Seeking a resolution, Astro decided to extend their portfolio beyond the Mac. With Apple offering their own mirroring solution baked right into their operating system, the small company has struggled to remain an appealing alternative for Mac users. It's been a year since digital EPIGRAPHY last reported about Astro's excellent dongle solution coming to Windows. (The photo for this article is from the Duet website.Astro’s Luna Display is almost ready to offer a seamless connection between your PC and iPad (Photo by Astro HQ) I believe Astropad is also intended to connect a Mac to only one iOS device at a time. 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. One other feature which I thought might be too obscure to list in the table is support for using multiple devices as displays simultaneously. Duet Pro and Astropad Studio claim to support hovering, but those are premium levels of those apps which require a subscription.Īfter I originally wrote this post, Astropad came out with their own table comparing the two premium versions, Duet Display Pro vs Astropad Studio. 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.Ībout 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. I can’t compare the performance and usage of Astropad and Duet Pro, because I’ve only used Astropad. If you want to connect wirelessly you have to use Astropad, but for best performance you’ll want to connect with a cable anyway.If you don’t like subscription pricing, you have to use Astropad (but not Astropad Studio, which does require a subscription).If you use a Windows PC, you have to use Duet Pro because Astropad only works with Macs.If you want to use Duet Pro, you have to own an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil.You can draw some conclusions from that table: 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.) ( Update: In January 2017, Astropad announced Astropad Studio, a premium level that includes better performance and additional features. Most of all, you’ll want to pay attention to the hardware they support and their pricing models. But beyond that, they have more differences than you might think. ( 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.)ĭuet Pro and Astropad both use an iOS app that communicates with a companion application that you run on your computer. If you’re deciding which one to use, you’ll need to know the important differences between them.ĭuet 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. 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.īoth Astropad and Duet Pro are much less expensive than a Wacom Cintiq…if you already own an iPad. 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).
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