mronge

Here's a list of some of my favorite books dealing with crisis:

- In Thin Air - About a mountaineering expedition that turned into disaster on Mount Everest.

- Black Hawk Down - The story of hundreds of US special forces trapped in Mogadishu overnight after a mission went completely sideways

- Leadership in Turbulent Times - About different US presidents leading through crisis and how there is no one singular type of leadership

- The Hard Thing about Hard Things - Leading a startup on the verge of failure to an eventual massive acquisition

- The Sledge Patrol - How a small group, outgunned and out manned fought back Nazi invaders in Greenland

Also check out Luna Display if you want to use another Mac as a display: https://astropad.com/product/lunadisplay/

There is also the option to use an iPad as a drawing tablet now. We've been doing this for a few years with Astropad. https://www.astropad.com

Astropad connects your iPad to your Mac and so it acts like a Cintiq. We have Windows support in private beta right now and we'll be launching it publicly next year.

This is compelling for a lot of people because:

1. The Apple Pencil is fantastic

2. You get a general purpose iPad as well!

And it is about the same price as a pen tablet with way more flexibility.

The vast majority of it has been software work, but we have developed a new model of Luna Display that supports HDMI specifically for the Windows market.

The USB-C dongle we didn't have to change and that will work as is on Windows.

Hi HN! I'm excited to share Luna Display for Windows, a new hardware dongle that turns the iPad into a wired or wireless display for the PC! We are long-time Mac developers who transitioned to Windows over the past 1.5 after being sherlocked by Apple (long story..)

So why hardware? There are no official APIs available on Mac or Windows for creating a virtual display. We have competitors that use low-level drivers to create a virtual display, but that is prone to subtle bugs. For example, virtual displays on Windows require reimplementing the GPU stack, which is extremely complex. We went with hardware because it's the only way to provide absolute reliability and compatibility across all PC programs. Luna Display is indistinguishable from a regular monitor to Windows.

Luna Display started as Mac/iOS apps written almost entirely in Objective-C. To go cross-platform, we selected Rust as our language of choice, and we've been incredibly happy with it. Our apps are now mostly Rust, with glue layers in C# on Windows, and Objective-C on iPadOS for the UI code.

Another interesting thing about our tech stack is that it contains a custom video compression algorithm and network protocol that we built for very low latency. The network protocol is built in Rust and sits on top of UDP and has a custom congestion control system. Our video compressor is C/C++ and a mix of assembly for max performance.

If you're interested, we'd love to have you back us on Kickstarter! I'm also happy to answer any questions about hardware, Windows, Rust, getting sherlocked, you name it. :)

PS: Luna Display also works with Mac if that's your jam!

Yes! We built that into Luna Display: https://shop.astropad.com/pages/meet-mac-to-mac-mode

We are also launching a Kickstarter at the end of the month to add Windows support to Luna.

I've been using the beta for a while and I'm happy to see it land here on HN. The two things I love most about Mimestream are:

1. It's wicked fast (seriously) 2. It has Gmail style shortcuts

The only thing I wish it had was a generic IMAP support for some of my other accounts. Either way I've been liking it!

Upgrades are still a good option but I didn't discuss them in the article because they aren't supported on the App Store.

One caveat with upgrades is it's difficult to maintain many version of the same app. Now with frequent hardware and OS upgrades (yearly!) it's even more expensive than ever to maintain many versions.

Thanks for buying Luna! :)

We've never taken features away and put them behind a subscription paywall, and we never intend to! So don't worry about that!

Also hardware allows us to have the upgrade pricing model you described. If we make a hardware device that's even better than the Luna you have now, you can choose to upgrade! Escaping the App Store model has been a really refreshing part of making hardware.

It’s a skill you can train just like any other.

We all sucked at programming in the beginning too! Just keep at it and your marketing chops will improve.

Also for Windows users, we have Luna Display for Windows coming later this year! Sign up to our waitlist if you're interested: https://astropad.com/windows

I'm happy to report that we haven't had to lay anyone off and we don't plan on it!

We found that there is still a market for our products, Luna Display[0] and Astropad[1]. Apple's Sidecar has limited features and doesn't support older devices.

For the past year, we've been rewriting our code base in Rust and we are nearing completion (you can read about why we chose Rust[2]) Our codebase previously was Objective-C/C and this kept us tied to the Mac platform.

Now with a solid Rust core we will be bringing both Astropad and Luna Display to the Windows ecosystem, a market that is 10x bigger! We are launching for Windows later this year and if you're interested I encourage you to get on our wait list: https://astropad.com/windows/

We also have a slew of new remote work products in development (we've been a remote team since 2013), but I'm not ready to share details yet ;)

- [0] https://www.lunadisplay.com

- [1] https://www.astropad.com

- [2] https://astropad.com/why-rust/

- [3] https://astropad.com/windows/

Hi! Luna team here.

