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Astropad – Transform your iPad into a professional graphics tablet
- rokgregoric 12y agoAwesome app. I was testing it and I highly recommend it!
- learc83 12y agoAny information on the input latency?
- RodgerTheGreat 12y agoIn the demo video it seems significant and I think I'd find it very distracting.
- gdonelli 12y agoInput: As low as 3ms on WiFi, less than 1ms over USB. Video: Mostly depends on the Mac graphic cards. it ranges from 12ms to 25ms on a good WiFi network
- Ezhik 12y ago$50, though? You can buy an actual graphics tablet for that much.
- gdonelli 12y agoYes a black slate on which you cannot see where you draw... have you ever tried those? This product is more similar to a Cintiq which is 1000+ value Astropad brings the Cintiq experience to your iPad http://www.imore.com/astropad-brings-cintiq-experience-your-ipad http://www.imore.com/astropad-brings-cintiq-experience-your-... Astropad Is An App That Pretty Much Replaces Graphics Tablets http://gizmodo.com/astropad-is-an-app-that-pretty-much-replaces-graphics-t-1686931534 http://gizmodo.com/astropad-is-an-app-that-pretty-much-repla...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rhinoceraptor 12y agoJust like typing on a physical keyboard, you're not supposed to look at the tablet while using it. After you use a regular graphics tablet for a while you develop the muscle memory required to use it accurately.
- gdonelli 12y agoThat is true, but it is not very intuitive and people still buy Cintiq because the direct manipulation is a really experience.
- Ezhik 12y agoWhat about palm rejection, precision, pressure sensitivity? I'll be honest, I'm not much of an artist. I know plenty of people who use graphics tablets, though, and I just don't see them trading away the three things I mentioned above for a screen. This does seem like a cool thing, and I'd love to test it with my Pencil by 53, I just can't justify it at that price.
- muyuu 12y agoIt cannot be compared to either really. The input precision is pitiful compared to either, although you do see where you are drawing as a plus vs a cheap blank slate pad.
- wanderingstan 12y agoI'm not a professional arts it but spend a fair amount of time in Photoshop. Years ago I got a low end Wacom but never used it after the first week. Too much hassle to pull it out, and I never got the hang of looking at the screen while moving my hand. Astropad is a good fit for me. I already own an iPad; and for <$100 I get Astropad and a pressure sensitive pen. This means the draw-on-screen experience of the $1K Cintiq and no extra peripheral to dig out. I saw on other sites where someone complained that "pro" tablets give 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity while ipad pens give only 1024, but I can't tell a difference. (Esp when the LCD only has 256 levels per color channel!) The geeky side of me is more impressed with how they got such low latency and high fidelity over the same wifi pipe used by other screen-mapping apps (Duet).
- JohnTHaller 12y agoTechnically, iPads have no pressure sensitivity due to the basic/standard digitizer within. They don't have a proper pressure-sensitive digitizer that works with a stylus like a Wacom Cintiq or a Microsoft Surface Pro. An iPad can fake it using a stylus that has a lot more beef built into the stylus itself to support some pressure sensitivity. But it still needs to have a big fat contact with the iPad digitizer itself since it isn't stylus-compatible. It will work with hot dog styli though... aka fat styli that simulate a finger.
- wanderingstan 12y agoYeah, I was talking about the 3rd party pens. An artist at my company has several of the iPad pens and I was impressed with how small the tips actually are. again im not a pro artist, but they were far superior to a finger and good enough for me. (I'm curious to show Astropad to the artist on Monday and see his reaction. He'd used the pens just for sketching on the iPad til now.)
- Galacticus 12y agoYes, the pens are pressure sensitive and draw thin lines. Previous poster was incorrect.
- davesque 12y agoI LOVE the philosophy behind this -- trying to address the dearth of functionality-rich applications (not apps, mind you) in the post-pc era. One question: How does this improve on the poor resolution of the iPad touch interface as compared with the Microsoft surface?
- gdonelli 12y agoIt mostly depends on what stylus you use. Here are the recommended ones: http://blog.astropad.com/styluses/ http://blog.astropad.com/styluses/ We have a 7 days free trial take it for a spin, judge for yourself.
- davesque 12y agoCool. Thanks a lot for hanging out in the thread and answering questions! I love it when posters do that :).
- dalys 12y agoJust a heads up, Chrome on my phone crashes repeatedly when trying to play the video.
- moreati 12y agoGood luck, looks like a nice product. My only request/suggestion for your website is to make it clear which iPads you're compatible with. e.g. does dock vs lightning connector matter? full size vs mini? iOS version?
- gdonelli 12y agoGood point. Any Mac running OS X 10.9+ Any iPad running iOS 8
- zmmmmm 12y agoCan't see any mention of palm rejection and the image they show doesn't clearly show if his hand touches the screen or not while drawing. I'm curious how well the palm rejection problem is solved in these kind of apps? If not it would seem to be a pretty annoying problem.
- gdonelli 12y agoiOS 8 introduces new features that make palm rejection possible. You actually now know the size of area touching the display. Upon this feature, we build our own palm detection. It works quite well. We have a 7 days free trial, take it for a spin.
- zmmmmm 12y agoInteresting info, thanks - I use an nVidia Shield tablet that comes with stylus and has palm rejection features that nVidia included dedicated support for their SoC. Unfortunately it does not work well enough for me and I end up not using the stylus very much. So it is interesting that it's possible (hopefully) to solve it better than that.
- yummybear 12y agoNot more than a month ago, I was looking for a similar products, and here it is. Good job. I have yet to try it, but especially the speed looks promising.
