Wired in, the latency is rock solid at three to six milliseconds. These gestures allow you to set one, two, and three-finger taps (and holds) to various useful shortcuts like Undo, Redo, Eraser, and “Hover”-an extremely useful feature that lets you move the mouse around with your pencil without activating the click at the same time.īoth versions use the same intuitive user-friendly UI with useful shortcuts that change based on your app, and both use the same tech to connect over WiFi or wired in over USB. Losing Magic Gestures is particularly painful because they’re so useful. The bad news is that you’ll have to subscribe to Astropad Studio to get most of these benefits.Īstropad Standard lacks pressure curve customization, support for unlimited shortcut sets, “Magic Gestures,” on-screen keyboard, and external keyboard support. The good news is that Astropad includes a ton of additional gestures, unlimited shortcut sets that can be customized by app, the ability to create custom pressure curves, and much much more, all incredibly useful and user-friendly. This is very much a “good news, bad news” situation. You can pick up Astropad Standard for a one-time fee of $30, or Astropad Studio (which is what we were testing) for $80 per year or $12 per month. As of March, you can also download the public beta of Astropad for Windows, code-named Project Blue, which makes this our first cross-platform option. There is no hardware dongle necessary: just download the Astropad app on the Mac and on your iPad, and you can connect over WiFi or over a USB cable. There’s Luna Display, which we’ll talk about in a second, and the company’s namesake app Astropad.Īstropad works just like Sidecar.
Not supported on older iPads and Mac computersĪstropad is the maker of two of today’s third-party alternatives.
No pen pressure or other nice-to-have drawing features.Poorly optimized multi-touch gestures for Undo and Redo.It’s free (if you own compatible hardware).Can be used to mirror or as a secondary display.No setup required: included in MacOS and iPadOS.It’s just limited by Apple, for Apple, and that’s going to be a pain if you really want to customize your photo editing experience with additional shortcuts, advanced multi-touch gestures, or other useful features like pen pressure curves. In fact, of the options I tested, it’s the most stable over wireless. After all, it is free, and since it’s a part of Apple’s walled garden it performs flawlessly whether you’re plugged in or connecting over WiFi.
If these things aren’t deal-breakers, Sidecar is admittedly a pretty sweet deal. True, the iPadOS text editing gestures for undo and redo aren’t limited to text, but they’re not well suited for photo editing: both are three-finger swiping gestures, so when I tried to use them in Photoshop, I ended up sending my canvas off-screen by accident at least 50 percent of the time. The shortcut keys on the sidebar can’t be modified, there is no control over pen pressure curves, you can’t program your own shortcuts, and there are only a few basic gestures for pinch, swipe, and zoom. You can find a full breakdown of compatible hardware here.įinally, while Apple did nail the basics with Sidecar, as you might expect, they locked it down pretty tightly after that. You also need an iPad Pro, a third-generation iPad Air, a fifth-generation iPad Mini, or a regular iPad that’s six-generation or later. You need a MacBook Pro released in 2016 or newer, a MacBook Air released in 2018 or newer, or an iMac released in late 2015 or newer. Secondly, you need a relatively new iPad and a relatively new Mac in order to make it work… something I found out the hard way when I wanted to try Sidecar on my mid-2015 Retina MacBook Pro. Firstly, if you’re a Windows user, Sidecar is out by default - the feature is only available on Mac.
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