MARCH 2020 MACWORLD 13Sidecar thus provides a
reasonable glimpse
into how well a
touchscreen MacBook
would work. And that’s
a relatively small
screen. On a large
laptop like the new
16-inch MacBook Pro,
the presumed
“problems” with touch
input would be even
less problematic.
We don’t even have
to guess at how we
might interact with
Sidecar or touchscreen
MacBooks if Apple
unlocked the full range of touch gestures,
as the third-party Luna Display (go.
macworld.com/lnds) service already lets
you interact with the entirety of macOS with
your fingers when you’re using an iPad as
a secondary display. Just like if you were
using an Apple Pencil with Sidecar, you can
press on links and apps and they’ll open.
You can hold down on an app or file and
pull up a right-click menu. You can even
select whole blocks of text with a finger
swipe (which means you’ll need to use two
fingers if you want to scroll normally).
Such features make Luna Display more
satisfying to use than Sidecar, though it’s
certainly not as elegant. Unlike Sidecar,
you need to plug a dongle into your
MacBook before it works, and then I found
the screen transitions weren’t anywhere
near as fluid, even working on our office’s
powerful Wi-Fi network. With Sidecar, the
iPad registers every movement so
smoothly that you’d think it was jacked
directly into the Mac.
Importantly, though, Luna Display
proves that using fingers to interact with a
macOS interface on laptop-sized screens
isn’t the hassle Apple has been making it
out to be. I can use it for all the lightweight
tasks I’d expect to be able to use with a
touchscreen laptop, whether that’s
opening links, opening apps, selectingAs impressive as Luna Display is, here’s what scrolling through an
article quickly ends up looking like. You don’t get that with Sidecar.
(The red dots are my fingers activating the scroll function.)