As part of the Air Projector launch event, we are pleased to announce a giveaway program for our loyal fans! Air Projector is scheduled to be released to the public in early September, but you can get a free download code for it today. Just do either of the following:

1. Follow us on Twitter and tweet “@qrayon Air Projector for #iPhone pre-release giveaway!”

2. OR, drop us a short note on our feedback form and tell us how you might find Air Projector useful.

Over the next 5 days, we’ll randomly pick one winner per day and send you a free download code, so the earlier you enter the more chances you will have to win! Only one entry per person. The giveaways end September 1st.

If you win, we would really appreciate your feedback on the product, feel free to let us know what you liked and didn’t like about it via our feedback form.

Please note that Air Projector requires iOS4, which currently isn’t available for the iPad.

Please tell your friends about Air Projector.

Thank you and good luck!

It has been quite a summer! While we have been hard at work releasing major updates for Air Sketch and Stickyboard, we have also been busy working on our next “secret project”. Well, the secret’s now out of the bag, and today, I’m happy to be able to share with you what we’ve been hard at work on.

Announcing Air Projector: Project PDFs and photos directly from your iPhone to a local browser over WiFi.

When we released Air Sketch, we were overwhelmed by the positive response we received from our users (thank you!), as well as feedback on where you would like to see us go next. One direction was to do an iPhone version of Air Sketch, so that you could take it with you wherever you go. We thought long and hard about this, and even worked on several prototypes. In the end however, we found that sketching on a screen as small as the iPhone would not be an optimal experience. We chose to focus on what would make an iPhone version really great instead – as a slideshow presenter.

There have been several apps that let you use your iPhone as a remote control for PowerPoint, Keynote, and other desktop apps. However, we realized that we could make the iPhone serve up the presentation content itself and use it as the ultimate presentation clicker. The wireless approach used in Air Sketch would be ideal for this as well, since no one wants a long heavy VGA cable attached to their iPhone.

We also had to completely rethink how the interface would work. One of the Apps that works exceptionally well on the iPhone is the Photo app. It feels completely intuitive to navigate even a large collection of photos by tapping and swiping. We realized that this would be a great model to follow.

We designed Air Projector to look almost identical to the Photos app. Navigating albums and photos works in exactly the same way. The major difference is that whatever photo you are looking at is also simultaneously projected to a web browser.

Air Projector projects images via WiFi from your iPhone or iPod Touch to a browser connected on the same local network. No additional client software is required. To use it, you just need to fire up Air Projector on your iPhone and type in the displayed URL in your web browser. Images show up as you navigate them on your iPhone.

We also added the ability to project PDF documents in the same way. Air Projector does not store PDFs directly. To project a PDF document, send it from the Mail App, or a third party document manager such as Dropbox, to Air Projector. This works great with exported PDFs from PowerPoint or Keynote (note: transitions and animations are not stored in PDFs). BTW, we wholeheartedly recommend checking out Dropbox if you haven’t already. They have an excellent service and their iPhone client works great with Air Projector. They are also currently offering a free 2GB subscription.

Coming soon to the App Store

Air Projector will be available for the iPhone and iPod Touch running iOS4. It is currently in final Beta and is scheduled to be available in the App Store in early September 2010.

We hope that you will find Air Projector a useful addition to your iPhone’s capabilities. We plan to have a special introductory pricing at launch time, so please subscribe to our twitter feed to be the first to hear about the launch. Also check out the Air Projector homepage for more details.

If you are a writer, and would like an advance copy of Air Projector to review for an article, please drop us a line and we’ll try our best to accommodate you.

We’ve made a couple of changes to make transitions between background images smoother without an intermediate blank screen on the remote display.

Now tap erase once to erase the drawing layer, and tap again to erase the background image. Also, when setting a new background image, the previous remote sketch is erased only after editing the new one is complete.

Thanks for using Air Sketch!

Thank you for all your feedback and great reviews in the App Store! We really appreciate all your support!

We are introducing two brand new features in this update: Zoom/Pan and Send To.

You can now fluidly zoom and pan around your sketches using 2 fingers. The remote image stays the same (full) size. Tip: Write smaller and smoother text while zoomed in. You can also make some fairly detailed drawings or edits using the pencil tool and zooming. Also, the eraser shrinks when zoomed in, allowing finer control.

Tap on the new Send To icon to email your sketches as PDF and JPEG images, or save them to the Photo Library. Tip: JPEG images are typically much smaller than PDFs and are recommended for email to others, but PDFs contain the full-quality image.

This release also includes numerous smaller bug fixes, including smoother erasing.

We hope you enjoy these new additions.

BonjourFoxy is an excellent Add-In for FireFox that displays available Bonjour servers, such as Air Sketch, in a sidebar just like Safari. This let’s you connect your browser to Air Sketch without having to type in the IP address.

To use BonjourFoxy, just install the add-in, then select View (menu) –> Sidebar –> BonjourFoxy. When Air Sketch is started on the local network, a link will appear under the Websites folder:

To make it even easier, you can also add a BonjourFoxy button to your toolbar. Right click on the toolbar –> Customize. Select the BonjourFoxy icon and drag it to your toolbar. You can now click on it to open the sidebar:

BonjourFoxy is available on OSX, Windows, and other platforms. Note that you may need to install Apple’s Bonjour libraries if you haven’t already (see the BonjourFoxy website for details).

[Updated 9/4/12: Looks like BonjourFoxy is now deprecated. Check out the DNSSD add-in instead.]

An extra bonus is that you can bookmark the address that BonjourFoxy or Bonjour in Safari links to. This uses your iPad’s machine name (e.g. http://my-ipad.local.:8080), which should remain static as long as you don’t rename your iPad in iTunes. We recommend you give your iPad a unique name (like “Sam Spade’s iPad”) to avoid potential conflicts on the network. In contrast, the IP address may change from day-to-day or on different networks.

Bonjour is a relatively unknown, but awesome piece of technology that makes networking just a little easier. If you know of a Bonjour add-in for other browsers, please do let us know about it.