Of all the things Apple announced, Sidecar is one of the most exciting ones, for me. Can anyone running developer betas of iPadOS and Catalina tell me how big the latency is? Is it good for drawing? Is there any pixelisation when you move things around? Compression artifacts? Thanks!
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Can anyone test Sidecar and tell me a few things?
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I had virtually no latency and no artifacts at all when testing. I was surprised how well it worked wirelessly.
It's actually pretty impressive! It's much smoother than I expected! I'm using it as I type this, on my iPad Pro 9.7" connected to my MacBook Pro 2018. It's so low-latency I can honestly see myself using this feature quite a lot!
Amazing. Have you tested the Pencil?
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Awesome! Same question - have you tried the Pencil and drawing/writing?
Yep, I was curious about that as well so I just tested it out! It seems like it works as well as you'd expect it to natively, which is to say, it responds almost instantly, and drawing has practically zero lag! It's also really nice to be able to use the Pencil as essentially a mouse, complete with "double click" support
Awesome. You really put a smile on my face. Can’t wait for the Public Beta!
Posted elsewhere but copied/pasted here for further discussion...
I have a question about SideCar, maybe someone can help, maybe they cant, maybe it is too early to know...
I have a headless Mac Mini that we use as a pseudo server/home theater PC/home automation PC for the home. Currently I do anything I need to do to that Mini through my MBP using screen sharing. Both devices are older, so I understand I may need to upgrade the Mini before my proposed setup may (or may not) work. I would like to eliminate the older MBP, its still in good shape, sell it; I would like to get a nice iPad pro and use it in place of the MBP to control my headless, peripheral less mac mini. Will SideCar allow this? Or will I need to go with something like the Duet Display? For the limited amount of personal computing we do at home, it doesn't make sense to have two Mac's at this point in time. An iPad would be perfect for what we do on a day to day basis but I still need to access the Mini from time to time.
I have a question about SideCar, maybe someone can help, maybe they cant, maybe it is too early to know...
I have a headless Mac Mini that we use as a pseudo server/home theater PC/home automation PC for the home. Currently I do anything I need to do to that Mini through my MBP using screen sharing. Both devices are older, so I understand I may need to upgrade the Mini before my proposed setup may (or may not) work. I would like to eliminate the older MBP, its still in good shape, sell it; I would like to get a nice iPad pro and use it in place of the MBP to control my headless, peripheral less mac mini. Will SideCar allow this? Or will I need to go with something like the Duet Display? For the limited amount of personal computing we do at home, it doesn't make sense to have two Mac's at this point in time. An iPad would be perfect for what we do on a day to day basis but I still need to access the Mini from time to time.
This is my exact setup and I am insanely stoked to hear its working well. I’m shocked this isn’t getting more buzz. I feel like there must be a decent segment that owns an iPad and Mac, and Apple basically just gave us all free Cintiques!
I don’t think the person who said there’s no latency really knows what they are talking about. The latency is a bit better than Astropad but it’s not even close to native apps. I wouldn’t count on your iPad turning into a Cintiq replacement anytime soon.
I actually think this technology is basically airplay on iPad. It remember it said “airplay display” in one of the settings windows.
I actually think this technology is basically airplay on iPad. It remember it said “airplay display” in one of the settings windows.
work. at least in all adobe apps. but I assume macos just pretends it's a Wacom tablet attached so it should work everywhere.
Well of course it's not going to be 1:1 on par with native, I was just impressed by how "native-like" it felt to me, having previously used Duet, and coming in with fairly neutral expectations, I was very pleasantly surprised
And of course this was over USB, I just tried a WiFi Sidecar connection and although as expected, there's slightly more latency and less overall responsiveness, it honestly is not nearly as much of a reduction as I had anticipated
Also yeah in regards to the latency with drawing on the Pencil, I definitely am not an expert in that area, I hardly ever use my Pencil for drawing
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As far as I can tell, for now, it only supports mouse emulation input via Pencil.
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I'd say it probably definitely does, it behaves identically to previous Hackintoshes I've owned with touchscreens, that just emulate a Wacom tablet device for touch events
It seems 2016 MB and MBP, 2015 iMac, 2018 MB Air, 2018 Mac Mini and Mac Pro are lowest requirements for Sidecar. It is probably because of hardware HEVC encoding/decoding (Skylake does 8bit hardware encode/decode).
My MBP 2016 barely made the cut and my 2014 iMac 5K is not supported, sadly.
My MBP 2016 barely made the cut and my 2014 iMac 5K is not supported, sadly.
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Oh and btw you're correct, I noticed that too, about the AirPlay display, I would bet that it's most likely a very heavily modified and optimized version of just the base AirPlay display functionality, which makes sense, and those modifications and optimizations are what really make the difference here
(uh Zeke Teenweed is my iPad, for reference hahah)
I think we all understood each other here - we were talking about latency compared to Astropad and Duet.... I found even Astropad adequate, for most work, like sculpting in Zbrush.
Of course, it's not going to be like 9ms Apple Pencil running on a 120Hz screen - but it will be usable if it's better than Astropad (which is also usable, but has pixelization and some other issues - for example, it uses a local network for wireless, while the Sidecar seems to be 'direct', like AirDrop).
Yeah As long as latency is ‘tolerable’, I’ll be more than happy.
I’m most interested to try to use sidecar for some sculpting and texture painting in blender.
I’m slightly nervous since it’s open source so less likely to get any special attention in supporting it, but my intuos seems to work fine in blender, and blender’s trackpad support with macOS is so damn good I actually use it rather than a mouse for all my 3D work! Hoping I can add sidecar as my next eyebrow-raising unconventional tool
I’m most interested to try to use sidecar for some sculpting and texture painting in blender.
I’m slightly nervous since it’s open source so less likely to get any special attention in supporting it, but my intuos seems to work fine in blender, and blender’s trackpad support with macOS is so damn good I actually use it rather than a mouse for all my 3D work! Hoping I can add sidecar as my next eyebrow-raising unconventional tool
Have you tried this on your unsupported iMac:
defaults write com.apple.sidecar.display allowAllDevices -bool YES
Thanks, but I don’t have the beta, I’ll wait for the Public one. Also, this hack does enable Sidecar on unsupported Macs, but I hear the image quality is low. I may try it, though.
There is a demo in this thread showing what you are asking for.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/affinity-designer-1-7-and-sidecar-sneak-peek.2184798/
Tolerable is all I’d expect for a wireless connection, but I’d expect a wired connection to be flawless, exactly like a Cintiq. I’m guessing the current iPad usbc port can’t handle video like a DisplayPort. Maybe they’ll add DisplayPort to the usbc port in the next gen iPad Pro.
While standard finger movements or clicks are apparently not supported you can scroll with two fingers.