So, Reflection is an app for macs that came out earlier this year that allows you to use Airplay on your iPhone 4s or newer iPads to share your phone screen with other macs or and AppleTV base station. Its quite good for $14.99, comes with a built in screen recorder and is very useful for some of the videos we do where an app won’t work with the simulators we use to create app-demo videos.

However I am finding it has a few issues. One: if the iPhone goes into sleep mode (i’m personally not an iPhone user outside of work so not sure if it is actually sleep mode) Reflection can sometimes not then find the phone, meaning the phone turns airplay off, and there is the problem, when this happens I’m finding that airplay on the phone then disappears until you do a reset of the iPhone. If this is just a problem I’m causing for myself or other users of the app have encountered it I don’t know, these are just my findings at the end of the day. It would be nice to find a fix for this or maybe the developers may

Also, as useful as the built in screen recorder is, it took 45 minutes yesterday to render an 8 minute video and seems to use a fair chunk of memory as it slowed down my usage of FCP. Not a good combo to run anyway at the best of times but still, needs must.

Reflection presents the screen in a virtual iPhone which is great, but give you a black background at the corners, a little thing but still adds a bit of time to the final project.

All in all though this is a great app for us to use here and much better than air server which you have to use a separate screen recording software for and if your working on a budget means you only have to pay what works out at roughly £12 for a full screen recording suite for capturing app demos from an iPhone. Hopefully they will bring out an android version that can work via tethering which would be a great point for Reflection. But like I said its a great app as it is and you can even transfer it between macs along as you use the same key and uninstall it from the previous one, so no need to buy a new key later on if you do change or upgrade computers.

Anyway I’m now going to go back to doing some screen recordings, try a couple of different techniques and see which works best. Ill post a quick update at a later date to let you know which is the best way to use this app for recording app demos directly from the phone.

In the meantime, if this is an app that you may find useful you can click here to find it or just google it.