I spent months writing a very capable MIDI driver. In those days, writing a MIDI driver was a truly non-trivial exercise, as you had to have a MIDI adapter that fed back a 1MHz clock, which you would then program their UART to clock down.
That UART was also a pretty hairy bit of hardware. You had to program it with ASM, and the chip was set up so that a 16-bit address range corresponded to various control states. Setting control states for the chip meant a LOT of homework.
MIDI drivers basically were about as difficult as you could get, as you needed to step down an external clock, and set up things like ring buffers that were large enough to not trip over their own feet during an intense session.
Anyhoo, after a couple of months of working on the driver (and buying a DX-7 as a test bed), I was just about to announce it, when Apple came up with a package of OS utilities that included...a MIDI driver.
I don't think that theirs was as good as mine, but that was beside the point.
I open-sourced the driver, but the OS community wasn't particularly well-established back then, and I believe that it's lost in the sands of time.
Do you really think that Apple couldn’t come up with the idea for SideCar without Luna? You could already use AirPlay to create a second monitor from your Mac and use AirPlay as a second display from iOS. It was completely logical that the next step is to send video from your Mac to your iPad as a second display.
Indeed, Apple had already implemented something similar with Target Display Mode on the iMac back in 2009, so it's hardly a stretch to figure they've been planning something like this for essentially as long as iPads have been around.
Answer 1: I did not have any kind of relationship with Apple, except for the standard Developer agreement. I don't think they copied anything from me, so it was not, truth be told, exactly the same.
Answer 2: Not especially, but those of us that have been programming Apple since the 1980s (I've been at it for a loooong time) have learned a rather cynical outlook.
Apple has a long, long history of stepping on its developers; often accidentally (but we still got stepped on).
I've taken OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX courses, because they were the future.
Anyone remember Copeland, and the enormous push behind it?
I still love programming Apple devices. I'm writing an open-source Bluetooth driver, right now.
It's still very much a WIP. I just burned the first iteration to the ground, and replaced it with a ghastly chimera that uses adapters to abstract the transport:
Fascinating hardware. How does it work? Does the iOS device use BLE to connect to the goTenna, which is then connected to the end device (Windows PC or something)? Or do you always need two goTenna devices?
Do you have a client who requires an interface to these devices? Or is it of general interest to you?
Not exactly sure how the mesh system works. There’s basically three players in this space: goTenna, BearTooth and Radacat. goTenna seems to be the biggest and most successful outfit.
BearTooth uses Bluetooth Classic; not BLE. In the latest OS revisions, Apple claims to have integrated Classic into CoreBluetooth, but the documentation is terrible, so I’m not sure how seriously to take it.
You need multiple devices of the same type. When you buy them, they come in sets of two. You can have a whole network of them. goTenna markets a “pro” line, aimed at First Responders. You can buy sets of devices that go for like $20,000.
They have a military use case, but I doubt it’s battlefield, as these could easily be “shoot me” beacons.
I like that these are aimed at disaster response. I’ve been writing software to support NGO/NPO assistance for decades.
No client yet. I’m doing this because I want to learn Bluetooth programming, and I want to create much more lightweight and flexible SDKs than the ones that currently exist.
Their use case is that the devices establish a mesh network in RF, with devices acting as repeaters, and are controlled individually via Bluetooth. The current limitations on that seem to be software, as a function of their SDKs.
I’d like to improve On their SDKs. For example, I’d like to be able to control goTenna devices directly from a Watch. You can’t do that, with their established SDK.
I’m fairly good at SDKs. I’ve been writing them for decades. Most of the “closed” work I’ve done (what I was paid for) was SDK work.
The driver is really just the lower-level part of an SDK, designed to provide transport abstraction. There will be another layer over that, providing application implementation support.
Dude! Mad respect. Not many people seem able to turn around their career, because it requires a decent amount of effort. One of my office mates is sick and tired of developing business apps but can't seem to turn the ship around.
I've made some technical switches (Java -> Embedded -> iOS) and found those to be hard; like you said, you need to have a serious portfolio before someone bothers interviewing you for either a job or a freelance project.
You say you were just about to announce it, so doesn't that mean nobody saw your work yet? If so it sounds like it doesn't fit the definition of sherlocking, just an unfortunate coincidence.
I just came across UART in the context of one of my side-projects related to the DJI Matrice 100 and have zero hardware related experience and seeing it in this context gives me some XKCD 979 vibes.
Back in the days before fire, before USB, and before the Internet, UARTs were everything. One couldn't call oneself an engineer until one had programmed a UART. You kids with your USB have it easy these days.
wrote com driver with 6501, it happens no matter if its apple , ibm, or micrsoft. I found out years later they copied the asm code and "reordered" it to make it look they done work.
What’s your point? Two entities working in silos don’t tell anyone what they are building and the bigger one releases it first leaving the other one feeling jaded.
Not really "jaded," per se. I hadn't really worked out what I was going to do with the driver, anyway. I tend to write stuff like that because I enjoy doing it.