- pokstad 12y agoGreat concept, but I would avoid "Ex-Apple Engineers" and go for "Former Apple Engineers" to avoid the negative wording. Sounds like you broke up with Apple and it's a sour relationship.
- gdonelli 12y agoGood suggestion. We actually still have many friends at Apple and left in great terms.
- michaelbuddy 12y agomeh, I'm aware at how this will perform. Surface pro 1, 2 or 3 is way better.
- washill 12y agoShame, seems like a lot of effort to fit themselves onto a platform that just wasn't made for illustration. If this is what you want out of a tablet there's no reason to get one without a digitizer.
- smrtinsert 12y agoOr buy an 800 touch pc.
- ghostly_s 12y agoYou meant $800, I imagine? How about you get one of those and report back to us how useful they are for professional illustration work.
- MichaelGG 12y agoIs the MS Surface actually bad for that? I thought that was one of the only interesting use cases for it (as it has no real keyboard, is rather heavy, etc.).
- sirn 12y agoI asked my artist friend to try drawing on my Surface Pro 3 a month ago (using Clip Studio Paint). Her impression was that N-trig's preciseness and lacking pressure level make the Surface 3 unsuitable for a serious work, but it's OK for light drawing session or for a rough drawing. The Surface 2 might be another story though.
- archagon 12y agoI feel the main problem with using the iPad as a stylus input device is the latency. There's a very noticeable and annoying lag when drawing anything via a capacitive input device, unlike on a Wacom. Hopefully the rumors are true and Apple adds a digitizer to the next iPad model!
- forrestthewoods 12y agoWould work 100x better with a Surface Pro 2. Unrelated, but I utterly despise any and all video playback setups that don't let me control time. This isn't a VHS tape, let me watch your promotional video how I want plzkthx.
- gdonelli 12y agoWe are Apple's #astroboys, we like one button and no knobs... ...but just for you: http://vimeo.com/astrohq/astropad http://vimeo.com/astrohq/astropad
- graeme 12y agoI'm just beginning to make khan academy style videos. That's where I use a tablet to make basic drawings, and screencast what I do. Is astropad a good fit for this use case? I tried drawing via sketchbook express, but it was hard to keep tools offscreen yet still have enough space to make sketches on the ipad screen. Currently I'm using jot whiteboard + Airserver, which lets me display my drawings to my mac.
- endergen 12y agoLooks awesome #astroboys. ps. I'm the founder of Emotely, where I toyed around with a similar approach but then ended up focusing on game controllers instead. Early concept video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4 Had been toying with doing something exactly like this again recently called interscreen. Made some prototypes of going over USB, it's so fast when you do that, generally it's fast over wifi. Wifi is un-demoable at conferences, which was always an annoying factor for self promotion.
- endergen 12y ago...not going to be continuing with it I don't think, but definitely going to keep check out the app. You have my purchase. :) I wonder if there's a way to combine your tech with Tiltbrush's for a cool VR use case: http://tiltbrush.com http://tiltbrush.com Being able to tilt the device as another axis of control for your virtual drawing plane could be cool. francoislaberge@gmail.com
- thenomad 12y agoLooks very cool! Any chance of it ever moving to Windows, or is it Mac-only forever?
- noahbradley 12y agoI'd love for the iPad to be a great digital creation tool. I really would. But as it stands, it's horrible. It's laggy, lacks pressure sensitivity, and the apps are clunky at best. Here's to hoping there's a push from Apple to improve things. But for the time being Microsoft's Surface line is about a thousand times better for actual creatives.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- cma 12y agoPlus it lacks hover, right? Making tooltips etc. inaccesible when using it for a Mac or PC.
- Galacticus 12y agoTypical stupid user request.
- bornabox 12y agoAstropad has a 7 day tryout. So, I've been using it to pretty great results. I like it. With Wifi it's actually laggy, but with the USB cable, it has been very fast. Pressure sensitivity isn't that important to me - depends on your use-case. Tried it with Photoshop and Illustrator and it works great. Being able to see what you draw is great, far better then a normal Wacom Tablet. So far, it's a great option. A bit on the expensive side, but cheaper then having to buy a Cintiq or a Surface :)
- mronge 12y agoI'm glad you like it! If you can, try using your wifi on the 5ghz band. In some cases that helps a lot
- leppr 12y agoI don't think Apple really cares about that since one of the most important design decisions made to create the iPhone/iPad was dropping stylus support. If they wanted their products to be creation devices we'd notice, they just don't. Now with the way their product line has been going recently they very well could announce an iPad "creative edition" to compete with Wacom but that'd be a huge change of direction.
- bane 12y agoGreat work, this has always seemed like one of those obvious things that we would have seen before. Great job making it work!
- whytry 12y agoWhy is this so hyped? I'm sick of this broken market bullshit. Computing has jumped the shark.
- oenvoyage 12y agoI tried different stylus solutions and iPAD doest NOT differentiate your palm from the pen... (or through software hack) which means you can not rest your hand on the screen (as opposed to WACOM / Galaxy Note/ Surface) And drawing all day long is tiresome. Maybe one can get used to it, I dont :-) Maybe your solution is good I hope.
- stefantalpalaru 12y agoAdd $20 and you can buy a Wacom CTH461 Bamboo Craft Tablet complete with stylus and 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity.
- peterhajas 12y agoI installed this on my iPad and Mac, excited to try out 53 Pencil support. Unfortunately, they don't tell you that it doesn't support 53 Pencil yet until after you start the free trial. I wish I could start over my trial when my stylus is supported.