Meet the ex-Apple engineers who turn iPads into Wacom killers

You built the tech - so what's your background?

We met working at Apple in 2006. Giovanni worked on Mac OS X and I worked on QuickTime.

We are engineers but we often feel like artists in a different medium. We have that same drive to create and share our creations with others. Most of all, we want to have creative freedom and building our own product is a way of achieving that.

You've suggested that the most up-to-date styluses aren't the best for Astropad...

The short story is the latest generation from Wacom and Adonit are actually worse than the older versions.

We've used all the styluses out there, and we've concluded that the Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus and Adonit's Jot Touch 4 are the best to use Astropad. They're both built great, use Bluetooth LE and are pressure sensitive.

The most recent have problems with precision, especially when working on an iPad Air2. There's issues with achieving straight lines, and where you put your stylus isn't always where the mark on the screen appears.

Also, Astropad can run on iPad 2, but as that doesn't have Bluetooth LE neither of our preferred styluses will work on that. The HEX3 JaJa will, however.

Your site says: 'Apps have become less powerful and pro creative tools under-developed'? Have they? What about Procreate?

We love Procreate! Procreate really is a great app and we want to see more like it. We want to see less freemium games, social apps, etc. and more creative tools being built for these mobile devices.

And yet... after talking to numerous professionals that use iPads, they all mentioned starting their creative process on an iPad and then finishing it on their Mac.

This requires fumbling with cloud shared documents or emailing yourself a file. If you want to go from your Mac back to the iPad it is even more frustrating (and often not possible at all).

Instead we wanted to create a different workflow. Your Mac and iPad are connected in one workspace and it's easy to go between the two. Now you have two ways of interacting with your creative works and you use the tool that is best for the task.

The way we've connected your workspace eliminates the friction that other tools have when going between Mac and iPad.

What stage is Astropad at?

We are a bootstrapped company of two, just releasing our first product. These are exciting times and we can't wait to see what people create with Astropad.

You can try a free version of Astropad (bottom of the page), or buy it for $49.99 right now.

Words: Matt Ronge

Matt was working on Apple's QuickTime in 2007 when he met Giovanni. Today they, "have ambitious plans for Astropad."

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