In the aggregate, it all worked out for the best. That was my first open-source project, and most of what I've written since, has been open-source.
I'm sorry for Astropad as they have made such a good product, but to be honest, this doesn't feel like Astropad being sherlocked; I'm pretty sure Apple was experimenting with this from the very first iPad Pro.
The idea to connect the iPad to use as a second display isn't that unique, there's Duet Display (founded by an ex Apple engineer), Astropad, and I think I've seen a couple of more apps.
Watson was a pretty unique product; that's why people recognized Sherlock as a copy of Watson... but this feels like a company that developed a Voice Memo app for macOS complaining that macOS Mojave 'sherlocked' them by including Voice Memo by default.
I often use Airplay as a second monitor to my 4K TV. The only thing that prevented me from Airplaying to my iPad was Apple didn't support an iPad as an Airplay target. Now they do except they renamed it.
Astropad is mostly sour grapes. Sure I feel sympathy that their market dried up but the feature (Airplay, Chromecast) has been just a compile away from being available. Yea I know they support input too but you can make similar arguments for imput. How far of is the standalone bluetooth touchpad code from just running the same or slightly tweaked software on an iPad to use as a touchpad, etc... Heck, I wrote a touchscreen driver for the Amiga. I'm sure it didn't take more than 2-3 days. It's not like the device doesn't have that feature already built in and transfering that data over to the mac is not a some crazy impossible never been done before process.
People make these arugments before. Networking drivers were not part of the OS in the earily 90s. Companies selling network cards complained when Microsoft added networking to Windows. TCP/IP stacks were not part of Windows pre 1993. There's an long list of features that got added as standard features to most OSes. Thumbnails for images in Finder/Explorer (use to need 3rd party software). Memory management. Anyone remember buying QEMM? Browsers started out separate from the OS. They are separate now but I can't imagine desktop OS shipping without one.
I’ve been a user of Astropad. It really was an exceptional piece of software which greatly increased the useful value of owning an iPad with the Apple Pencil. I also own a Wacom tablet, but I could much more easily use Astropad for quick work. It wasn’t perfect, the primary shortfall is you get latency with the drawing. With Sidecar that doesn’t happen.
Astropad deserves credit for shipping a feature years ahead of Apple adding it. That in itself is worth a lot. At the same time, the functionality is very obvious. The real lesson here should be something about expecting to be copied from day 1. Anyone that’s been around for a while knows that is just reality. You don’t get special credit for having an idea first or producing a working product long before someone else. There are patents and trademarks but those only go so far. The more obvious what you are doing, the more likely other people are working on it even if you don’t know it. History is littered with that sort of thing.
I think the more obvious lesson in this (which Astropad appear to have stunningly missed), is that if your product’s role is fixing a (perhaps obvious) deficiency in another product, then you have a significant risk that the other product will improve to the point of making yours obsolete. If your business model can be turn on its head by another product implementing a (perhaps even trivial) feature, then you simply don’t have a very strong business model.
That's a pretty funny/clever hack (took me a minute to figure out you're Zooming with yourself). You can also try AirServer (similar to Reflector). There's a free trial.
https://www.airserver.com
I use it mainly for audio streaming from my phone to my MacMini / Stereo, and sometimes to play
Alto's Adventure on a projector.
> That's a pretty funny/clever hack (took me a minute to figure out you're Zooming with yourself).
Yes, multiple Zoom sessions from my same user account. I'd mostly do this to convey a diagram live with other people, that I would draw out. So They'd join once, I would join on one device and my ipad, with the first device being so they could see me sitting normally during the whole session.
Funny name I used to use something called AirParrot by a company called Squirrels
It was for extending my desktop to a chromecast. Not mirroring but extending and acting a second monitor. It broke at OSX 10.13 and I gave them 6 months and stopped trying
QuickTime can do this, or at least it could before Catalina (I’ve not upgraded so can’t be sure). Just plug the iPad in and use the screen recording feature (you don’t have to actually start the recording — the preview is sufficient).
That's a use case that the app Reflector 3 handles. It's sort of the inverse of Sidecar. Lets your Mac display you iPad, iPhone, or Android device live in OSX over WiFi, by implementing a desktop receiver for the Apple AirPlay and Google Cast protocols.
Luna Display does exactly that - just mirror your display to your iPad and anything you do on your iPad shows on your Mac display too. Best thing about Luna is it gets you Pencil support on the Mac. People have been ditching Wacom tablets since the iPad has dramatically better (lower) latency.
So sidecar doesn't (yet, at least) fully do everything Luna does? I guess it probably will eventually..
Apple pencil latency on ipad OS is crazy low and I hear it was already lower than a typical wacom tablet, so this is quite compelling. Sad for Astropad that Apple are taking their business away, but it is a logical step really... :/
I’m using Screen Mirroring by 2kit[0] to stream from my iPhone to a Linux laptop. It makes a MJPEG stream on local network, and I’m using some custom CSS for their website to fix scaling. It has an iPad version, so you may want to test it.
