Clean Slate

On my way home from work yesterday I realized that – given that various moments of forgetfulness had led to me not sending it back until almost a week after setting up the exchange – that I was within the estimated timeframe, though a bit on the early side, of my replacement Surface Pro 3 arriving.
I’m guessing that it was because it was on my mind that my reflexes were up to the task of allowing me to catch it with my foot as I opened the door and the package containing my new SP3 came flying out at me from its hiding place between the doors.
Because it was an entirely new device – they replaced the whole thing rather than replacing or repairing the defective part – that meant that I had to go through the process of setting the whole thing up again.
There was the initial setup that follows from turning it on the first time, such as pairing it with the Surface Pen, selecting a language, region, and time zone, and connecting it to my home network.
From there, it was a matter of setting up the various customizations and personalization, and reinstalling applications and reloading personal files.
Windows 8.1 makes that a lot less painful than it used to be, thanks to the use of the Microsoft Account login and the ability to sync settings, themes, and “modern” apps across devices.  Once you’re signed in, if you’re using the syncing options, you’re presented with the lockscreen and desktop wallpaper images you’ve set up on your other PCs, you’ve got all of your bookmarks, and in the “All Apps” screen, you see a list of all of the apps you’ve installed using your Microsoft Account.  Granted, the majority of those apps need to be reinstalled, but at least you have them there and don’t have to try to remember which apps you had.  The reinstall occurs as soon as you tap on the app.
This process will get even simpler in the future with Windows 10 and as “universal” apps become more ubiquitous, at least if we assume that the “universal” apps ultimately end up replacing the more traditional desktop applications.  In the case of those applications, I did have to go through the process of manually reinstalling, which is also, in many cases, a little less painful than it used to be.  In particular, reinstalling the Adobe applications was a matter of simply downloading and installing the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop application, signing in, and choosing the applications I wanted to install.
Manga Studio was a little more complicated, as I had to dig out my Serial Number, go to the update site, download the most recent update (the updates actually contain the full version), and go through the somewhat convoluted process of downloading it.  It was still simpler than using the physical media to install it, as I would have had to connect a DVD drive and set that up, then do the install, and then end up having to download the update anyway.
(It’s worth noting that while I had uninstalled the Adobe applications from the old SP3 before sending it in, I had neglected to sign out of them first, so the first time I launched Photoshop on the new SP3, it complained that I had too many devices registered – the limit is two – and I had to tell it to sign me out of all of the others before it would let me sign in on the new SP3.  That meant that, in turn, I had to sign back in on my desktop PC.)
So, while I question whether or not “universal” apps will ever be as robust and powerful as the more traditional desktop applications – even Microsoft intends to make both “universal,” which is to say, “touch-friendly,” versions of Office applications concurrently with more fully-featured desktop versions for the foreseeable future – if there ever comes a time that the universal (dropping the scare quotes) apps supplant their ancestors, the reinstall process when getting a new PC or tablet will become much more streamlined.
Beyond the applications there were also the various add-ins – and again, syncing based on an account helps a lot – for browsers, and assorted other utilities and codecs that you need in order to do whatever it is that you normally do with a computer.
Personal files weren’t too much of an issue for me, as I keep most of them either on my NAS or in the cloud.
Overall, the initial set-up and restoration went pretty smoothly – except for that moment when I was just finishing up an installation and accidentally pulled the plug, and the not-yet charged SP3 shut off, but that ended up not causing any real issues.
Later, though, things got a bit more bothersome.
When Windows 8 launched, Microsoft made Windows Media Center, which was integrated into Windows back into the days of XP, into a paid add-on.  I like Media Center, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it allows me to add non-indexed locations to my media libraries. 
As something of an aside, seriously, Microsoft – People use Network Attached Storage devices and need to be able to add them to libraries.  Either find a way to index them, or let non-indexed locations be added to libraries.  Media Center proves that it can be done, and the fact that it’s looking like Media Center won’t be available in Windows 10 at all means that you have to find a way to make libraries and NAS locations work together.  I know you’re pushing OneDrive and the cloud, but even though I have unlimited OneDrive storage thanks to my Office 365 subscription, after having you shut down my previous OneDrive account because I had pictures – that weren’t being shared with anyone – that violated your puritanical and draconian rules about nudity (“Oh noes, that woman’s shirt is wet and you can see her no-no parts!”), I can tell you that I have a lot of files that are never, ever going to get stored on OneDrive, so I need my NAS.  Making files available offline – your “solution” to the indexing problem – isn’t a solution, because I don’t have an extra 3 TB of space on my 256 GB SSD to store duplicate copies, and if I wanted to keep them on my local drive I wouldn’t have stored them on a NAS in the first place.
*Ahem*
Anyway, I like Media Center enough that I’d paid the extra money to add the feature on my former SP3, and, since I no longer had that one, I figured I could use the Product Key to activate it on my new one, so that’s what I did.
The first sign of trouble (which, to be fair, I kind of expected) I noticed was that there was a bit of text in the lower right corner of the Desktop listing the build number of Windows 8.1 currently installed.  This is something you normally only see when you’re running a consumer or technical preview (which is to say a beta version) of Windows, or when your copy of Windows isn’t activated.
I checked my settings and sure enough I saw an option to activate Windows.  I tried it, even though I knew it would fail, because if it were going to work I wouldn’t be seeing the option in the first place.  It did fail, of course.
The reason is that when you add Media Center and its Product Key, you actually change the Product Key of Windows itself.  So by adding the Product Key for the copy of Media Center that had been installed on the old SP3, I changed the new SP3’s Key to the old Key.  Because the old Key was in use on the validation server, my copy of Windows was deemed invalid.
I called the number provided and talked to an automated system, which walked me through the process of getting a new, valid Key that I could use to activate my copy of Windows.  While it meant rattling off a lot of numbers to the system and then, in turn, having a lot of numbers rattled off to me, it was a relatively painless experience, and it’s really only noteworthy in that in all the years that the whole validation/activation process has been in place it’s the first time I’ve ever had to do it.
In any case, I’m glad to have a working SP3 again, though now I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with the SP2.  Of course, that’s been a problem for a while, as I don’t really need two Surface Pros, and I don’t feel like dealing with the hassle of trying to sell the SP2, nor am I especially inclined to just give it away.  However, it’s more complicated now, as I installed the Technical Preview of Windows 10 on the SP2 and want to continue putting the new OS through its paces and contribute my feedback to its continuing development, but now that I have my SP3, I’m not sure how much I’ll make use of the 2.
Still, I will try to use it so more, if for no other reason than to get material for an upcoming post about Windows 10.

