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 drone-drawn landscapes from around the world. Over time, Apple began adding videos from space as well as submarines, and the list goes on to this day.
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 a screensaver on the device. This is possible as Apple does not store these videos locally on the Apple TV, but online on one of its servers and each Apple TV "streams" them whenever it needs them. The project is written in the Swift programming language and is hosted on GitHub free for 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
. The choice of which videos from the list to view from the list has never been a feature, while in the macOS version it 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 app was written in C# and made it all the way to 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 και CSS ενώ αξιοποιεί το Electron Framework to run as an application on Windows.
The application has the ability to "stream" videos from Apple's servers, while it can also "Cache-remove" them in order to avoid buffering during playback.treatment. Also, the user can choose from the list of videos, which one he wants 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 features and performance upgrades are also common. The application 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).
