Luna Display

These guys are fantastic; they really know good design! I guess that’s what you can expect from ex-Apple employees. The user interface & user experience is top-notch. I just tried my Luna out and it works great! Super responsive with very clear Retina graphics. I guess it helps that I have a good WiFi connection. It’s nice that the Luna app comes with a software tool to let you track the product performance in real time (latency, etc). Note that Luna on your iPad doesn’t work with pressure-sensitive styluses unless you also get the AstroPad product, which I already had. But when you combine Luna with AstroPad you can use the pressure-sensitive feature on your stylus and its an amazing experience! In that case, you open the AstroPad app on your devices rather than the Luna app. But thanks to the Luna app, with that setup you can continue to use your iPad as a second display. This really is the ultimate setup. It’s a great way to take your Mac and your iPad and combine them to have a touch-enabled drawing pad that works with Apple Pencil. And much cheaper than buying a Wacom drawing pad or a second monitor with touch/draw capability.

I have only started using Luna Display for less than an hour, and I can already say that it’s the best second display app by far (over Duet Display I have used for more than a year). The quality of the screen is amazing especially for the Retina resolution. It’s so, so crisp 🤤. Text and photos look amazing on Luna Display. When content changes quickly, Luna chooses to maintain frame rate instead of the rendering quality, so you may see coarse frames for a brief moment, and that’s a fine approach Astro took. Color accuracy is insane. Photos on Luna look indistinguishable from photos on native iPad when looking at them side by side (with Slide-Over). I can see why artists absolutely love Luna Display for this. One big plus for Luna Display is that you can switch apps on iPad from Luna Display to another app, and then back to Luna Display again, and it wouldn’t lose the connection. I do this often as a developer. This is something that, so far, only Luna Display can deliver and such continuity feels so amazing. EDIT: this is actually not true. Luna will lose connection once iOS puts in in the background. However, this is not what Luna advertises. MORE EDIT: Luna Display almost always needs a cable to work well for me. This can be a drawback for many, but not for me personally, so I still enjoy Luna immensely. Thank you Astro HQ. I am absolutely in love with Luna Display ❤️.

UPDATE: I still love my Luna Display. The only issue that I have had is that after using it for several hours, the display gets laggy (I use this over WiFi). At that point I have to disconnect, close the apps on both sides and restart to get it to run smoothly again. I got my Luna Display a couple of days ago and I already can’t imagine being without it. I love always having a second screen and being able to walk away from my computer without walking away from my computer monitor. Setup is incredibly easy and only took a few seconds. It has been 100% reliable for me using a 10.5” iPad Pro and a 2017 MacBook Pro. I would recommend this to everyone!

This is definitely better than duet. It supports retina, has a reasonable frame rate, and supports touch gestures. I love the Astropad app and use it frequently. I have three main complaints: 1) Despite what their webpage says, you cannot practically use this over WiFi. The frame rate is around 2 FPS and it takes a couple of seconds to send those frames over. The other two items in this list are when using wired mode only. 2) Even in wired mode, there’s still quite a bit of latency. It’s about a quarter of a second, which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s definitely noticeable when scrolling, typing, and moving windows around. Having retina on or off did not seem to affect this. 3. To maintain frame rate, the screen drops resolution. Sounds reasonable, however their method of downscaling ends up crushing text, making anything in the moving area (like a webpage) is completely unreadable until you stop moving and it has a chance to catch up. This is a minor issue, however, and doesn’t really mess up usability. I’d rather the app downscale than do what duet does and drop most of the frames. This definitely shows promise, and if duet could fix the latency issue over wired and adjust their downsampling algorithm to avoid messing up text I’d bump them up to a 5 star. Hardware used: 2012 MacBook Pro (with discrete GT 650M and quad core i7) and an iPad Pro 10.5 inch

So, first off I love the app. So my review is simply another way to reach out to the developers, aside from the email and messaging I’ve done. Some suggestions, personal wish lists for future updates: - Cellular support. That would be just great if I can access my stuff from outside my house. - Connection while in background. The app sometimes closes, sometimes doesn’t. I wish it wouldn’t close, at least when I’m switching back and forth between apps. Sometimes if I’m out of it for a long time, it glitches and doesn’t let me in, resulting in me resetting the app, or worse, resetting my Mac mini (not cool, I use the app as an exclusive display). Aside from these two things, the app is a solid 5 and more. I had Duet, but was limited due to it’s need for a wired connection. I’ve only commented on 1 other app over the years, this one is worthy of giving kudos and anyone who is on the fence of spending the money to buy it, it’s worth it and will exceed your expectations. It’s given me the ability to exclusively use my iPad for everything without the need to lug around a laptop any longer.