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.
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.
The “feature” was being done a month after the iPad was introduced in 2010.
https://gizmodo.com/review-idisplay-turns-your-ipad-into-a-s...
I resorted to joining Zoom meetings twice and sharing the screen with my ipad session as host and drawing in the Notes App
I use it mainly for audio streaming from my phone to my MacMini / Stereo, and sometimes to play Alto's Adventure on a projector.
Or, if your Mac is compatible, just try Sidecar. There's a hack to make it work on older Macs, but I think officially it's tied to the ones that have hardware HEVC/h.265 support. http://osxdaily.com/2019/10/11/sidecar-compatible-mac-ipad-l...
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.
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
HMMMMM well worth considering if other options don’t pan out
Astropad does this, yes. https://astropad.com
https://www.imore.com/luna-display
Love my Luna - even with sidecar I still see me using Luna. Hope they survive :(
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... :/
[0] https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/screen-mirroring-app/id1463795...
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.