That's more of the inverse. I think an AirPlay receiver on your Mac might work, but I'm not sure. Sidecar, Duet Display and Astropad let you draw on your iPad as a secondary display for your Mac, using Mac apps.
Sidecar with mirroring turned on if you want both screens to show the laptop, Airserver with Airplay from the iPad if you want both screens to show the iPad.
> We admittedly got swept up in a false romance with Apple. Over the past few years, Apple routinely invited us to demo our products at their headquarters, and offered to help us out with whatever business and engineering challenges we faced. They also ordered thousands of dollars’ worth of our hardware, and we naively thought it was because they were interested in our product. It turns out that they were… just not in the way we were thinking.
Holy crap they got (HBO) Silicon Valley "Brain Raped."[0] What sickens me is that Apple wouldnt just outright buy them out instead. If you are designing something like this... Make sure you patent as much as possible. That would of guaranteed a buyout. Course not sure how patentable that idea would of been by now if they had other competitors.
Maybe this is a case where the old adage applies: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a byzantine organizational structure in which the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing".
While its certainly plausible that Apple engaged in some kind of two-faced corporate espionage here, another plausible explanation is that Apple is an enormous company, and the part of it that was working on Sidecar had little or no connection at all with the part that was talking to Astropad.
Yes, this seems likely. If Apple is anything like most tech companies, the people who interact with third parties like Astropad would be in a division called something like Partnerships, at a far remove from the core macOS product decision-making.
It probably isn't even that. The "Left hand" could be engineers who are only thinking about technical and product design aspects and really want the thing to go off and succeed. And then, just when it's about to happen, a legal team does the final check and someone higher in the hierarchy has to approve it and they say "wait, can we just build this in house much cheaper". The Right Hand just learned what the Left Hand was up to, and decided that it isn't perfectly in company's interest, so they adjust it a bit.
> "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a byzantine organizational structure in which the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing"
The effect is the same. If you assume malice, the actions you end up predicting are identical to the actions you predict if you assume byzantine organization. They are functionally equivalent. The distinction is hardly even a distinction at all, since byzantine organizations are often malicious. Even if no particular individual in the organization has malicious intent, the actions of the organization as a whole may be malicious.
More and more I hear this applied to companies acting irresponsibly. How about 'effing's law' where companies are exempt from that adage. Public companies act in the interest of profit. Full stop.
Again, I hate to defend such a fxxedxp company as Apple, but...
Unless they divulged some really clever low-latency video compression optimizations during these meetings (I bet making the mouse cursor move with low latency was the #1 priority - everything else is boring plumbing)... I'm filing this under the "CEO's slightly dramatically exaggerated regrets", maybe for the benefits of his investors.
Just watching their promo video about the Astropad Studio on their website, what I see is the latency for drawing is annoyingly bad (and they show it exactly when they're talking about "lightning fast speed" :O )
Apple OS updates broke low latency even on things that only send the mouse, like Synergy (power saving causes latency when idle and wakes up for responsiveness only on hardware input, or something like that). My guess is sidecar uses OS level stuff to get around some of those limitations, which may have affected astropad too?
Exaggerated how? Not sure how the investors benefit. I am going to assume good intent from the author to just reflect on things. Hes not focused on his other projects. But he does have the right to link to them since they are relevant.
Again how do investors benefit? There is usually motive behind ill intent, I am not seeing it. I have had moments similar but not quite as impacting as an entire OS adopting my ideas and I reflect from time to time on those moments. I have nothing to gain from sharing them though nor will anybody near me.
English can be an awful language sometimes. I take that “for the benefit” to mean “The real audience is AstroPad investors”, not that AstroPad investors somehow came out better on the deal.
Ah I understand now, that I can't argue against. Companies make such public statements all the time so it's not surprising if that's the case. This also gives future investors insights into the company they are considering investing in and how they operate.
It's unfortunately very common for people to believe that they'll get bought out based solely on the ingenuity of their product.
The business reality is that almost any software can be easily replicated by BigTechCo for a max of a couple million dollars, far less than any founder is hoping to get acquired for.
In an acquisition, buyers are not buying the software despite whatever PR-friendly face gets put on it. They're buying something they can't just easily generate by locking a few of their already-employed engineers in a closet, which means either a) intellectual property via patents; or b) an audience/userbase that the acquiring company can't already easily access.
No entrepreneur should go into it without internalizing and understanding that. Code is cheap. If you want to be acquired, you have to bring something to the table.
(also note: for Google and Apple, "a lot of mobile users" isn't really part of that equation)
IIRC this company was started by a couple of ex-Apple engineers who had been trying unsuccessfully to get this sort of thing built into iOS for a while.
In the 1990s, 2000s, or heck even early 2010s this would have been an open source utility that someone had spent a few months building as a passion project. And then 5-10 people from around the world would have pitched in a work week here and there to make it work really well and lots of people using it would be really happy from using it.
Now, because everything that possibly can be monetized needs to be monetized.. it has to be monetized. And everything needs to be made into a company, with programmers, product management, marketing, HR, legal etc etc.