When I Think About You I Touch My…Screen

Given that I won’t be buying one (and I didn’t win one in a recent giveaway, dammit), for me, the most interesting aspect of the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 announcement last month was the appearance by someone from Adobe showing off an upcoming version of Photoshop featuring some touch-related enhancements to the venerable image-editing program.
This week, Adobe Creative Cloud Subscribers (like me) were presented with the option of downloading Adobe Photoshop CC 2014, which delivers those enhancements.
…once you figure out how to enable them, anyway.
I had hoped that when I installed in on my Surface Pro 2 it would recognize that touch was available and right off the bat it would be optimized for touch.
Nope.  Doing some digging online revealed that you have to navigate to Edit>Preferences>Experimental Features, check the box for “Use Touch Gestures (Windows only),” close Photoshop, and open it again.
There’s also an option to scale up the interface (more on that in a bit) to make it more finger-friendly, and something related to 3D printing, but I don’t have a 3D printer, so that part was irrelevant for me.
The touch features work pretty much how you would expect them to:  you can pan and zoom and rotate the canvas.
That may not seem like much, but considering that previous versions lacked even those capabilities, it’s a marked – and welcome – improvement.
I’m especially glad to see the ability to rotate the canvas freely by placing two fingers on the screen and turning them in the direction you want to rotate the canvas, as it’s a feature that’s available in Manga Studio that I utilize frequently.
However, I do have some quibbles with Adobe’s implementation.  In Manga Studio there are options for performing the same function via on-screen menu buttons if you’re not working on a touch-enabled screen, including a button for restoring the canvas – or paper, as it’s called in MS – to its original orientation.
No such buttons exist in Photoshop CC 2014, at least as far as I’ve been able to determine.  Also, it was not immediately apparent that there was a way to snap the canvas back into the original orientation (attempting to do so via touch requires more precision than I’m able to manage), but I did find that clicking on the Crop tool will cause it to snap back.
It is possible to rotate the canvas through menu options, but it’s less efficient than the approach that MS takes, which provides a wider larger selection of set increments and a slighter to allow you to rotate in arbitrary increments.  The buttons in MS rotate by 15 degree increments, whereas Ps gives you the option of 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise, and an “Arbitrary” option which presents you with another menu for choosing the increments.
The other quibble I have is that in order to pan you have to use two fingers – in MS, you only need one – which wouldn’t be a problem except that it’s very easy to accidentally rotate the canvas, or to zoom in or out.
As for the scaling, the new Ps allows you to scale up the UI by 200%.  That does make things more finger-friendly, but it seems like a bit much.  125-150% might work a little better, though the optimal solution would be to allow you to choose from several options.
Of course, it’s clear that, based on their presence at Microsoft’s launch event, that Adobe is thinking primarily in terms of higher-resolution displays.  I have no doubt that the 200% scaling works very well with the Surface Pro 3’s 2,160 x 1,440 resolution.
Stepping outside of the limitations with the Adobe product, I’ll mention again that Windows 8.1 could benefit from either more built-in gestures, or the ability to create custom gestures, as while using Photoshop CC 2014 with the UI scaled up I found myself wishing that there were an easy way to quickly clear some of the clutter that the enlarged UI brings with it, freeing up more screen real estate for the canvas.
There is a mechanism for that in Ps itself; hitting the Tab key will show/hide all tool palettes and menus, but that’s of little use if you’re using your Surface device in tablet mode without the keyboard cover attached.  Granted, you could invoke the on-screen keyboard, hit Tab, then close the keyboard, but that’s more effort than is necessary considering that they’re could be a gesture – say, a three-finger tap – that could serve to mimic hitting the Tab key.
Similarly, there could be gestures to perform other commands, such as Copy and Paste, Undo, and Redo.
Windows does have a feature called “Flicks,” which allow you to perform navigation and editing tasks via pen (not touch) gestures, but so far I’ve found them to be rather inadequate for use in any sort of drawing or image-editing software.
On a positive side, palm rejection works extremely well in Ps, primarily because Ps won’t allow you to use anything bout the pen (or mouse) for drawing and editing tasks on the canvas, at least, not that I’ve found.  So, unlike MS (or Sketchbook Express/Pro) there’s never a danger of errant lines showing up on your work should the built-in palm rejection experience any sort of hiccup, or should you place your palm on the canvas while the pen is too far from the screen to register.
Overall, it’s a positive step from Adobe, and I’m willing to cut them a lot of slack given that the touch support it still labeled “experimental.”
There have been some other enhancements to Photoshop as part of the update, but so far I haven’t really managed to delve into them, as the support for touch was the one that I was most interested in trying.

