
Astropad – Transform your iPad into a professional graphics tablet - opusdie
http://astropad.com/
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archagon
I feel the main problem with using the iPad as a stylus input device is the
latency. There's a very noticeable and annoying lag when drawing anything via
a capacitive input device, unlike on a Wacom. Hopefully the rumors are true
and Apple adds a digitizer to the next iPad model!

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gdonelli
Did you see the finger crossed here:

[http://astropad.com/assets/img/pens.jpg](http://astropad.com/assets/img/pens.jpg)

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archagon
Yes! It made me smile. :)

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noahbradley
I'd love for the iPad to be a great digital creation tool. I really would.

But as it stands, it's horrible. It's laggy, lacks pressure sensitivity, and
the apps are clunky at best.

Here's to hoping there's a push from Apple to improve things. But for the time
being Microsoft's Surface line is about a thousand times better for actual
creatives.

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bornabox
Astropad has a 7 day tryout. So, I've been using it to pretty great results. I
like it.

With Wifi it's actually laggy, but with the USB cable, it has been very fast.
Pressure sensitivity isn't that important to me - depends on your use-case.

Tried it with Photoshop and Illustrator and it works great. Being able to see
what you draw is great, far better then a normal Wacom Tablet.

So far, it's a great option. A bit on the expensive side, but cheaper then
having to buy a Cintiq or a Surface :)

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mronge
I'm glad you like it!

If you can, try using your wifi on the 5ghz band. In some cases that helps a
lot

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wanderingstan
I'm not a professional arts it but spend a fair amount of time in Photoshop.
Years ago I got a low end Wacom but never used it after the first week. Too
much hassle to pull it out, and I never got the hang of looking at the screen
while moving my hand.

Astropad is a good fit for me. I already own an iPad; and for <$100 I get
Astropad and a pressure sensitive pen. This means the draw-on-screen
experience of the $1K Cintiq and no extra peripheral to dig out.

I saw on other sites where someone complained that "pro" tablets give 2048
levels of pressure sensitivity while ipad pens give only 1024, but I can't
tell a difference. (Esp when the LCD only has 256 levels per color channel!)

The geeky side of me is more impressed with how they got such low latency and
high fidelity over the same wifi pipe used by other screen-mapping apps
(Duet).

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emehrkay
I was messing around with this the other day and I had a video playing on my
computer. It showed up on the iPad pixelated like when tv censors nudity,
pointer tracking seemed pretty fluid even with that playing.

What would be nice is a direct connection between the iPad and computer
instead of wifi. My work network is a hassle to log into so I don't event do
it most of the time. If I need to look up something on the iPad, i pull out my
cell phone hotspot.

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gdonelli
Pixelation is expected and by design. We are optimized for displaying high
quality still images.

If a large change occurs on your Mac screen and we are unable to keep up, we
show pixelated content. This is a signal that we don't have the full screen in
yet, and that the screen image is loading. Astropad is honest, when the image
is clear, you are assured what you see is the actual content, artifact free.

Sending high image quality over WiFi is really challenging. Ever wonder why we
don't have wireless TVs? or Wireless computer displays? It's really really
hard to do.

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ghostly_s
Well... we do have wireless TVs. They started that way.

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davesque
I LOVE the philosophy behind this -- trying to address the dearth of
functionality-rich applications (not apps, mind you) in the post-pc era.

One question: How does this improve on the poor resolution of the iPad touch
interface as compared with the Microsoft surface?

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gdonelli
It mostly depends on what stylus you use. Here are the recommended ones:
[http://blog.astropad.com/styluses/](http://blog.astropad.com/styluses/)

We have a 7 days free trial take it for a spin, judge for yourself.

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davesque
Cool. Thanks a lot for hanging out in the thread and answering questions! I
love it when posters do that :).

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pokstad
Great concept, but I would avoid "Ex-Apple Engineers" and go for "Former Apple
Engineers" to avoid the negative wording. Sounds like you broke up with Apple
and it's a sour relationship.

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gdonelli
Good suggestion. We actually still have many friends at Apple and left in
great terms.

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zmmmmm
Can't see any mention of palm rejection and the image they show doesn't
clearly show if his hand touches the screen or not while drawing. I'm curious
how well the palm rejection problem is solved in these kind of apps? If not it
would seem to be a pretty annoying problem.

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gdonelli
iOS 8 introduces new features that make palm rejection possible. You actually
now know the size of area touching the display.

Upon this feature, we build our own palm detection. It works quite well. We
have a 7 days free trial, take it for a spin.

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zmmmmm
Interesting info, thanks - I use an nVidia Shield tablet that comes with
stylus and has palm rejection features that nVidia included dedicated support
for their SoC. Unfortunately it does not work well enough for me and I end up
not using the stylus very much. So it is interesting that it's possible
(hopefully) to solve it better than that.

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endergen
Looks awesome #astroboys.

ps. I'm the founder of Emotely, where I toyed around with a similar approach
but then ended up focusing on game controllers instead. Early concept video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4)

Had been toying with doing something exactly like this again recently called
interscreen. Made some prototypes of going over USB, it's so fast when you do
that, generally it's fast over wifi. Wifi is un-demoable at conferences, which
was always an annoying factor for self promotion.

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endergen
...not going to be continuing with it I don't think, but definitely going to
keep check out the app. You have my purchase. :)

I wonder if there's a way to combine your tech with Tiltbrush's for a cool VR
use case: [http://tiltbrush.com](http://tiltbrush.com)

Being able to tilt the device as another axis of control for your virtual
drawing plane could be cool.

francoislaberge@gmail.com

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graeme
I'm just beginning to make khan academy style videos. That's where I use a
tablet to make basic drawings, and screencast what I do.

