Feature tour · 3 of 16
Rooms
Share one screen with everyone in the room
Choose what the room sees: a whole screen, a single window, or every window belonging to one app. It arrives on every tablet, phone and laptop at once, with the Mac's sound alongside it and at the speed the screen itself is running, so a video or a live demo holds up rather than only a deck. Nobody signs in, nothing is scheduled, and none of it leaves the network you are all on.
A screen, one window, or one app
Share the whole display, or just the deck. Sharing a single app sends that app's windows and nothing else, so your mail and your notifications stay off the wall even when they are open behind it.
The source does not have to be your main screen
A spare desktop counts, and so does the screen already running on the tablet beside you: lay one out the way the room should see it, then share that. A trusted device can also send its own screen to your Mac and have the Mac carry it out, so a colleague shows something from their tablet without anybody pairing again or the room leaving and joining something else.
The Mac's sound goes with the picture
Audio travels on a channel of its own, because a missing moment of sound is more noticeable than a missing frame, and it arrives uncompressed carrying the timestamp it was captured on. The room hears what you hear, lined up with what it is watching.
Fast video holds up, not just slides
The picture runs at whatever the shared screen is running at rather than a slower rate chosen for slides, and no frame is invented to cover a gap. What the room sees are the frames the source genuinely produced, which is what makes a video or a live demo worth sharing this way.
A Room code lets anyone in
Six characters, read off the screen. Nobody pairs anything first, and nobody is still let in once the Room stops.
Somebody else can drive, if you let them
Viewers watch by default. A device you added yourself can pick the pointer up while it is free; anybody who came in on the code has to ask, and the request lands on your Mac. One person drives at a time, and you can take it back whenever you like.
A Room and Mirror are different things, and both stay
The comparison is not another second-screen app. It is the four-figure hardware sold to get one laptop onto one room display. This is software, it does the inverse, and it reaches every seat instead of one wall.
| Aspect | Mirror | Room |
|---|---|---|
| macOS display configuration | Changed | Untouched |
| Encoders | One per client | One in total |
| Letterboxing | Encoded into the stream | Drawn by each viewer |
| Viewers | One | Many |
| Windows you dragged there | Come back when it ends | Unaffected |
Mirror is "this tablet is that screen". A Room is "everybody can see that screen".