I'm really sorry to hear you had a poor experience with Luna Display. We do support both the iPad keyboard and Mini DisplayPort so I'd be happy to try to get this figured out for you.

You can contact me directly matt@astropad.com and we'll get thing sorted!

That's true but they may be able to cancel the contract based on a force majeure clause because of the global pandemic.

We build the computer accessory Luna Display[0] which turns your iPad or extra Mac into a second display - particularly useful for working from home!

We were originally pure software people, so it's been fun and challenging to explore the hardware space. I've found it to be a lot like software development but with much much longer "compile times" aka manufacturing.

[0] - https://lunadisplay.com

I also found a video slideshow that shows a lot more of the interior

https://youtu.be/ZFst3PVWErw

That's a great question. Our UI is pretty light on the desktop side and most of the complex UI is on the iPad which we don't have to rewrite (yet). So we will most likely use the native UI APIs and use Rust's excellent FFI support.

C++ would have been a safe choice, but then well... we'd be stuck using C++. We still do use C++, a lot of our video codec is in C/C++ but parts outside of that will be Rust.

Here's another great book that touches on this subject: https://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Deadly-Obsession-Amazon/dp/...

The main story about explorer Percy Fawcett is also incredible

Astro HQ | Firmware Engineer | Minneapolis, MN | ONSITE | Full-time

We are Astro HQ and we build hardware and software tools that unlock creativity and productivity. Our tools are in use by tens of thousands of creative pros and some of the largest animation studios in the world.

Our latest product is Luna Display – The first and only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless second display. We are looking for a talented firmware engineer to join our team working on display technologies. You will be responsible for firmware development for devices using computer display protocols like DisplayPort, HDMI or DVI.

If that sounds interesting to you, come join our small, but rapidly growing team!

Apply and learn more at: https://blog.astropad.com/firmware-engineer/

Also check out Astropad https://www.astropad.com which turns the iPad into a Wacom like graphics tablet.

Couple that with a drawing app and it works great

Astropad | Codec Software Engineer | Minneapolis,MN | REMOTE

At Astro HQ we make Astropad, software that turns the iPad into a high-end drawing tablet for the computer. We replace existing dedicated, hardware drawing tablets that are prohibitively expensive, costing thousands of dollars. Astropad is used by creatives of all types, from hobbyists to high-end professionals working on major motion pictures.

To make Astropad possible we had to create our own network protocol and low-latency video codec we call Liquid. We are just getting started with Liquid and we need engineers to help us work on this next generation high quality, low-latency video technology.

We are looking for someone with an interest in low level programming (C, SIMD), graphics, GPU programming and compression to work on our cutting edge Liquid tech. We are also a fully remote company with a small office in Minneapolis, MN. If this sounds interesting to you, e-mail: jobs@astro-hq.com

Astro HQ | http://www.astro-hq.com | Fulltime | REMOTE or Minneapolis, MN

At Astro HQ we make Astropad, software that turns the iPad into a high-end drawing tablet for the computer. We replace existing dedicated, hardware drawing tablets that are prohibitively expensive, costing thousands of dollars. Astropad is used by creatives of all types, from hobbyists to high-end professionals working on major motion pictures.

To make Astropad possible we had to create our own network protocol and low-latency video codec we call Liquid. We are just getting started with Liquid and we need engineers to help us work on this next generation high quality, low-latency video technology.

We are looking for someone with an interest in low level programming (C, SIMD), graphics, GPU programming and compression to work on our cutting edge Liquid tech. We are also a fully remote company with a small office in Minneapolis, MN. If this sounds interesting to you, e-mail: jobs@astro-hq.com

Another +1 on Minneapolis. A growing tech scene, lots of outdoor activities, low unemployment (2.5%!) and very affordable.

Been here 5 years now, and it's the best place I've lived

I've been using DejaLu for my Gmail the past couple weeks and it's FAST!

Going back to Mail.app is now painful. The sync speed and search are far superior in DejaLu.

I'm really excited to see where this app goes.

How does this compare to what Elon Musk says about solar power? In this presentation he shows that a reasonable amount of area could power the entire US (if we used roof tops etc for solar panels).

Is that not feasible?

https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187

The FBI Hostage Rescue Team is an amazing group of professionals, the premier hostage rescue team in the US. They are the civilian equivalent of Delta Force as they can't normally operate in the US. Historically Delta and the FBI HRT even do hostage training together.

Pretty amazing how highly trained these people are

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.

I'm glad you like it!

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

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

We'll have to follow up with a tech blog post where we go into more details.