Scratching The Surface

Shortly after I bought my Surface Pro 2, Microsoft announced that they were having a “small” event during which there would be some type of announcement relating to the Surface line.
The immediate speculation was that they were going to announce an 8” Surface Min, and a lot of user-generated renders of what such a device might look like began to, er, surface.
Though I don’t have any particular need for such a device, I was somewhat interested, and decided that, if it hit the right price point, I might consider picking one up as a companion device.
Coincidentally, the day of the event fell on a day that I had taken off from work, so, while I sat drawing (or more to the point, failing to draw) on Odin, my desktop PC, I fired up the webcast of the event on my Surface.
The rumored Surface Mini was nowhere to be seen, however, and it turned out that MS was actually announcing the launch of the Surface Pro 3.



Despite the rumors, I had considered this possibility beforehand and had already worked through my annoyance at the launch of a new and improved Surface Pro so soon after my purchase of the 2, but even so, the announcement did cause me to sigh and shake my head.
While many of the specs represent only incremental improvements, there were some significant changes that I found appealing, such as a higher resolution and a different aspect ratio, which makes the device like a traditional piece of paper in terms of overall size and shape, and an overall decrease in thickness and weight.
They also demonstrated some cool new features of the pen, particularly with regards to One Note.
As an aside, I use One Note a lot, but I feel like there’s more I should be doing with it given its capabilities, but I just can’t seem to find the appropriate use case.
Of particular interest to me was that they managed to all but eliminate the parallax when using the pen.  That is to say that there is virtually no offset between the physical tip of the pen and where it appears on the screen.
However, there was one thing in the announcement that struck me as odd:  a reference to the pen having 256 levels of pressure sensitivity.
Why did this strike me as odd?  Well, my older-model Cintiq has 1,025 levels.  Current-model Cintiqs – including Wacom’s own Cintiq-branded Tablet PC – have 2.048.
My Surface Pro has 1,024 levels, just like the Surface Pro 1.
So why the downgrade?
In reading some of the more in-depth coverage, particularly around the new pen, I found the answer, and even more than the reduction in pressure sensitivity, it gave me pause.
Unlike the previous generations, the SP3 does not come with a Wacom active digitizer, opting instead for a product from N-Trig.
…
Some of you may recall my experiences with an N-Trig device.
Suffice to say that they were not positive experiences.
Many people online expressed concern about the drop down to 256 levels.  While I did find that troubling, I know from experience that 256 levels still works pretty well – on a Wacom device.
Gabe from Penny Arcade did a post addressing the 256 levels issue (TL; DR is it’s not really an issue).
However, I still have little or no confidence in N-Trig.
A lot of Microsoft-related sites – run mostly by non-artists, for what it’s worth – bundled the concerns about the pressure sensitivity reduction and the shift away from Wacom together and simply dismissed the misgivings expressed by the commentariat as the ravings of neckbeards who are resistant to change.
That’s not it.  At all.  Again, I’m not terribly concerned about the 256 levels thing, though I will say that perception counts, and regardless of how well it works, this looks like a step backwards, and while more knowledgeable users might recognize that it’s not a dealbreaker, the average consumer – regardless of whether or not he or she even understands what it means – might see that change in specs and immediately assume that it’s bad.
But the real issue, for me, is that name:  N-Trig.  And this isn’t because I’m a Wacom fanboy; I would very much like to see Wacom forced to square off against some real competition, as they pretty much own that space (and their prices reflect that fact).
I have no doubt that N-Trig has improved since I last used one of their devices.  That would pretty much have to be the case, otherwise I don’t see how they could still be in business.  I also have no doubt that MS has made absolutely certain that their new flagship device works properly.  Well, I have some doubt, given that hey released the first generation of the Surface Pro without a driver that supported pressure sensitivity in Photoshop, so it’s not like it’s unheard of for them to drop the ball on something like this.
(Speaking of Photoshop, the one piece of good news for me during that event came when a representative from Adobe came out to show off an upcoming update to Photoshop that is more touch-centric.  That is, of course, great for the SP3, but the update will also find its way to everyone with a Creative Cloud subscription, so at some point I’ll benefit from that as well.)
In any case, despite my misgivings about N-Trig, I do understand the reasons for selecting them as a vendor, particularly given that their digitizers are slightly thinner and lighter than Wacom’s, and I do hope that N-Trig can prove to be the competitive force that’s so desperately needed in that market.
But I’m still rather wary.
That said, it’s still not a dealbreaker for me; the fact that I just bought the Surface Pro 2 is what’s keeping me from shelling out the cash to pick up the SP3.
If I were in a position to shell out the money for a Surface Pro 3, I would most likely do so happily, despite my misgivings, as it does provide a lot of compelling advantages over its older sibling.  Still, while considerable progress has been made, MS hasn’t quite nailed the formula yet and it’s not quite perfect.  The typing experience, by most accounts, still needs some improvements, particularly if you are one of those people who takes – or has to take – the term “laptop” literally (I personally tend not to be one, as an extended period of typing with a keyboard, any keyboard, placed in my lap is unworkable), and even setting aside the physical issues of typing via the Touch or Type Cover, there’s the issue of the cost; Type Covers need to be included in the base purchase price.  Period.  No debate.
I understand the position MS has taken; people like being able to choose different colors for their Type Covers, so they don’t want to bundle them with the Surface.
I also think that position is bullshit.  They’re no reason that they can’t bundle them together and still have different color choices. 
But even if they can’t, they still need to drop that cost down to $0.  You have money to spare, Microsoft…eat the cost.
Because what you don’t have is mindshare, and as long as the keyboard is a pricey add-on, you’re not going to get it.
Yes, I know; iPads and Android tablets don’t include keyboards, but, per your own marketing, that’s not the segment of the market you’re trying to compete with.  The Macbook Air got mentioned a lot in the Surface event.  And guess what?  The keyboard for that isn’t optional.
Again, eat the cost.  There are plenty of avenues for making up the cost via accessories, such as replacement pens, docking stations, power covers, and so on.  Whatever happened to that whole Blades concept?
You also need to figure out a better method for storing the pen.  The loop included for it on the – optional – keyboard cover isn’t a solution, nor is the simple magnetism that holds it in place in various locations on the Surface itself.
Start addressing these concerns – and develop a good marketing strategy – and you’ll definitely have a winner on your hands, one that has the potential to redefine computing for years to come.
And you’ll also have a basis for expanding the Surface family of products.  What about a Surface All-In-One?  How about a Surface-branded Windows Phone?
In fact, if you were to say to me that you would be releasing a 5” Surface Phone with a high-resolution screen, active digitizer with pen (with integrated storage), and VaporMg casing, I would say to you, “Yes, please.”
With all of that said, while I won’t be picking up a Surface Pro 3, I hope it does well enough for me to have the option of picking up a Surface Pro 4 when the time comes.
And, you know, if some wealthy reader were feeling generous, or if Microsoft said, “Here, Jon, have a Surface Pro 3 on us,” I certainly wouldn’t object…

