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Comment by millimeterman | Hacker News Reader

Strong disagree. Software quality is driven almost entirely by either insane dedication from hobbyists or (more commonly) monetary incentives. Lots of businesses depend on Postgres so it's good. Github makes money off of providing a good product. Wacom has a total stranglehold on the market so they don't care because they know artists will put up with it.

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Wacom is seeing a lot of their lunch get eaten by iPad Pros now, so hopefully they’ll be pressured to improve. I wish Apple could make Sidecar integration work at Wacom levels so I’d never have to use one of their devices again though.

I don't know enough about the APIs involved but - that seems like something you should be able to write as a pair of apps.

You'd need a native iPad app to capture and transmit pen events, and then something on the desktop side to receive the events and turn them into the equivalent wacom tablet events. How does wacom send tablet events to apps? Is it a named socket or something? It shouldn't be too hard to emulate. I wonder if anyone's made something like that in the app store.

Mind you, I'd much rather if Apple baked it into macos through Sidecar.

Wacom uses kernel extensions, which is another reason why I’d rather it be a first party solution. Not sure what Astropad uses because their service requires an overpriced subscription, has a bad UI, and only functions well with an extra peripheral.

But Sidecar is also pretty half-baked and Apple is flakey about supporting features like in general, so who knows how it will all pan out.

There is indeed an app, Duet Display Pro, that will relay Apple Pencil input to your Mac. I've only used it for its second screen functionality; no idea how well the pencil part works.

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