgrades. The app is offered for free on GitHub (https://github.com/OrangeJedi/Aerial/releases), while there are also useful instructions as well as a user manual on the Wiki of the site (https://github.com/OrangeJedi/Aerial/wiki).
But we are a group of only two people who try to maintain and deal with the problems that arise.
Having already seen the end of the first Aerial implementation effort, due to the non-involvement of the community in development assistance, we invite anyone interested, with or without programming knowledge, test the application, tell us any problems it encounters in order to fix them (https://github.com/OrangeJedi/Aerial/issues), while if he has the knowledge to do it himself, after first consulting the Contributing Guide of the project (https://github.com/OrangeJedi/Aerial/wiki/Contributing-Guide).