Suggestion Box

Not that anyone who has any influence will see this – although I have to admit that I was surprised by the amount of traffic that my last post about Windows Phone 8.1 has received – but as this is my primary public forum (such as it is), I thought I’d share some suggestions for improvements and enhancements for the two pieces of technology I’ve been living and working with for the past few weeks:  Windows Phone 8.1, and the Surface Pro 2.

Windows Phone 8.1:

I’m starting with WP 8.1 simply because, as it exists right now, it’s actually pre-release software, and as such, there is room for Microsoft to make some improvements before the product is officially released, though, again, as a person who is completely lacking any sort of influence and lacking an audience of people who have influence, I doubt that anything I write will even be seen, let alone implemented.
Beyond that, some of my suggestions pertain to Cortana, and as much of what Cortana does takes place in the cloud, rather than client-side, there is the possibility for a more rapid turnaround when it comes to adding or changing features.
So let’s start with Cortana.

Functional Reminders – By this I mean reminders that are not for me, but rather are for Cortana herself.  As an example, I can tell Cortana, “Turn off WiFi,” and she’ll do it.  Conversely, I can then tell her, “Turn on WiFi,” and she’ll turn it on.  Combining this capability with reminders – particularly the location-based reminders – would be a particularly useful function.
In the interest of conserving battery life, I typically turn off WiFi when I’m out and about, where my regular 4G or LTE – I have unlimited data – is usually sufficient for my needs, and I don’t have a need to connect to random WiFi hotspots.  However, I usually turn it back on when I get home, where a constant WiFi connection is available (as is a steady source of power for recharging).  So in this use case, I would turn off WiFi when I leave the house, then set a reminder for Cortana to turn it back on when I get home.
I tried this to see if it was available.  It’s not; when I said, “Turn on WiFi when I get home,” she simply set a reminder for me to turn it on, which popped up when I got home.
I believe she does have this capability to some extent.  You can, for example, tell her to Check In (via the appropriate app, like Facebook or Foursquare) when you get to a specified location, but I don’t do check ins, so I’m not sure if I’m right about that.  Either way, it would be an incredibly useful capability if it were extended to a wide array of functions.
(And for what it’s worth, you can set WiFi to turn itself back on after a specified interval.)

