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Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry for Astropad as they have made such a good product, but to be honest, this doesn't feel like Astropad being sherlocked; I'm pretty sure Apple was experimenting with this from the very first iPad Pro.

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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-s...

I think the more obvious lesson in this (which Astropad appear to have stunningly missed), is that if your product’s role is fixing a (perhaps obvious) deficiency in another product, then you have a significant risk that the other product will improve to the point of making yours obsolete. If your business model can be turn on its head by another product implementing a (perhaps even trivial) feature, then you simply don’t have a very strong business model.

Does anyone have an app that lets me draw on the ipad and show it live on my laptop? Is that what astropad and now Sidecar does?

I resorted to joining Zoom meetings twice and sharing the screen with my ipad session as host and drawing in the Notes App

That's more of the inverse. I think an AirPlay receiver on your Mac might work, but I'm not sure. Sidecar, Duet Display and Astropad let you draw on your iPad as a secondary display for your Mac, using Mac apps.

That's a use case that the app Reflector 3 handles. It's sort of the inverse of Sidecar. Lets your Mac display you iPad, iPhone, or Android device live in OSX over WiFi, by implementing a desktop receiver for the Apple AirPlay and Google Cast protocols.

https://www.airsquirrels.com/reflector

That's a pretty funny/clever hack (took me a minute to figure out you're Zooming with yourself). You can also try AirServer (similar to Reflector). There's a free trial. https://www.airserver.com

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...

Funny name I used to use something called AirParrot by a company called Squirrels

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

> That's a pretty funny/clever hack (took me a minute to figure out you're Zooming with yourself).

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.

I’m using Screen Mirroring by 2kit[0] to stream from my iPhone to a Linux laptop. It makes a MJPEG stream on local network, and I’m using some custom CSS for their website to fix scaling. It has an iPad version, so you may want to test it.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/screen-mirroring-app/id1463795...

QuickTime can do this, or at least it could before Catalina (I’ve not upgraded so can’t be sure). Just plug the iPad in and use the screen recording feature (you don’t have to actually start the recording — the preview is sufficient).

> Just plug the iPad in

HMMMMM well worth considering if other options don’t pan out

Luna Display does exactly that - just mirror your display to your iPad and anything you do on your iPad shows on your Mac display too. Best thing about Luna is it gets you Pencil support on the Mac. People have been ditching Wacom tablets since the iPad has dramatically better (lower) latency.

https://www.imore.com/luna-display

Love my Luna - even with sidecar I still see me using Luna. Hope they survive :(

So sidecar doesn't (yet, at least) fully do everything Luna does? I guess it probably will eventually..

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... :/

Sidecar with mirroring turned on if you want both screens to show the laptop, Airserver with Airplay from the iPad if you want both screens to show the iPad.

> Does anyone have an app that lets me draw on the ipad and show it live on my laptop? Is that what astropad and now Sidecar does?

Astropad does this, yes. https://astropad.com

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