Astropad 1.0.2 – Transform your iPad into a professional graphics tablet. YOUR IPAD AS A PROFESSIONAL GRAPHICS TABLET. Use the Mac creative tools you know & love, like Photoshop, with the touch experience of your iPad. Astropad today launched version 2.0 of its iPad app, which transforms a compatible iPad into a drawing tablet for a connected Mac. Once connected, Astropad mirrors the Mac's display onto the iPad. Adobe xd cc 20 2 12 1st.
If you’ve wanted to use a mobile tablet as a Wacom Cintiq-like graphics input device for your computer, for a long time Astropad was the app that many turned to (a company called Avatron also offers Air Display for iOS and Air Stylus for Android). Now Duet, Inc. has introduced Duet Pro. These solutions display desktop applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator on an iPad, letting you use a stylus on the iPad display to draw or paint directly on the desktop document.
Both Astropad and Duet Pro are much less expensive than a Wacom Cintiq…if you already own an iPad. If you’re deciding which one to use, you’ll need to know the important differences between them.
Duet Pro started out as Duet Display, which lets a Mac or PC use an iPad or iPhone as an additional Mac display. Duet Pro adds support for advanced stylus features such as pressure and angle, bringing it into direct competition with Astropad. (Update: In December 2016, Duet Display and Duet Pro added the ability to let an iPad display the Touch Bar when connected to a Mac running macOS 10.12 Sierra.)
Duet Pro and Astropad both use an iOS app that communicates with a companion application that you run on your computer. But beyond that, they have more differences than you might think. Most of all, you’ll want to pay attention to the hardware they support and their pricing models.
(Update: In January 2017, Astropad announced Astropad Studio, a premium level that includes better performance and additional features. Like Duet Pro, Astropad Studio is available by subscription, but you can still pay just once for the Astropad app and use its base feature set without an Astropad Studio subscription.)
You can draw some conclusions from that table:
I can’t compare the performance and usage of Astropad and Duet Pro, because I’ve only used Astropad. But given the major differences in what hardware they support and how they’re priced, you might be swayed one way or the other more by what hardware you own or how you prefer to pay.
About that “Hover/rollover support” line in the table: A frustrating aspect of using a mobile tablet as a graphics tablet is that they generally don’t support pointer hovering, so you can’t hover the pointer without clicking as you can with a mouse or Wacom tablet. Not being able to hover is a side effect of how most mobile devices work, where your finger or stylus can interact with the display only at the moment you actually touch it. But hovering is important when you want to select a small target, precisely grab object handles, or use mouse rollover effects such as tool tips. Duet Pro and Astropad Studio claim to support hovering, but those are premium levels of those apps which require a subscription.
After I originally wrote this post, Astropad came out with their own table comparing the two premium versions, Duet Display Pro vs Astropad Studio.
One other feature which I thought might be too obscure to list in the table is support for using multiple devices as displays simultaneously. I had no problem creating a ridiculous multiple desktop display by using Air Display to connect multiple iPads and iPhones to my Mac, but Duet Display can use only one device as a display. I believe Astropad is also intended to connect a Mac to only one iOS device at a time.
(The photo for this article is from the Duet website.)
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Released today as a free upgrade for existing users, Astropad 2.0 brings major performance improvements and new features to the popular iPad-to-Mac graphics tablet app. Described as a “Wacom Cintiq alternative,” the app allows for a stylus-wielding iPad user to perform photo retouching in a way that many prefer over clicking with a mouse.
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When you open the new app you’ll notice an updated user interface, a refined pressure curve for a more natural feel, panning and zooming enhancements for more applications, and a new setting that will auto-hide the cursor on your Mac while drawing.
Under the hood, Astropad 2.0 now runs three times faster due to a “Liquid” upgrade. Liquid is an in-house core technology developed specifically for Astropad’s performance demands. Astropad describes Liquid as being responsive up to 60 frames per second (improving on Apple AirPlay’s 30 frames per second), GPU accelerated, color corrected to the source material, and better than the highest quality JPEG with no compression artifacts. Astropad 2.0 also uses three times less CPU power and four times less memory.
You can find the free update today in the iPad’s App Store, or first-time customers can purchase Astropad 2.0 for $29.99.
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[via Astropad Blog]
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