Natural Language Improvements – Improvements in this area are bound to be forthcoming anyway, but speaking of reminders, when I ask Cortana to create a reminder for me, I have to do so in a slightly unnatural fashion.  For example, if I were a different Jon, namely the one from the comic Sex Criminals, which is a great comic, by the way, I might want to set a reminder to drop a deuce in my boss’s potted plant at noon.  So if I, as the other Jon, said, “Remind me to drop a deuce in Mr. Shankworth’s plant at noon,” Cortana would respond with, “Okay, I’ll remind you ‘To drop a deuce in Mr. Shankworth’s plant at noon.’  Is that right?”
(Note:  She doesn’t have enough of a personality to ask, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”)
That is to say that the reminder on your Calendar would be titled, “To drop a deuce in Mr. Shankworth’s plant.”  She knows enough to figure out that “at noon” is the when, but not enough to drop the “To.”
So to get it formatted without the “To,” I would have to say it like this:  “Remind me:  Drop a deuce…”
Similarly, saying, “Remind me that I need to to stop dropping a deuce in Mr. Shanksworth’s plant” would create a reminder that contains everything after “Remind me.”  It’s not a huge deal, but it would add to the sense of familiarity and make talking to Cortana feel a bit more natural if she could figure out that when you say, “Remind me to buy toilet paper next time I’m at the store,” she would just create a reminder titled “Buy toilet paper.”  She’s already smart enough to know that “next time I’m at the store” defines the time and place, so I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to get her to pare out the extraneous relative pronouns and whatnot when writing the reminder to Calendar.

Lack of Interests – Cortana can keep track of the things you’re interested in using her Notebook, through observing your usage patterns and through direct input, which is great.  However, I’d like to see it go a step further and make it possible for you to let Cortana know not only what you like, but also what you hate.
For example, she knows that I’m not interested in sports, in that it was not something I checked off as an interest, which means that she won’t deliver me any sort of sports news or scores or whatever.  However, she doesn’t know that my feelings go beyond merely lacking an active interest, and that I don’t want to see anything relating to sports.
I mean, I don’t care who wins any game.  At all.  Ever.  But certain sporting events tend to spill out beyond the limits of their boundaries and fall into the general category of “news,” which means that I’ll still end up seeing headlines about such-and-such sportsball team winning the big sportsball tournament.
I’d like to avoid that by being able to specify with a certain amount of granularity what types of “news” stories I don’t want to see.  I’d also like to have more control over the news sources.
Of course, an anti-sports position is peculiar to me, but I think most people have topics they don’t want to hear about while still having an interest in the more general category under which those topics fall.  You might, for example, have an interest in entertainment news, but no interest in, say, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashians, or whoever.

Action Center – On the non-Cortana front, I’ve been somewhat disappointed in the Action/Notification Center.  It’s been pretty hit-or-miss – mostly miss – when it comes to notifying me about activities on Facebook.  The other issue with Facebook notifications – and this may be a problem with the FB app itself and/or the way it’s designed, though the same may be true of the sporadic nature of receiving notifications – is that if, say, I get a notification that someone commented on my status, I’ll click on it, the FB app will launch, and it will take me to the applicable status, but the comments are collapsed, so I have to make an additional click to see what the comment was.  So much less efficient than the old way.
Additionally, it would be nice to be able to actually manage the notifications right there.  For example, if I’m notified of an e-mail, I’d like to be able to just delete it right there without having to go into the actual Mail app.
Ultimately, though, what really needs to be done is for MS to implement the interactive live tiles that are being tested by Microsoft Research, as the overall experience needs to be a bit more seamless, as it was/is in WP 8, while still adding in the ability to add functionality via the more rapidly deployed app updates as opposed to core OS updates.

Extra-Large Tiles – Windows 8.1 has them, so why not Windows Phone 8.1?

Calendar – This is much improved in WP 8.1, but while the week view is appreciated, why did adding that necessitate eliminating the Agenda view?  Yes, it’s sort of there in the week view, but there’s no reason it can’t exist separately.
Also, add the ability to display more than one appointment on the live tile.

Surface Pro 2:

Some of these fall into the category of Windows 8.1 suggestions, but they’re things that have really stood out for me while using the Surface Pro 2, so…

Custom Gestures – There are apps that will allow you to create your own custom gestures, but this needs to be baked in.

Independent Scaling/Display Controls – And here I’m not talking about whatever it is that’s being called independent scaling, but true, honest-to-Glob independent scaling, whereby a user can invoke separate controls for each display.  I right-click on the external monitor and bring up Screen Resolution, and I’m presented with controls that will only apply to the external monitor.  So I can set my scaling to 100%.  Meanwhile, I do the same on the Surface Pro, and boom, I can set the scaling there to 150%.