I hate to defend Apple here, because I think they are beginning to halt progress rather than bring it forward, but.. meh. It's just a goddamn feature. You can't call dibs on obvious features. (And in terms of obviousness, I think this one is a lot more obvious than Sherlock.)
The creators of this tool chose to create a company and try to actually make a living off of their idea. I don't see why this should count against them; in fact with the open-source tools of the 2000s now experiencing "license regret" over cloud services product-izing their software (e.g. MongoDB), it probably makes sense to stake out the commercial territory yourself before someone else does.
And the author isn't calling "dibs" at all; her company's product hit the market first, but she isn't claiming any right to that market.
Maybe I'm just being old here, but MongoDB (initial release 2009) doesn't really feel like the old guard of open source to me.
Not calling dibs: fair enough.
Edit: Just noticed the pronoun you used and was confused. I vaguely remember these people (the creators of this product) from when they launched the product as, well, male.
Turns out they still are: Here's their separate blog post btw:
The AGPL is exactly the thing that MongoDB dropped because their software was being monetized by cloud providers without adequate benefit to themselves.
Same surprise, why are 13 people needed for a shareware utility. Maybe that was their mistake: if they made the app free, everyone would use it and apple would acquire them.
And in fact YC CEO Michael Seibel has said on many, many occasions that the number one reason YC companies fail is because they hire too many people, too quickly.
VC companies push you to grow efficiently not just grow at any cost (unless of course you have unique unit economics).
I have no problems with their choice to sell a commercial product, but their pricing was /extremely/ high and an ongoing subscription to boot. I never even entertained the idea of paying.
That does not obviate their point, of course. Getting Sherlocked by your platform sucks.
On the "obviousness" judgment - maybe, maybe not. A lot of people claim post-hoc that something was "obvious" but it's usually Monday-morning quarterbacking. If something was so "obvious" then why wasn't it done before? Food for thought.
What I will say is that I think - despite the harm to the specific developer of the competing product - that adding new features to the OS for free is a net positive for consumers. It's one less thing they have to pay for out of their own pockets, and enhances the overall value of the product and its ecosystem.
Usually I root for the underdog, but in this case, it was almost inevitable. I have both Astropad and a iPad Pro, and I have to say that they priced themselves out of the market straight out of the gate by using a high cost subscription (~$20/mo) plus ~$20 for the hardware dongle. At these prices, professionally it's actually cheaper to just go buy an Intuos because it will perform better in every way and doesn't cost you over time.
TBH, I'm actually surprised this didn't happen sooner -- it's the obvious solution to a lagging Adobe Photoshop and pro tools that immediately give the iPad strong value and staying power.
Their pricing model is besides the point. Apple extended interest and kindness towards them and then copied their products. It's just kind of cruel. These are the types of rotten actions that make people more generally cynical and disappointed about large corporations and the valley.
This is just basic business sense -- you don't go showing off your crown jewels to any company without lots and lots of NDAs and binding agreements in place first, unless you have some kind of hook in there to keep it rooted with you. And even then, just don't do it! This was the lesson learned by US chip manufacturers back in the 70s and 80s when competing against Japan -- it's no different with software. In fact, it's worse for software because there are less protections available.
What would have been a better outcome? Continuing to make customers pay for the feature?
Buying the company? If so, what about the competing companies that offer this functionality? Apple obviously felt it would be easier/cheaper to build than buy.
Buying the company (or a competitor) would have been fair: it would have felt like “the market has spoken” and a winner was picked. Building anew after playing it cool feels very “Pirates of Silicon Valley”.
This said, single-platform feature apps like this are always at risk from this sort of thing.
They could have bought the company if necessary.
Frankly it just wasn't worth buying. That is the market speaking. The market said it was better to develop the thing in house.
And before Steve Jobs came back, Apple would buy third-party utilities to incorporate into MacOS (System 7.5 WindowShade, MenuClock, Hierarchical Apple Menu were all third-party acquisitions)
Apple still buys companies all the time. Perhaps not always well-known app developers, but certainly a lot of them. (Shazam is one from recent memory, as was Siri.)
This makes me believe that if Apple is building their own rather than buying, perhaps there’s not a whole lot of innovation that the app developer created that wasn’t trivially replaceable.
They still acquire when they need the talent, but the utilities I listed were absolutely trivial (printing the time in the menu bar?) and Apple could have easily just replicated them
I think the commenter is actually stating that Apple was better on this front in the era when Steve Jobs wasn't able kind. As in, the Gil Amelio and the like era.
> [...] Apple extended interest and kindness towards them and then copied their products. It's just kind of cruel.
No it isn't.
That is capitalism and cut-throat business. These guys were foolish for getting so close to Apple when Apple could literally destroy their entire business by adding a single feature.
Protip: If your business is defined by a single feature, your strategy sucks.
Maybe this is also the obvious outcome of Apple refusing to put a touchscreen on the laptops, fearing cross-cutting of iPad sales.
