Hacker News Reader

Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: what are some practical use cases for this? I use my Macbook and iPad but always exclusively for different purposes and never both at the same time.

What are some potential things that this can unlock? I might well try it but just can't think of a practical use case for me.

View on HN

The iPad is a pretty good art device. At least when it comes to drawing. For final editing touches, I prefer using a desktop.

Being able to treat my iPad and MacBook as one seamless device for art work sounds great.

3D artists, for example, pretty much have to do their 3D modeling work on a desktop. But the iPad is a better device for drawing 2d textures. If I could drag and drop textures onto 3D projects, that’d be nice. Or even just drawing layers on my iPad and dragging them into a desktop photoshop project or something.

Outside of art, it seems much less useful though.

I usually do my email and messaging on the iPad now with my Mac’s keyboard and mouse. I can do that while I’m watching something full screen on the mac.

Also it’s really useful when you’re writing up documentation. I draw up draft diagrams in GoodNotes with Apple Pencil and you can just drag them straight across the screens into the target document!

It’s pretty remarkable. I think people will find use cases for it as time goes on because it’s so new it’s not well understood yet.

I like it though. A lot.

Edit: also experimenting with sharing two screens at once on zoom. One with presentation (iPad) and one with code/IDE on it (mac)

It's a portable second screen that is thin, has a 10+ hour battery life, can open documents + websites. It's the dream!

You can code on your mac, while reading documentation / keeping an eye on your email on the iPad propped up next to you from any café in the world.

But can you really context switch between programming and a totally unrelated email without destroying your code quality? I mean this as a genuine question because I work single screen and I typically also need headphones to get in the zone.

With practice yes. I still manage to write decent code while being hammered on slack constantly.

This sounds like a use case better suited to Sidecar to use the iPad as an external display. I’m not sure I see how it benefits very much from the additional Universal Control features, but having never used it I’m quite open to being wrong.

Sidecar is basically AirPlay mirroring, with the lag and quality degradation that entails.

I usually connect to Google Meet calls using my iPad, so I can carry it around if I need to. If I'm working on my computer, the iPad is placed a bit out of reach to make the camera angle work a bit better.

Universal Control means I can now control my mic and hang up using my mouse, instead of having to awkwardly reach to the screen. It's a stupid and basic use case, but hey, it works!

There's no need to have this enable complex new workflows. Sometimes it's about those simple things.

If you're into the grind that comes with being an app developer, this makes testing your apps on real devices much easier.

You can also connect multiple Macs, no iPad needed. I’ve an iMac in my office and I bring my MacBook Pro to lectures, the lab or meetings. I’ll often have both machines on my desk and will need to move some files from one machine to another, usually via Airdrop or some Cloud service.

This just removes some of that friction.

I was peer-reviewing some papers yesterday, which I do by annotating PDFs on my iPad with the Pencil. After I finish annotating, I write the review on my laptop. While writing, I moved my cursor over to the iPad to select a sentence I wanted to quote, copied it, and pasted it into my review. Pretty cool.

> annotating PDFs on my iPad with the Pencil

How do you do the annotation? The markup tool or something else?

Documents by Readdle for me, but many people use Good Notes.

I used to use Notability but recently switched to Good Notes. iCloud sync would cause Notability to freeze and the recent Notability subscription drama made Good Notes cheap to switch.

Some apps only work on one platform (eg. instagram), and this makes using them much simpler.

But there shouldn’t be any restrictions for apps to run on only one device in the first place.

Drag and drop files between devices is handy when you quickly need to move media files from one to the other.

connect Ipad->hdmi dongle->hdmi grabber dongle->mac now you have video source device that looks like webcam. This feature makes the setup easier to control

You could also use OBS Virtual Camera feature[0] to capture your desktop as a webcam instead of the iPad.

[0]: https://obsproject.com/

Files drag n drop

Reply on news.ycombinator.com