Saved Docking Preferences – When in its docking station – or otherwise connected to an external display – it should remember how you had things set up the last time you were docked.  (Assuming this isn’t your first time docking it).
I put the Surface Pro in its docking station.  It remembers that I want the scaling on the external monitor set to 100%.  It also remembers that I want all of the icons and shortcuts on my desktop to display on the external monitor, and that I want all x86 applications/control panels to open on the external monitor, without me having to set the external monitor as my primary display.
Then I undock, and everything automatically moves back over the Surface Pro.
Also:  fix the damn mouse problem.  Having to undock and re-dock the Surface Pro to get the mouse cursor to stop being invisible is a nuisance.

I’m sure that if took the time to think about it there are a lot more suggestions I could make – particularly on Windows Phone 8.1 – and I do have some ideas around the way some things ought to work and the potential for better integrating MS devices and services into the average person’s life, but many of them would require a lot of development from companies other than MS and are likely things that are part of Redmond’s vision anyway, but these are the main ones that have been on my mind.

Of course, while I’m tilting at windmills…

Adobe:  Make your Creative Suite more touch-friendly.  In Manga Studio 5, I can pan, zoom, and rotate the image using touch.  in Photoshop or Illustrator?  Not so much.
On the other hand, despite responding well to touch, the overall interface itself in Manga Studio isn’t especially touch-friendly either.  So that’s something to be worked on in both worlds.
Which isn’t to say that you have to make “modern,” Windows Store-style touch apps, but Photoshop/Creative Suite and Manga Studio have different default workspace options to choose from, so why not add in a touch-based option?
Also, Adobe, admit that there’s a problem with lag when it comes to certain brushes in Photoshop and fix it rather than trying to blame it on some mysterious “something” that your legions of users must all somehow have on their disparate computers that are running on an assortment of operating systems.

Manual Override

I did some more digging around on the Internet and found a solution to the problem I was having on the Surface Pro with the Wacom drivers and my mouse.
It actually ended up being something that I had considered trying, though I hadn’t, as I’d just gotten sick of dealing with it and uninstalled the Wacom drivers.  I decided to give it a shot after seeing that someone else had done it and, confirming my suspicions, gotten it to work.
As I thought, the problem was that for some reason the Wacom drivers overwrote the drivers for the mouse, which caused the mouse to not work, as it isn’t a Wacom device.
The solution was to open up Device Manager, right-click on the “Wacom Device” that showed an error, choose to update the driver, then manually browse to the correct driver file.
Boom.
I’m still annoyed, however.

****

Confused Jon Is Confused Department:
This morning when I got up, after getting dressed in my workout clothes and brushing my teeth, I went out to start my car, as, despite the eventual warmth of the day, the early morning hours are still chilly, and then headed back inside, so that I could go back outside to the patio and smoke a cigarette while the car warmed up.  On the way back in I noticed that there was a package next to my door.
”That wasn’t there when I got home yesterday,” I thought.  Then, “Did I order something?”
I remembered that I had, but the thing I had ordered was a T-shirt, and while I’ve encountered my share of excessive packaging, this rather large box seemed especially excessive.
”Maybe it was left here by mistake,” I thought, but upon bringing it inside and inspecting it – determining that it was too heavy to be a shirt – I confirmed that it was, in fact, addressed to me.
”The hell…?”
I opened it up and discovered that it was this statue of Batgirl.
I stared at it in confusion for a while – in fairness to me, keep in mind that I was still pretty groggy, as it was still hours and hours before sunrise – and then thought, “Did…did I order this?  Have I been sleepshopping?”
Then, somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought occurred to me.  “Isn’t it my birthday soon?  Is this a…present?”
Why, I wondered, as he was the most likely suspect, would Scott have my present shipped to me, rather than just giving it to me in person on my birthday?
The whole thing was rather baffling, and was made moreso by the fact that I couldn’t find any sort of packing slip indicating who had bought this for me.
Finally, after digging through all of the packing material, I found the slip and discovered that it was a gift from the (former) Boss Lady, and at that point grateful Jon was grateful…and especially glad that, since it’s the “New 52” version, that she selected a character whose costume redesign I actually like.
So…thanks, (former) Boss Lady!