It’s a surprise though that Apple is making some moves that appear to cater to pro users, since the overwhelming sentiment seems to be that Apple has completely abandoned the pro market. I loved my mac laptop, but it’s becoming very clear I can’t stay on the platform. I work with a lot of CG film companies and everyone I know feels the same way, that Apple no longer has any interest in customers doing high end design. I suddenly don’t know anybody who’s not migrating away from macOS.
Does anyone actually use touchscreens on laptops? They've always seemed pretty awkward to me. OTOH, being able to use a tablet as an extension to a desktop seems as if it would let you have effectively a couple different interaction mechanisms. I'm looking forward to checking it out.
My GF and I both have ThinkPad X1 Yogas. I rarely use the touchscreen, but I do like the digitizer pen for sketching out design ideas and such.
OTOH, she uses the touchscreen all the time. Even when something would be easier with the keyboard, like filling in a form field and just hitting Enter, she finishes typing and reaches up to touch the button on the screen. If anything can be done by touching the screen, that's how she does it.
It seems a bit strange to me, but she loves the touchscreen!
I can definitely see the digitizer pen. That's mostly why I like the idea of being able to use an iPad Pro as a secondary display. Sketching something with a mouse or trackpad makes my barely legible chicken scratch that much worse. I usually end up doing it on paper and taking a picture.
But different folks, different strokes. I have a ChromeBook with a touch screen that I never use. But I have a friend who, if I hand over the ChromeBook to look at something, their natural reaction is to swipe the screen to scroll, which is something I almost never do.
The boss likes his Surface Pro as much as it’s possible for a Unix guy to like Windows. Flipping to touch mode on the plane and churning through emails — mostly read & delete — is a favourite.
I’m in the ‘get your fingers off my screen’ camp but there are undeniable benefits.
My issue is mostly with using tablets as laptop replacements. Not so much because of capabilities (I often travel with a ChromeBook) but because nothing out there is great for just grabbing and typing on my lap--which I admit I do a lot even at home or in the office.
IMO, there needs to be a detachable keyboard with trackpad that really locks to a tablet so the screen doesn't need to be propped up in some manner. Some things out there get close but not quite.
It’s certainly the idea although I’m not in the Microsoft ecosystem any longer. But yeah, that’s probably the closest thing to what I have in mind these days.
You believe this, despite them just announcing a tower Mac Pro. I'd say the very fact that they are even producing it precludes that they have 'abandoned' the pro market and customers doing high end design. If they had truly abandoned the segment they wouldn't bother.
I've talked to multiple audio / graphics studios and they are actively planning/executing their Apple exit strategy. Phasing out over several years. Started about 2-3 years go for most of them. Apple don't care about them because they can't even see them on their bottom line.
I am someone who dabbles in audio and video production. I was set on buying Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro for my use.
But in the current environment we are in, I am seriously considering using cross-platform software like Ableton Live and DaVinci Resolve. This is due to the fear of being locked-in hardware wise.
I'd also give pretty good odds that we're seeing the beginnings of a convergence between Apple's tablets and laptops/desktops which is probably (mostly) not good for pro users given--probably including a shift away from x86.
Likely. Macs running only ARM is a definite possibility. I doubt anyone would doubt Apple could make 100% ARM based Mac Pro given a reasonable timeframe. Just a matter of time.
Only need higher performance ARM cores. And this isn't in the "impossible" or "silly pie-in-the-sky" bucket either.
Having a computer named “pro” is marketing, that doesn’t mean they cater to actual pro users. Go ahead and Google “has apple abandoned pro market” and see for yourself whether anyone else thinks so, and why. The hardware isn’t the main problem, the software is, as @mondoshawan pointed out up-thread. Apple’s made lots of moves that frustrate pro users in recent years. Canceling Shake was a big one in the pro film industry. Apple preventing use of nvidia GPUs is an ongoing issue a lot of people I know care about. Personally, as a programmer who moved to macOS for it’s unix environment and needs some ability to maintain cross-platform compatibility, I am not able to continue because Apple has moved strongly toward Apple-only development, and the unix environment is frozen with decade-old licenses that will never resolve.
> Having a computer named “pro” is marketing, that doesn’t mean they cater to actual pro users.
The new Mac Pro caters almost exclusively to pro users. Normal people (at this time) have little use for a computer and monitor that cost 5 figures with the specs on offer. The “pros” I know that benefit from this level of power are chomping at the bit to get the new Mac Pros and the monitors. Just the capabilities of Logic and Final Cut with the Mac Pro are astounding.
I evaluated Astropad for my iPad Pro some time ago and I couldn't rationalise paying the subscription fee since I would only use it every now and again to play around. I'm not an artist, I just like to dabble a bit. I would have happily paid a $50 one time fee for that, but not a recurring subscription.
I was surprised by how positive and constructive this article is considering the circumstances. Say what you want about whether it was foreseeable, being blindsided by your platform is not fun. I’m sure there were some swear words used the first couple of days, but some companies in the same situation have just closed up shop, so putting it behind you and moving on with hope and positivity, recognizing that there are still options, and noting that one of them is to stay there and compete with Apple, that’s commendable.
