Astropad Studio

Draw on your Mac with an iPad Pro

Astropad is an app that links your iPad and Mac together: the iPad displays whatever program you’re running on your Mac, and whatever you draw with a stylus on your iPad appears on your Mac.

Last year’s Astropad Standard app enabled you to do this with a variety of iPad models and any stylus you owned. Studio, however, works only with iPad Pro and Apple’s Pencil. Another important difference is that Standard costs a one-off payment of $29.99, but Studio is only available through a monthly or annual subscription, managed through an online account. It’s clear that Studio is a professional solution, aimed at working artists and designers who expect to be drawing for hours every day.

Setting everything up is a chore, simply because of the number of components you’re working with. First, create your Astropad Studio account and set up your subscription. Next, download and install the Astropad app on your Mac and the Astropad Studio app on your iPad Pro. Now run both apps: as long as your Mac and your tablet are on the same network, they’ll recognize each other and your Mac screen will be reproduced on your iPad Pro. Of course, all this only needs to be done once.

The combination works well in practice. If you link your iPad and Mac with your iPad charging cable, the connection between the two screens feels instantaneous. If you decouple the iPad and link through Wi-Fi instead, you might notice a lag between the Mac screen changing and the iPad screen updating, depending on the speed of your wireless network. We were never excessively bothered by the time lag, though.

The exclusive use of iPad Pro and Pencil means that Astropad Studio has several extra features compared with Standard. For example, Studio’s Magic Gestures feature enables you to combine finger tap and Pencil gestures to trigger responses, including simulating a right-click or switching between tools.

the bottom line. State of the art, but you might prefer the Standard edition’s pricing if you’re a more casual sketcher.

Turn your iPad Pro into a graphics tablet with Astropad, which enables you to draw directly into Mac software such as Photoshop.

You can combine finger touches with Pencil movement to trigger shortcuts such as simulating a right-click.