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Working, Working Hard: Behind the Scenes of Astropad

A scifi digital painting of a man fighting a machine

The Astropad team has been busy! Here’s a quick overview of what we’ve been cooking up:

Pencil Support

This has been a very popular request. We had to pull support for Pencil by FiftyThree at the last moment before launch. We had some bugs related to pairing and we didn’t feel it was ready.


We’ve been working on fixing up Pencil support and it will be coming soon! We’re also working on greatly improving the palm rejection for Pencil, which was another reason we pulled it for v1.0. Sadly we won’t have support for the eraser just yet — we haven’t figured out how to properly add it yet.

App Compatibility

We mostly tested with Photoshop during development, but we’ve quickly found that there’re a lot of apps you want to use with Astropad! We hear you, and we’ve made great progress on this front. In particular, zooming and panning doesn’t work in some apps, and we’re correcting that.

In other apps pressure hasn’t worked properly, in particular: Adobe Photoshop CS5, Corel Painter, Manga Studio and SketchBook Pro. Just the other day we had a breakthrough, and we’ve figured out how to add pressure support for all of these apps. Keep an eye out for a Mac update coming soon.

Improved Stylus Drivers

Since launching Astropad, we’ve been in touch with numerous stylus manufacturers. The good news is that both Adonit and Wacom have greatly improved the drivers for their latest styluses. The wavy lines we complained about on our blog have been greatly reduced. They still aren’t our recommended stylus picks (the accuracy still isn’t there), but for those of you who own them, you’ll be really happy with the updates we’ll be shipping.