I'm not in the Apple ecosystem so I've not previously heard of this product, nor Sidecar or the amusing verb "sherlocked."
I don't have a lot to add except to say that the blog entry was substantially more insightful, honest, introspective, and valuable to the reader than I would have expected given the circumstances. The author and the company deserve a lot of credit for dealing with setbacks so graciously. Meanwhile, Apple deserves another helping of skepticism.
I look forward to seeing what kinds of creative display tricks Astropad comes up with in their multi-platform adventures on Rust.
Large tech companies have the resources to clone any single piece of software engineering or hardware engineering. The marginal cost of developing a new "feature" of their existing "product" is so small in the grand scheme of things. As long as you have software engineers, money, and an idea, you can make something like sidecar real; this company needed to create all three from scratch, Apple has oodles of the first two and can easily steal ideas for the third. With that being said, if the only definition of a product is something that Apple can't replicate, then I'm afraid we are damn near out of products.
(Again, this applies to every large tech company, not just apple)
That seems unnecessarily cheeky. If you can make money on it, its a product, if someone builds it in to their product line, perhaps they did it better (though not always).
You can make money off many things that aren’t products. Pedantically we might be right that anything revenue is product, but I think it’s the difference between a real product and an add on that people only buy because hey are buying something else.
The advice is useful because if I’m building a feature I will either be purchased by a product or eventually be added into a product.
I can see what you are saying. Perhaps a third option of advice is being suggested here which is diversify your feature to make it better than a built in solution or diversify your business to make it resilient to these types of loss.
I think that’s a good strategy. As long as I’ve paid attention (85+) there have been “feature” companies selling addons and stuff on top of windows, Mac, Oracle, etc.
I think the risk is thinking you are a product company when actually a feature company and then not diversifying.
It's probably too early to know if astropad can actually survive this, or if it can create a sustainable business so this article is premature.
My company was Sherlocked in 2017 when Apple released ARKit and our flagship product, an AR SDK with SLAM was made obsolete overnight. We knew it was coming, but didn't know when, so we diversified into mobile-web computer vision products before it happened.
Didn't matter though, the third party mobile AR tool landscape isn't robust enough to sustain more than a handful of content companies. All the hard tech in AR is being done by FB, Goog and Apple so we were dead in the long run anyway.
We were lucky though that a niche market for our mobile web product was desirable enough for an acquisition and we found that offramp. I don't think most companies can survive a sherlocking.
I have an older Mac as my daily driver and was bummed to learn it was excluded from the Sidecar functionality. As a daily Wacom user, I’ve really wanted this feature.
So, I went and looked at Astropad and learned that their pricing is based around a ludicrous subscription model and they lock basic functionality behind it (like shortcuts). They obviously don’t understand their market because Adobe is near reviled by digital artists nowadays for these kind of tactics.
If they had at all been reasonable in their to pricing, they would have been fine. Most artists I know hold onto their hardware for a long time and would’ve payed (reasonably) for support/their feature set. But because they got greedy, people will just wait and upgrade to the built-in support on newer devices.
I also got sherlocked around 15 years ago. At the time I was working for a music company, and I was in very close loop with apple CoreAudio and CoreMIDI guys. I had (still have) a whole bunch of apple employees or ex- as friends.
Rather enthusiastically I was advocating, and filing bugs to allow me to ship a side project I had been working on for quite a while: A way to network MIDI devices on OSX. Multicast, very low latency, auto-discovery etc. I basically entirely trusted them with all the ideas, thinking it wasn't something they would need, or care, to ship in OSX at any time in the future because it was so niche.
I was wrong, next major OSX version, they had it -- in a more primitive way than my product -- but they had it.
I that point I had been a mac developer, one of the old school, since 1985 or so. And I literally dropped tools and decided to do something else entirely.
Now I still use a Hackintosh mostly for a few programs I still cary on using, but my work has entirely shifted away from Apple.
Interesting comment by a company whose apps replicate what has been available for almost a decade. I remember using software to turn my 1st generation iPad into a second screen, back in 2010. Have been through at least three variants of the same app since.
I'm not happy with platform owners eating more and more of their own market, and think some of the anti-competitive clauses of app stores should be illegal, but there is no high horse to stand on here.
Several products already exist for this purpose, including Duet Display, one of the Splashtop products (can't remember which). I'm sure there are others.
It made reading this article a bit off-putting because they seem to imagine they were the sole bearers of such a product; they were not and never have been.
Isn’t this quite similar to what happens when a supermarket creates their own brand version of a product, and places it alongside the copies product, albeit with a much cheaper price?
I felt quite bad for Spotify and Flux when Apple Music and Night shift came out, but I guess this is a risk when you use any type of platform to reach customers.
Diversification is a good idea, I’m impressed was impressed with the response in the article.
Supermarkets rarely "create their own brand version of a product." They usually contact a a vendor to have them make the product with the house brand's labels.
