Duet now lets you use the Touch Bar on your iPad with any Mac

Duet Display, a startup whose eponymous app lets you use your iPad as a second screen for your Mac, is announcing today that a new update makes it possible to extend a virtual Touch Bar — like what you find on the new MacBook Pro — onto the bottom of the iPad’s display.

As long as you can run the latest version of macOS — version 10.12.2 — or something newer, you can run this sort of emulation of the Touch Bar. For those who already use Duet and have gotten used to the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, this should be a welcome change. For those who don’t use already Duet, this might be just the thing to get them started on it.

“I think Touch Bar is pretty incredible, and Apple has done a great job getting developers on board. With our launch, we should be able to increase the number of people using Touch Bar, therefore encouraging more developer adoption,” Rahul Dewan, cofounder and chief executive of Duet Display, told VentureBeat in an email.

Apple has updated many of its own desktop apps with Touch Bar support, but relatively few third-party developers have come out with integrations. What Duet Display is doing is different, because it’s not constrained to a single type of hardware. The app can run on all iPads that can run iOS 7.0 and later.

In future, the team wants to make it possible for end users to customize the Touch Bar from inside of Duet, wrote Dewan, who is also a former Apple software engineer.