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!
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.
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.
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 ;)
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 [email protected] and we'll get thing sorted!
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.
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.
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