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Astropad: Turn your iPad into a professional graphics tablet (astropad.com)
31 points by mronge on Feb 18, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments


This sounds awesome.

It's a little unfortunate that the iPad Air (at least the first one) is really inexact for pressure-sensitive drawing, though. It tends to reject or miss the very first part of fast, light strokes. It only recognizes them properly when you start out rather deliberately, counter to how you might sketch or crosshatch.

While nobody has officially confirmed last I looked, best guess seems to have been this is an accidental touch rejection heuristic in the touch drivers to compensate for your hand overlapping the thin bezel when you hold the tablet. That was borne out by the fact that if you first touch the screen elsewhere, the strokes register immediately and correctly as part of a multitouch.

This has, unfortunately, seriously damaged the usefulness of my Wacom Intuos Creative iPad stylus. I've seen the same complaint leveled at other styluses too. I can't see how it wouldn't hit this solution as well.

That said, I'll definitely check this out. I've always wanted a Cintiq but couldn't justify the cost as a hobbyist. If Apple has allowed or will allow the rejection behavior to be disabled by drawing programs, this would be a slam dunk for me.


Of all the styli for the iPad, the Jot Touch 4 seems to be the best as far as accuracy. It is the only one I'd put in the "usable" category." Surprisingly the newer Jot Touch Pixelpoint is horrible compared to this (missing strokes, not keeping straight lines, not being able to detect near the edges of the screen) and I wish I could return mine.

The Cintiq is a nearly natural pen and paper experience, but if I'm on the go, the Jot Touch 4 + AstroPad has worked out well.


Which iPad are you on? My stylus worked great with the iPad 3, but is reportedly bad on the Mini and definitely bad on my Air.


Interesting, I'm on the iPad mini 2 (the first retina mini). I'll have to dig up my iPad 3 and try. I've heard that the Air 2 is especially bad since Apple change the surface.


We are extremely interested in the rumored iPad Pro and stylus :)


And with functionality like this, so am I!


Love this idea. One less thing for me to have to carry in my bag.


That's the kicker for me too.

I'm often on the go, and don't do enough Photoshop work to justify lugging around a dedicated wacom. And even if I did it wouldn't have screen, let alone a gorgeous one like on the iPad!

Astropad is working great for me so far. Now time to invest in a pressure sensitive pen.


Thanks, that's great to hear :)

We've been working on this for 1.5 years and we had to write completely custom tech to make it happen.

We're happy to answer any questions about our tech


What's the unique sauce that makes this work?

How do you keep arbitrary Mac apps in sync with the iPad display?


That's the tech we built we call LIQUID: http://astropad.com/#tech


So it's basically a faster Air Display? I agree, the site is too vague. I don't know what it is, so I don't see why I need it.


Sure, but that doesn't really tell us anything.


We'll have to follow up with a tech blog post where we go into more details.


Looks cool, however I couldn't watch the video as it kept freezing. Marked it to check it out later.


It's super HD.. maybe that's the problem

Try on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouwCHT3rGRY


So it's like Duet display except it's suppose to run just fine on a wireless connection?


$50! Wow...that is quite a hefty price tag for essentially an app!




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