Trader Joe's does this, and some googling will tell you who really makes some of their products. Costco is known for rebranding some impressively good single malt scotches and selling them cheap.
1) Have your work patented.
2) Be acquired by a larger firm that can enforce your patents.
If you don't have a patent, then anyone can copy anything you create, and economies of scale are going to catch up to you and force you out of business.
I personally don't believe in patents, but it's the only way to operate today.
Wacom. Avid. Adobe. There are a lot of companies that would buy tech like Astropad. Adobe could have integrated it into CS for instance and it would have been a value-add for that audience.
Even if the software itself ticks a nice box as a feature add to some other product, the patents wouldn't have fit into the portfolios of any of those companies. To make it a profitable investment they would have had to pre-meditate a licensing deal... with Apple.
Prior to using Sidecar I was using Duet Display, which is a software solution to the Luna hardware module. I can't see any benefits of using Luna over the Duet App, and most of the Pros/Cons on the Luna website are outdated as of Duet 2. If Sidecar didn't kill Luna, Duet would have.
Duh, quite obvious, diversification is what all companies desire, but most just try and milk the golden goose for as long as possible. Until it is too late.
It does astonish me though when every year I walk through the booths at AWS Summit (poor man's Re:Invent) and see all these companies that are a feature-announcement-in-one-tiny-paragraph-in-an-AWS-blog-post away from going out of business. But I guess it pays the mortgage bills for a lot of people until those blog posts.
The add on/enhancement business is always risky. As the author says,oin one hand it's kinda validating when it happens, otoh it obviously means you're going to have to find a new "got to have tool" to hawk. There will never be a "sit back and watch the dollars roll in" in this space. Either the platform/ecosystem/standard offering eats you up OR everyone else smells the cash and moves in and the race to the bottom of profitablity begins.
As an oldie, who remembers the kinds of money that was being made in the late 80s early 90s in software development tools? Cool languages. Powerful compilers. CASE tools. Libraries. Innovative IDEs. I worked in that space (Smalltalk VisualWorks). Businesses paid good money to fund those efforts, to try and have competitive advantage to develop better solutions than the competition. But in a similar vein, the OS vendors (as well as free open source) moved into this space, and then there was very little money to be made in 3rd party software development tools.
So I feel these guys pain. But the expansion transcends the particular type of add in they're making money in.
This is what worked in a 'Sherlocked' case I was involved with:
(1) Take a deep breath, don't pretend nothing happened
(2) Don't just compete, look at how you can provide additional value to those customers that will also use the incumbent's offering
(3) Get on with your roadmap on improving value for and delighting all your customers
When Microsoft announced Teams [1], we thought our own team collaboration product [2] would be severely impacted.
Not that we were surprised that Microsoft came out with this product after having lauded ours in the past. Team collaboration was always on their radar, and had been declared strategic for years. But I will not deny that it still makes you feel as if the ground beneath your feet is rumbling.
We knew from past experiences, and our contacts, that Microsoft would push this product hard into their ecosystem. So we had to keep in mind that most of our customers would be aware of it if not already, soon, and at least there would be questions of whether they should consider going with Microsoft or not.
But we also had been competing successfully for years as a 'small indie' shop against outfits that were swimming in VC money, so stiff competition was not a 'new' experience. However, Microsoft being the gorilla in the room stapling in their offering into O365 might be a different beast altogether.
So what to do?
First we acknowledged that going forward many of our customers would also have Teams, by choice or by company policy. So we looked at how our customers might benefit from having both. I think this is a key question you should ask. Not just 'how is my offer better than theirs', but how are both together better than just the competing offer from the behemoth?
In our case this meant two things
- making sure that you play nice with the new app, in a way that the experience of using both is seamless.
- find specific scenarios where the users of the incumbent app benefit from having yours as well
We developed an integration with Teams[3] that covered these points. We also doubled down on our roadmap, making sure that both standalone and dual app users receive increased value over time. Dual might be a bit of a misnomer since nearly 100% of our customer base even before Teams touched collaboration across different applications and services, Outlook and SharePoint being the most prominent.
I'm not saying this is a recipe that will lead to guaranteed success in every case. It worked for us and we kept growing both our customer base and revenue all through the advent of Teams and thereafter. Of course I can not compare this to a world where Teams was never introduced. I remain however convinced that where possible, the strategy of not just competing but also adding value to those customers that chose or were forced onto the platform provider's own offer is far preferable to one were you just go head-to-head.
Always offer the best product, but also offer the better-together experience.
Absolutely. But you can not rely on Microsoft or Apple or Google or whatever is your favorite evil corp be filled with 'mindless corporate drones' or 'bogged down with process that will snuff out everything that is good'.
Assume their next iteration will be better. Then what? By all means, believe in your team to be competitive head-to-head. But also assume Microsoft/Apple/google/... will be present and eventually if not already will/might be pretty decent.
Or they might just be part of the package. For many of our product champions in corporate environments, SharePoint was not something they chose, but it still was part of their daily reality and not something they could ignore or stop using.