Is astropad a good fit for this use case? I tried drawing via sketchbook
express, but it was hard to keep tools offscreen yet still have enough space
to make sketches on the ipad screen.

Currently I'm using jot whiteboard + Airserver, which lets me display my
drawings to my mac.

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oenvoyage
I tried different stylus solutions and iPAD doest NOT differentiate your palm
from the pen... (or through software hack) which means you can not rest your
hand on the screen (as opposed to WACOM / Galaxy Note/ Surface) And drawing
all day long is tiresome. Maybe one can get used to it, I dont :-) Maybe your
solution is good I hope.

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bane
Great work, this has always seemed like one of those obvious things that we
would have seen before. Great job making it work!

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peterhajas
I installed this on my iPad and Mac, excited to try out 53 Pencil support.
Unfortunately, they don't tell you that it doesn't support 53 Pencil yet until
after you start the free trial.

I wish I could start over my trial when my stylus is supported.

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mronge
Hey Peter!

Sorry about that, we had to pull Pencil support at the last minute due to
bugs.

The trial only records days actually used, so if you resume when we have
Pencil support you'll still have time left.

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moreati
Good luck, looks like a nice product. My only request/suggestion for your
website is to make it clear which iPads you're compatible with. e.g. does dock
vs lightning connector matter? full size vs mini? iOS version?

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gdonelli
Good point.

Any Mac running OS X 10.9+

Any iPad running iOS 8

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forrestthewoods
Would work 100x better with a Surface Pro 2.

Unrelated, but I utterly despise any and all video playback setups that don't
let me control time. This isn't a VHS tape, let me watch your promotional
video how I want plzkthx.

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gdonelli
We are Apple's #astroboys, we like one button and no knobs...

...but just for you:
[http://vimeo.com/astrohq/astropad](http://vimeo.com/astrohq/astropad)

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thenomad
Looks very cool!

Any chance of it ever moving to Windows, or is it Mac-only forever?

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yummybear
Not more than a month ago, I was looking for a similar products, and here it
is. Good job. I have yet to try it, but especially the speed looks promising.

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learc83
Any information on the input latency?

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RodgerTheGreat
In the demo video it seems significant and I think I'd find it very
distracting.

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gdonelli
Take it for a spin, we have a 7 days free trial.

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troymc
Maybe have a video showing someone drawing a fast zig-zag scribble; it would
answer the latency question implicitly. Ditto for palm rejection.

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dalys
Just a heads up, Chrome on my phone crashes repeatedly when trying to play the
video.

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rokgregoric
Awesome app. I was testing it and I highly recommend it!

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smrtinsert
Or buy an 800 touch pc.

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ghostly_s
You meant $800, I imagine? How about you get one of those and report back to
us how useful they are for professional illustration work.

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MichaelGG
Is the MS Surface actually bad for that? I thought that was one of the only
interesting use cases for it (as it has no real keyboard, is rather heavy,
etc.).

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sirn
I asked my artist friend to try drawing on my Surface Pro 3 a month ago (using
Clip Studio Paint). Her impression was that N-trig's preciseness and lacking
pressure level make the Surface 3 unsuitable for a serious work, but it's OK
for light drawing session or for a rough drawing. The Surface 2 might be
another story though.

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stefantalpalaru
Add $20 and you can buy a Wacom CTH461 Bamboo Craft Tablet complete with
stylus and 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity.

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Ezhik
$50, though? You can buy an actual graphics tablet for that much.

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gdonelli
Yes a black slate on which you cannot see where you draw... have you ever
tried those? This product is more similar to a Cintiq which is 1000+ value

Astropad brings the Cintiq experience to your iPad
[http://www.imore.com/astropad-brings-cintiq-experience-
your-...](http://www.imore.com/astropad-brings-cintiq-experience-your-ipad)

Astropad Is An App That Pretty Much Replaces Graphics Tablets
[http://gizmodo.com/astropad-is-an-app-that-pretty-much-
repla...](http://gizmodo.com/astropad-is-an-app-that-pretty-much-replaces-
graphics-t-1686931534)

~~~
nacs
There's no way this compares to a Cintiq.

Cintiq has far higher accuracy compared to the Astropad and Cintiq also has
2048+ levels of pressure sensitivity.

Also, input lag with actual tablets/Cintiqs will be far less than the
Astropad.

For casual sketching/scribbling, the Astropad may be OK but for professional
level work, nothing comes close to Wacom-powered tablets (and, unfortunately,
won't anytime soon due to Wacom's patents).

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mintplant
It doesn't have to be _better_ than a Cintiq, it just has to be closer than an
equivalent dedicated graphics tablet at the same price point. I think it's a
valid comparison.

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nacs
Except this doesn't come close to any dedicated graphics tablet, let alone one
of the most high-end tablets you can get like a Cintiq so the comparison is
really bad.

All real graphics tablets, even ones in the <$100 range, have pressure
sensitivity unlike the Astropad and the accuracy is far higher with real
tablets.

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wanderingstan
You're conflating a lot of things here.

* Astropad _does_ have pressure sensitivity via the supported pens. * Astropad _does_ provide a visible screen like a cintiq at a much lower cost.

How can you clame it "doesn't come close to a desicated graphics tablet" when
you obviously haven't tried it in the preferred setup of iPad + pressure
sensitive pen? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying ita speculation at
this point.

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michaelbuddy
meh, I'm aware at how this will perform. Surface pro 1, 2 or 3 is way better.

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washill
Shame, seems like a lot of effort to fit themselves onto a platform that just
wasn't made for illustration. If this is what you want out of a tablet there's
no reason to get one without a digitizer.

