Duet Display has long since been known to provide for convenient use of someone’s old iPad lying around and use it as a secondary display. Now, it’s becoming even better, adding the functionality of the MacBook’s touch bar as well!
The Touch Bar will be added to the bottom of the display, even if the user doesn’t have a MacBook Pro. Now, how usable this application is, depends on how well the user can actually utilize it. The Touch Pad, although a welcome feature, was always meant to be on the MacBook Pro, along with the same system that is running the applications. So, users who are going to edit with Photoshop, will have to continuously switch between the iPad, the MacBook and the touchpad whenever they want to tweak that image brightness level just a bit.
But if you think of using the iPad as a proper illustrating pad, like a Wacom tablet, then the application is just perfect. As a secondary display with the same functions of a MacBook Pro, it’ll be a dream to draw on. So jogging between different colour palettes, brush strokes or even increasing/decreasing the volume of the background music while designing could be all controlled with one swift swipe. Duet always knew how to smoothen the workflow around systems. And with its latest updates, it gets even better.
For later iterations and updates, Duet will make it possible for the Touch Bar to provide for hosting shortcuts and other actions based on the context of what’s on the screen at that point of time. It’ll allow for global custom shortcuts or even specific actions to pop up depending on which application is open at the time. But having said that, the software isn’t supposed to be a replacement for the real-life Touch Bar that Apple has on its MacBook Pros, since it’s not completely optimized for use as much as those ones are. But Duet will still provide its functionality as a taste so that users can adopt the Touch Pad later on, when it becomes a more widely available addition to other variants of the MacBook ecosystem.
Nevertheless, for a one-time purchase of $9.99, the Duet will come in handy for those who want a taste of the premium price that most would have to pay for that small little strip.
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