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 it world taken by drone. Over time Apple started adding videos from space as well as underwater, and the list continues 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 screen saver στη συσκευή. Αυτό είναι δυνατό καθώς η Apple δεν αποθηκεύει τα βίντεο αυτά τοπικά στο Apple TV, αλλά online σε έναν server της και το κάθε Apple TV τα “streamάρει” όποτε τα χρειαστεί. Το project είναι γραμμένο στη language Swift programming language and is provided on GitHub for free download.
But soon Windows users wanted to get a similar feature, so GitHub cDima user Dmitry Sadakov, along with a group of developers, took advantage of the fact that the links to the site where the videos were stored could 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 will be displayed from the list has never been possible, while in the version for macOS it exists from the first days. Also due to the difficulty in maintenance and development for various reasons this project in 2017 stopped growing. The application was written in C # and managed to reach version 6.1-Stable.
This brings us to today and the 2nd attempt to create Aerial for Windows. The Orange Jedi user on GitHub, due to the disappointment when he learned that the development of cerial Aerial is stopping, decided to make his own, which reaches the level of features corresponding to macOS (https://github.com/OrangeJedi/Aerial).
The application this time is written using HTML, JavaScript and CSS while leveraging the Electron Framework to run as a Windows application.
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).
