Hi.
I have an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil, so I had high hopes for a good experience handwriting into Notion 6, via the intermediate use of apps like Duet Display, X-Display, or Astropad.
Having written to all three app providers, to see whether they might function as required, Duet Display got back in touch the same day (bless them); Astropad the day after (fair enough), and X-Display have yet to reply (X-Dem). These are expensive apps, and a "buy to try" policy is really not a choice, with them costing between €10 and €30 each. The free trial version of X-Display is useless, as it only gives about 6 minutes use, before expecting you to buy the full product, at the "discounted" price of €10 (vs the usual €20). If anybody can get ANY of these apps to work that quickly, I take off my hat to you.
Having failed to achieve anything in 6 minutes, you are then locked out from further trial use of X-Display. My advice? Forget X-Display. Duet replied helpfully, and offered a refund, should the app not work out. Encouraging, despite the €20 cost. Astropad also replied, stating the availability of a free Astropad Mini option, as a trial version, but that is not available in the App Store; at least not in Ireland. At €30, Astropad will have to wait until I have trialled Duet fully.
Duet installed ok on iMac and iPad Pro, (needing a restart) but took a few attempts to get it going, as the Touchable (common enough music) app causes conflict, and had to be quitted. Annoyingly, Duet's first function is to inform you of an extra upgrade costing €20 a year, which offers pressure sensitivity. Is it the photographic world that makes graphic apps so ****** expensive? Spare a thought for the poor musician.
Anyway, I got into Notion 6, and can handwrite pretty well, though it is not an earth-shattering moment for me. Because you cannot operate the handwriting window on it's own, you have to have ALL of the Notion screen showing on either the iPad Pro or, (using Mirror mode) the full Notion screen on both screens. Scrolling and zooming the main score on the iPad is sluggish and frustrating, at best. You can zoom into the main score enough to move and select notes for editing/changing, but it takes a lot of patience to zoom back out again. Notion 6 absolutely should have been designed with a seperate-able handwriting screen, that could be moved to just the iPad, for example, leaving the main screen on the Mac. That would be perfect. A huge opportunity missed there Presonus. As it stands, I can see no benefit in this quite costly run-around. Why not just score on the iPad Pro and Pencil, and port it over for refinement in Notion 6 afterwards? That may prove the quicker way to work, which is what it is all about, is it not? We should not be wasting our creative time re-designing costly apps that are not fit for our purpose.
I will keeping working at it, and update this post, but already I experienced three "auto restarts" of the iMac in the first hour of use. This sort of half-baked stuff is not very usual in the Mac world, at ANY price. I expect to be less than pleased with the outcome of my many day's research.
I will keep you posted.
