
Astropad: Turn your iPad into a professional graphics tablet - mronge
http://www.astropad.com
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geoelectric
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.

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tumultco
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.

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geoelectric
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.

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tumultco
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.

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

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mronge
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

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cpr
What's the unique sauce that makes this work?

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

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mronge
That's the tech we built we call LIQUID:
[http://astropad.com/#tech](http://astropad.com/#tech)

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

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

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

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

Try on:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouwCHT3rGRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouwCHT3rGRY)

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

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

