Flect 0.5.0

Up to twenty-four iPads at once.

What's new

• Settings now offers 16 and 24 iPads as well as 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9 and 12. Four is still the default.
• Flect's copy of UxPlay now accepts 64 connections instead of 32, so two dozen iPads fit with room to spare for the brief connections devices make while looking for a receiver.

How many can a Mac really take?

Measured on an M-series MacBook Air:

Streams	Picture	Result
24	960×540, what Flect asks for at that many	decoded at ~6,700 frames a second
24	1920×1080	decoded at ~2,200 frames a second

24 iPads at 30 fps need 720 frames a second, so the Mac has roughly nine times the headroom at 540p, and three times even at full HD. The video engine does the work and the CPU barely notices.

The Wi-Fi is what runs out first. Two dozen iPads send something like 2–4 Mbit/s each, all arriving at one Mac, with every device sharing the same airtime. Beyond about twelve, put the Mac on wired Ethernet if you can.

Two other things worth knowing at that scale: on a projector, 24 tiles are about 320×240 each, enough to see who is stuck but not to read their writing; and with 24 open slots, any iPad in range can put itself on the board, so consider turning on the code in Settings.

You can run the measurement on your own Mac:

FLECT_CAPACITY=24 swift test --filter Capacity

Downloads

File	For
Flect-0.5.0.pkg	School IT. It installs Flect in /Applications; push it with Jamf, Mosyle or another MDM.
Flect-0.5.0.zip	Trying it on one Mac. Unzip it and move Flect to Applications.

Both run on Apple silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 14 or later. SHA256SUMS has the checksums.

It still isn't signed

macOS blocks Flect the first time you open it. Within the hour, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, click Open Anyway, and enter an administrator password. Installed through an MDM, it usually opens without these steps. See Installing on school Macs.

Since 0.4.0

Record an iPad to a QuickTime movie in Movies ▸ Flect, with its sound (⌘R).