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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

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.

AJ007 7y ago
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.
- notimetorelax 7y ago
  Pioneers have arrows in their backs. The way I see it, if you created a market it doesn’t mean that it belongs to you.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Astropad deserves credit for shipping a feature years ahead of Apple adding it. The “feature” was being done a month after the iPad was introduced in 2010. https://gizmodo.com/review-idisplay-turns-your-ipad-into-a-second-monitor-5508816 https://gizmodo.com/review-idisplay-turns-your-ipad-into-a-s...

AJ007 7y ago

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.

notimetorelax 7y ago
Pioneers have arrows in their backs. The way I see it, if you created a market it doesn’t mean that it belongs to you.
scarface74 7y ago
Astropad deserves credit for shipping a feature years ahead of Apple adding it. The “feature” was being done a month after the iPad was introduced in 2010. https://gizmodo.com/review-idisplay-turns-your-ipad-into-a-second-monitor-5508816 https://gizmodo.com/review-idisplay-turns-your-ipad-into-a-s...