It IS A Microsoft Product, After All…

So after getting more use out of my Surface Pro 2, I’ve encountered a few more problems beyond the scaling issue.
For what it’s worth, Windows 8.1 supposedly does have independent scaling, in theory, but it just doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work in a way that yields the kind of results I want.
Basically, if you uncheck the box for choosing one scaling level for all displays, you can choose from a sliding scale that will give you more options for scaling levels.  In theory, you can try to find a sweet spot that will look okay on both displays – say 125%, for example – and when connected to an external display, the Surface will adjust the scaling accordingly.
Or something, though despite calling it that, that doesn’t sound like independent scaling to me.
It also seems to be tied to some sort of autodetect of the pixel density of your display in some fashion, though I don’t really understand the details, and I don’t see how it makes a difference, as you can’t actually select independent scaling anyway.
In practice, it doesn’t actually appear to do anything any differently from simply choosing one scaling level for all displays.
In any case, that isn’t the biggest complaint I have.
The complaint I have goes back to something that was an issue with the first generation Surface Pro:  a lack of pressure sensitivity in Photoshop.
That was kind of a huge oversight on the part of Microsoft.  After all, you’ve got a full-fledged computer that’s capable of running Photoshop, and a nice Wacom active digitizer, so naturally people are going to want to use it in Photoshop, and they’re going to expect pressure sensitivity.
Eventually, sometime before the release of the Surface Pro 2, Wacom put out some drivers that would enable pressure sensitivity in Photoshop.
What made this especially frustrating is that pressure sensitivity worked in other applications, such as Sketchbook Pro, Manga Studio, and various Windows 8 applications – of the legacy x86 variety, such as Microsoft’s One Note, and of the “modern” Windows Store variety, such as Fresh Paint – thanks to built-in drivers for the Wacom active digitizer.
Photoshop, however, doesn’t utilize those drivers, and requires a different set of drivers entirely.
One can choose to blame either Microsoft, Adobe, or both for this, but frankly, I don’t care who’s to blame; shit should just work.
In any case, Photoshop still requires those other drivers in order to recognize pressure sensitivity, so I downloaded and installed them, and, as a result, gained pressure sensitivity in Photoshop.  (I already had it in Manga Studio, as it can use either driver)
However, once I brought it back upstairs and dropped it into its docking station, I ran into a problem:  my mouse stopped working.
My mouse and keyboard are from Microsoft, and both connect to the Surface Pro via the same USB wireless dongle.  The keyboard worked fine, but the mouse wouldn’t.
Uninstalling the Wacom drivers restored the function of the mouse.
After trying the install of the Wacom drivers again, I plugged in some random old wired mouse and it worked with no issues.  Looking at the Device Manager, I noted that there was an entry for a Wacom device that had an exclamation point on it, indicating that there was some problem with it.
From what I can determine, installing the Wacom drivers somehow replaces the drivers for the Microsoft mouse with some random Wacom drivers, which, not being the correct drivers, won’t allow the Microsoft mouse to work.
I even reinstalled the keyboard and mouse software, and in the resulting setup screen that appeared after the install, it only showed the keyboard as being installed – it doesn’t see the mouse at all.
So my options are to either have pressure sensitivity in Photoshop, or have a working mouse.
Overall, as I’m largely using the Surface Pro in its docking station as a desktop computer, the need for a mouse wins out, but I have to say that it’s pretty goddamn annoying.
After all, neither the Surface Pro 2 nor Photoshop is cheap.  Hell, even the mouse and keyboard were relatively pricey.  I should be able to get my money’s worth.  And, again, I don’t care who’s at fault here*; someone needs to fix it.
For what little it’s worth, I’m not the only person who has this problem.  That’s not worth much, because no one has a solution.
Of course, there are other problems with mouse support anyway.  Upon initially docking the Surface Pro 2, the mouse cursor is invisible.  It will only reappear after undocking and re-docking.
Which, again, is shitty, and, again, I’m not the only person with that problem.  At least in this case there’s something I can do.  It’s annoying, but it works, unlike the Wacom driver issue.
So, yeah.
Still, it is a product from Microsoft, so it’s not like I dropped all that cash on the thing without expecting to have some kind of problems.
But seriously, Microsoft and/or Adobe:  get your shit together.

*That said, I do tend to blame Adobe just a little bit more than Microsoft.  After all, other software vendors – who make much less expensive products – are perfectly capable of getting their products to work with the standard driver that comes with the Surface Pro 2.

Too Clever By Half

As mentioned, I ordered a copy of Manga Studio 5 to install on the Surface Pro 2.
Unfortunately, they no longer sell it via download, so I had to order a physical copy.  Fortunately, I ordered it through Amazon at a substantial savings – almost half of the current 40% off sale price when buying it direct from Smith-Micro.
The unfortunate aspect of having to buy a physical copy is that the Surface Pro 2 doesn’t have any sort of DVD drive.
I do, however, have a spare external Blu ray burner, so I hooked that up, but the installation for that is unnecessarily complex, and I couldn’t find the installation guide, so I wasn’t able to get it to install from the DVD.
However, last night I installed an update to Manga Studio on Odin, and I realized that the downloadable “updates” are actually full installation files rather than just a patch.  You just have to provide a valid serial number in order to be able to download the updates, so I went to the update site on the Surface Pro 2 – just “the Surface” going forward – entered the serial number from my new DVD, downloaded it, and successfully installed it.
I’m so clever!
In the process of installing it, though, I learned that the license for MS5 allows you to install it on two computers, with the limitation that you can’t have both copies open at the same time.  (My Adobe Creative Cloud subscription has the same licensing terms, which is how I have Photoshop installed on the Surface and on Odin).
So, even though I got the software for about 75% less than what I paid for it the first time I bought it (not counting my later upgrade to the EX version, which I didn’t bother with for the Surface), I still ended up paying more money than I really needed to.
I’m too clever!
Oh well.  In any case, I now have MS5 on the Surface, and will begin experimenting with doing some actual drawing on it.

