Working at a café, I often felt one step away from the folks who brought in iMacs with external keyboards and mice - when your electronics and wires are taking up more of the table than your food or beverages, you've basically created a mini-office for yourself. Duet Display, despite its technical achievements, always felt clunky because you had to plug your iPad into your Mac to make it work. As such, Luna owners will instead be able to launch one of those programs and use all of their multitouch tricks, shortcuts, and tools with an external display canvas, rather than a mirrored one. While the Luna app doesn't have all of Astropad's many touch features built in, it still offers a fair amount of multitouch support for interacting with macOS: You can tap to select or tap and drag to resize windows two-finger drag to scroll through windows and two-finger pinch or spread to zoom.Īnd when the Luna module officially launches next May, Astropad and Astropad Studio will both get software updates to enable external display support. Astropad Studio's Magic Gestures took that one step further, allowing users to build custom shortcuts based on finger input and pencil interaction. macOS isn't designed to be touch-sensitive, to be sure, but there's something to be said about being able to quickly select regions or pinch to zoom on a Photoshop canvas. When Astropad first launched in 2015, it blew me away in large part because of its cohesive touch and Pencil support. Luna gives you a touch-sensitive Mac screen The only time I really saw significant lag or screen degradation was when I brought my iPad Pro across the apartment to continue working in the living room - and even then, the screen would restore to pixel-perfect quality at rest. When you're moving windows or typing text, you'll get a momentary pop of pixelation as Luna redraws the screen, but it's often almost invisible in everyday use. HiDPI mode looks gorgeous: When the machines are at rest, you can't tell the difference between the Mac's native screen and the iPad Pro's simulated external display. The latter option can be a little small for people with poor eyesight, but it's an amazing alternative to have while on the road, especially if you need more space than a laptop screen can provide. On a 10.5-inch iPad Pro, that means the option of having 1112x834 HiDPI (2x) resolution, or using the iPad's full pixel grid to run a 2224x1668 monitor. Luna's HiDPI 2x mode (left) and 1x 'giant screen' mode (right)

Astropad studio account