Astropad – Transform your iPad into a professional graphics tablet | Hacker News Reader

Astropad – Transform your iPad into a professional graphics tablet

astropad.com

177 pointsopusdie67 comments

I 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!

Did you see the finger crossed here:

http://astropad.com/assets/img/pens.jpg

Yes! It made me smile. :)

I'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.

Plus it lacks hover, right? Making tooltips etc. inaccesible when using it for a Mac or PC.

Astropad 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 :)

I'm glad you like it!

If you can, try using your wifi on the 5ghz band. In some cases that helps a lot

I 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.

I'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).

Technically, 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.

Yeah, 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.)

I was messing around with this the other day and I had a video playing on my computer. It showed up on the iPad pixelated like when tv censors nudity, pointer tracking seemed pretty fluid even with that playing.

What would be nice is a direct connection between the iPad and computer instead of wifi. My work network is a hassle to log into so I don't event do it most of the time. If I need to look up something on the iPad, i pull out my cell phone hotspot.

They claim sub 1ms response times when connect d directly via USB.

Pixelation is expected and by design. We are optimized for displaying high quality still images.

If a large change occurs on your Mac screen and we are unable to keep up, we show pixelated content. This is a signal that we don't have the full screen in yet, and that the screen image is loading. Astropad is honest, when the image is clear, you are assured what you see is the actual content, artifact free.

Sending high image quality over WiFi is really challenging. Ever wonder why we don't have wireless TVs? or Wireless computer displays? It's really really hard to do.

Well... we do have wireless TVs. They started that way.

http://www.whdi.org/

I'm not sure what sense you mean "don't have" or "wireless". So first of all, props to ghostly_s, because in the '30's when serious TV experimentation started a lot of the tests were radio-wave based.

I have a Wacom. Haven't used it for a while now but used to some years ago. The way I got used to drawing while looking at the monitor was that when I first got it, I spent a few days drawing only simple shapes like circles and boxes as well as trying to lift the pen and pick some other spot on the screen that I wanted to draw the next shape at. It was very hard in the beginning but got much easier fast.

Perhaps off-topic, but you might want to check out the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."

One of the things it teaches, if you're interested, is how to draw without looking at the page. It's incredibly useful if you're ever drawing from life, and will probably lessen the weirdness of using a tablet.

I 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?

It mostly depends on what stylus you use. Here are the recommended ones: http://blog.astropad.com/styluses/

We have a 7 days free trial take it for a spin, judge for yourself.

Cool. Thanks a lot for hanging out in the thread and answering questions! I love it when posters do that :).

Great 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.

Good suggestion. We actually still have many friends at Apple and left in great terms.

Can'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.

iOS 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.

Interesting 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.

Looks 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

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.

...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

Being able to tilt the device as another axis of control for your virtual drawing plane could be cool.

francoislaberge@gmail.com

I'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.

I 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.

Great work, this has always seemed like one of those obvious things that we would have seen before. Great job making it work!

I 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.

Did it say which are supported?

Hey Peter!

Sorry about that, we had to pull Pencil support at the last minute due to bugs.

The trial only records days actually used, so if you resume when we have Pencil support you'll still have time left.

Good 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?

Good point.

Any Mac running OS X 10.9+

Any iPad running iOS 8

Would 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.

We are Apple's #astroboys, we like one button and no knobs...

...but just for you: http://vimeo.com/astrohq/astropad

Looks very cool!

Any chance of it ever moving to Windows, or is it Mac-only forever?

Not 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.

Any information on the input latency?

In the demo video it seems significant and I think I'd find it very distracting.

Take it for a spin, we have a 7 days free trial.

Maybe have a video showing someone drawing a fast zig-zag scribble; it would answer the latency question implicitly. Ditto for palm rejection.

Input: 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

Just a heads up, Chrome on my phone crashes repeatedly when trying to play the video.

Awesome app. I was testing it and I highly recommend it!

Or buy an 800 touch pc.

You meant $800, I imagine? How about you get one of those and report back to us how useful they are for professional illustration work.

Is 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.).

I 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.

Add $20 and you can buy a Wacom CTH461 Bamboo Craft Tablet complete with stylus and 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity.

$50, though? You can buy an actual graphics tablet for that much.

Yes 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-...

Astropad Is An App That Pretty Much Replaces Graphics Tablets http://gizmodo.com/astropad-is-an-app-that-pretty-much-repla...

Just 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.

That is true, but it is not very intuitive and people still buy Cintiq because the direct manipulation is a really experience.

What 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.

It 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.

There's no way this compares to a Cintiq.

Cintiq has far higher accuracy compared to the Astropad and Cintiq also has 2048+ levels of pressure sensitivity.

Also, input lag with actual tablets/Cintiqs will be far less than the Astropad.

For casual sketching/scribbling, the Astropad may be OK but for professional level work, nothing comes close to Wacom-powered tablets (and, unfortunately, won't anytime soon due to Wacom's patents).

It doesn't have to be better than a Cintiq, it just has to be closer than an equivalent dedicated graphics tablet at the same price point. I think it's a valid comparison.

Except this doesn't come close to any dedicated graphics tablet, let alone one of the most high-end tablets you can get like a Cintiq so the comparison is really bad.

All real graphics tablets, even ones in the <$100 range, have pressure sensitivity unlike the Astropad and the accuracy is far higher with real tablets.

You're conflating a lot of things here.

* Astropad does have pressure sensitivity via the supported pens. * Astropad does provide a visible screen like a cintiq at a much lower cost.

How can you clame it "doesn't come close to a desicated graphics tablet" when you obviously haven't tried it in the preferred setup of iPad + pressure sensitive pen? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying ita speculation at this point.

There are styluses for the iPad with 2048 levels of pressure, the Cintiq still does have better accuracy but the iPad tech is getting better all the time.

Alot of pro artists are using Astropad now, in fact we even had a Pixar animator use and loved it!

PS: We are especially excited for the rumored iPad Pro and stylus

I'm a pro artist. Astropad has less perceived input lag than the last time I tried a friend's Cintiq.

It's not going to replace my Intuos tablets, mostly due to power consumption issues, but it is a killer app for one use case: I can now draw on a crowded airplane. I do not mean sketching; I have worked on pages of my comic on the plane with my iPad hooked to my Air. The only real problem I had is that my usual Illustrator palette setup wouldn't fit on the smaller screen.

But I can sit there in a single seat, with my Air on my lap, and my iPad on top of that, and draw.

(Disclaimer: I beta-tested it.)

Well the software is $50. You'd also have to add a stylus which costs another $30-50 (the one they recommend by Wacom is $50) which brings total cost to ~$100.

At that price you might as well get a Wacom tablet which comes with a stylus in the box.

meh, I'm aware at how this will perform. Surface pro 1, 2 or 3 is way better.

Shame, 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com