The Bullet Has Been Bitten

After mulling if over for a considerable amount of time, on Monday I finally decided to buy a Surface Pro 2.
You may recall that I was considering several options, including buying a new desktop to use for my day-to-day computing needs and turning my current desktop into a dedicated graphics workstation, which was part of the reason I was reluctant to pull the trigger on buying a Surface Pro 2.
Ultimately, I decided I could kill two birds with one stone by picking up the docking station for the Surface Pro 2 and hooking it up to an external monitor and making it into my primary desktop – with the added benefit of having it serve as an on-the-go graphics workstation, given that it has a Wacom active digitizer, and also being able to carry my primary desktop with me wherever I go.*
So that’s what I did.
I’ve run into a couple of issues with that so far, mostly due to a lack of space, but I’ll delve into that in another post; the point of this post is to mention that I bit the bullet and now have a Surface Pro 2 – in addition to a power cover, which is a variation on the Type Cover, a removable cover/keyboard, that contains an additional battery, which extends the overall battery life of the Surface Pro 2 by several hours – and to give my first impressions about it after using it for a couple of days.
Not that I’ve really used it all that much, as I’ve mostly been setting it up and personalizing it, but overall I will say that I’m pretty happy with it.
I actually have only the most minor of complaints, and haven’t really had any issues with it so far, and that issue wasn’t actually a problem with the Surface Pro 2 itself, but rather with Office 365.
After getting the Surface Pro 2, I pulled the trigger on taking advantage of the yearly Office 365 subscription.  It’s a good deal – I can install the latest version of Office on five different computers.
The problem I encountered was one I’ve run into several times in the past – it’s a mistake I keep repeating because I’m an idiot – which is the process of setting up Outlook to connect to my work Exchange account.
This is, in theory, a simple process, but if you forget a step, or make a typo, you’re kind of screwed.
Basically, unless you have the sense (which I never do) to set up a default profile that can be automatically configured – say, your Hotmail or Gmail account – if you screw anything up while manually setting up an Exchange account, Outlook will not let you fix it.  Because if the Exchange account you’re setting up is the only account, that becomes your default profile, and if it’s set up incorrectly, Outlook will not open.  Period.  It will tell you that your profile is screwed up, and will close without giving you an option to fix the problem.
This is frustrating, and it’s happened to me every single time I’ve set up Outlook to connect to my work account**, and, as mentioned, I’m an idiot, so I never learn.
You can fix it by accessing the mail settings in the Control Panel, but for some reason I couldn’t get the settings to open on the Surface Pro 2 until after I uninstalled and reinstalled Office (and when I reinstalled, Outlook recreated my screwed up profile, even though I deleted it after the uninstall, so I couldn’t even get a fresh start).  But eventually I got into the Control Panel and fixed the problem.
So, again, more an issue with Office/Outlook and my inability to learn, though it was odd that it took so much effort to just get into the Control Panel.
As for the actual complaint I have about the Surface Pro 2, it’s really more of a Windows problem than anything else.
The Surface Pro 2 has a full HD screen.  It’s also pretty small.  So with the normal settings for displaying text/items on screen, in Desktop mode, it’s almost impossible to see anything.  So, by default, the Surface Pro 2 is set to scale everything up to 150%.  That works well on the small screen, but when you connect to a larger, external monitor, the 150% scaling looks terrible.
You can’t set the scaling for the displays independently, so in order for the external monitor to look good – setting the scaling back down to 100% – I have to make the Surface Pro 2’s screen almost impossible to read when it’s on the Desktop (it looks fine in the “Modern Interface,” or whatever Microsoft calls it since they can’t use the term “Metro.”).
Not a big deal, as I don’t do much on the Desktop on the Surface Pro 2 itself when it’s docked, but when I remove it, I have to reset the scaling, which requires logging out and logging back in.  (For some reason.)
Still, if that’s my only real complaint, I’m doing pretty well, all things considered.
So far I haven’t done much actual drawing on it.  I installed Photoshop, but that’s hard to work in on a smaller display.  I will be installing Manga Studio 5 on it, but I had to order a physical copy, as they no longer allow you to purchase it via download, so I won’t get that until Saturday.
That said, I can say that it’s an improved experience over my old tablet – at a minimum, palm rejection seems to actually work on the Surface Pro 2.  So that’s a plus.
In any case, that’s my quick mention of having bought the Surface Pro 2 and my overall happiness with it.

*Which is to say, to the living room while I’m watching TV, though I do take it with me to work.  Of course, given the ability to sync things between computers in Windows 8.1, that’s not as much of a boon as it once might have been, especially since I really don’t store that many files locally; most are on my NAS, and I can access that from any PC in my house, and, with some effort – more than is necessary, but that’s a long story –  from anywhere I have Internet access.

**There are other options available, such as simply accessing it via webmail, but using Outlook is my preferred method.  I could also set up the Windows 8.1 mail app to connect to my Exchange account in much the same way that my phone does, which is simpler, and has some advantages, but that would require that I download and install some of our IT’s security features.  I’m okay with doing that on my phone, but less okay with doing it on my computer.