According to people familiar with the development of macOS 10.15, the next major version of Apple’s desktop operating system, the software may ship with a cool new feature akin to Luna Display that would make it easy to turn your iPad into an external display for your Mac.
9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo says macOS 10.15 will let you send any app window to either a standalone Mac display or your iPad. This should be accessed by hovering over an app window’s green maximize button for a split second, which will bring up a new menu.
Aside from making the window fullscreen, the menu will offer options for tiling and moving the app window to external displays, including the user’s iPads and external displays connected to their Mac. Selecting one of the display options moves the current window to the selected external display or iPad, in fullscreen.
They’re calling this “Sidecar” internally.
What’s more, an extension of this much-needed new feature could even turn an iPad into a graphics tablet for your Mac, making it possible to draw with your Apple Pencil on your iPad’s screen and effectively “turning the tablet into a Wacom-like device,” according to the report.
“Engineers are also working on options that will allow windows to be easily snapped to one side of the screen, similar to a feature that already exists on Windows.” That part is confusing — Macs have supported snapping to automatically align windows since 2016’s macOS Sierra.
Sidecar reminds me of Luna Display, an awesome hardware attachment that connects to your Mac’s Mini DisplayPort or USB-C and turns an iPad into a second display for the Mac, taking advantage of Metal hardware acceleration for no lag and impeccable image quality.
Here’s our overview of the Luna Display adapter.
For those interested, Luna Display is $80.
It’s unclear if the Sidecar feature might work the other way, too—i.e. letting you send an iOS app to appear in a window on your Mac’s internal or external display. For what it’s worth, iOS 13 is said to bring new iPad improvements, including app windows with detachable panels.
Apple will preview macOS 10.15 at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 3.
What do you make of this report?
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Photo: Luna Display in action