I hope I'm not downplaying just how hard it can be when your core revenue generating product is just being completely commoditized by a 'ham sandwich'[1]. I'm just trying to relate an experience where we could absorb and even grow through the impact in the hope it might keep others from being discouraged in difficult times
[1] Steve Ballmer, famously said the company could bundle a ham sandwich into Windows if it wanted to
Sidecar is an obvious OS feature that I've wanted since the original iPad, and the third-party attempts/solutions from VNC to Remote Desktop to Air Display to AstroPad to Duet to Luna were not great and some of them added very annoying bits like subscription pricing (seriously?) or clunky/expensive hardware adapters.
I also considered how easy it is to have your iPhone screen show up as an video source in QuickTime Player, just by plugging in a lightning cable...
I'm deleting basically all of them (possibly excepting VNC, which has a few different use cases) and switching to Sidecar.
I use a non-airplay compatible MacBook Pro from mid 2010 and I am rather disappointed at the overall product offering for these slightly older machines. While I find you can mirror the display to an iPad, it seems impossible to use one as genuine secondary display (such that it could be used for extra screen real estate). I paid for several products over the last few months only to be disappointed in this way. Perhaps therefore a niche could be to support older machines like my mid 2010 MacBook pro?
I remember during the early facebook app dev days, there was a very popular Independent ncaa tourney bracket app.
Then fb partnered w some big name to do another app that copied the functionality very poorly, but fb promoted it far and above the other all, effectively killing it.
What people seem to forget is that this is nothing personal, only business. A company has the right to compete with your product, and you are not entitled to any sort of market share. That’s just the way capitalism works, and the consumers are better off because of it.
I've read the whole article and I've literally no idea what either product does.
I use a Mac for work - and most of user that I know don't slavishly follow the glorified press conference that Apple holds. I dare say most users don't know about most of the new features in the utility laptop they buy or are forced to use at work.
Astropad lets you use your iPad as a second display for your Mac, with an emphasis on functioning as a tool for artists. It used to support multiple iPad styluses but moved to only supporting the Apple Pencil.
Sidecar lets you use your iOS13 iPad as a second display for your Catalina Mac, with an emphasis on functioning as a tool for artists. I have not used it but I am pretty sure it only supports the Apple Pencil.
Both of these are sort of functioning as an alternative to buying an external monitor with pressure-sensitive stylus support, which is generally going to be more expensive than a tablet - Wacom's Cintiq line, for instance, runs from $700 for a 13-inch screen to $3300 for a 32-inch screen.
They are also in competition with the growing power of tablet apps; there's a lot of former Photoshop painters who have switched to Procreate or the tablet version of Manga Studio to get their work done.
I think the author is missing the most vital point and that is why you should develop web applications and not native applications, if possible. With native, you have big companies that is in control of the platform and can easily make it hard for you any time. Besides, with a web app, you can reach customers on many different platforms making it harder for one company to kill your business.
The web on the other hand is open and no single company can just change it in a whim.
Speaking from experience building most of a screen-sharing/presentation web app for a big-name company, there's no way one would be acceptable in this role as a daily driver input device. There's just too much latency once you add in canvas transformations and all the mess that goes with that on top of input latency over a network.
Web apps are good for CRUD but little else. What film editor is going to edit a movie using a web browser? What kind of powerful image editing can you do on a web app? Who is going to use ForeFlight in a cockpit over the web? Who wants to play Call of Duty in a browser.
The web is good for displaying information, but it’s not a 1-1 replacement for native.
I never said all apps should be web apps. I just wrote "always believe in the web" and that you should make a web app if possible.
But I honestly think all your examples are soon to be quite possible with WebGL and WebAssembly. Most apps I use today are web apps so you can do a lot more than just display CRUD. That is simply BS from your part.
Some examples, I stream all my movies that I rent via youtube, I talk to people in real time via Discord, I download files with WebTorrent and I do all my coding in Visual Studio Code.
All of those are web apps and none of those would I consider only to be CRUD apps. Downvote all you want, it is still true that you can do a lot more than simply CRUD on the web.
There is even image editors coming up, sure they are a bit basic still but I think that is about to change: https://pixlr.com/x/
I spent months writing a very capable MIDI driver. In those days, writing a MIDI driver was a truly non-trivial exercise, as you had to have a MIDI adapter that fed back a 1MHz clock, which you would then program their UART to clock down.
That UART was also a pretty hairy bit of hardware. You had to program it with ASM, and the chip was set up so that a 16-bit address range corresponded to various control states. Setting control states for the chip meant a LOT of homework.
MIDI drivers basically were about as difficult as you could get, as you needed to step down an external clock, and set up things like ring buffers that were large enough to not trip over their own feet during an intense session.
Anyhoo, after a couple of months of working on the driver (and buying a DX-7 as a test bed), I was just about to announce it, when Apple came up with a package of OS utilities that included...a MIDI driver.
I don't think that theirs was as good as mine, but that was beside the point.
I open-sourced the driver, but the OS community wasn't particularly well-established back then, and I believe that it's lost in the sands of time.