Issue 27  February 20th 2015

I want to take a little detour from the usual introduction to our newsletter and talk about a new product that launched earlier this week. We don't typically have a space for this kind of thing, but a fellow Mac and iOS developer reached out to me last week asking if I'd be interested in showing off their new product to our readers. After playing with it a bit I think it's definitely something worth talking about.

It's called Astropad and it is an awesome new app that allows you to use your iPad as a drawing tablet for your Mac. I love the execution of this tool. You install an app from the App Store on your iPad and another on your Mac, launch both of them and you're all set. It's a zero-configuration setup at its best.

What's great about Astropad is that it isn't tied to any one app. It's essentially a window into your Mac from your iPad, but with gestures enabled that gear it towards image editing. Zooming via two finger pinch works as expected as does panning around an image. It's really quite cool. I opened up one of my images in Photoshop to make a few edits and where I found Astropad really shined was in making adjustments to layer masks and the like.

Astropad is available now at astropad.com, go check it out!