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.

N-trig Responds

Hello Jon

Did you try to uninstall and reinstall the N-trig bundle from your computer?

Usually this error (the blank FW issue) is related to unsuccessful installation. Please uninstall our bundle via control panel -> programs and features and then reinstall the latest bundle (2.239).

Regards

N-trig Customer Support

Jon Responds:

Yes, I have done the uninstall/reinstall multiple times.
It usually takes multiple attempts just to do that, since the drivers/firmware WILL NOT install unless Windows actually recognizes the digitizer. The installer fails with a "fatal error" because it's not able to detect the hardware.
It usually takes several power cycles to get it to a point at which Windows/the installer actually see that the hardware is there and recognize it as a digitizer rather than "unknown device."
And even after it's installed, there's still the issue of phantom clicks if touch input is enabled.
But sure, I'll try it again, since I'm sure the 50th time will be the charm...

Ladies Of The Legion: The Collage

So I've been messing around on the tablet PC a lot, and found the "Windows Touch Experience Pack," which has several little toys for playing around with touch, such as a 3D map program, some games, a screensaver that lets you scare fish in a pond by creating ripples in the water with your fingers, and Microsoft Surface Collage, a photo viewer based on the Microsoft Surface technology that lets sift through, stack, and shuffle your pictures as if they were on a table in front of you. You can rotate and resize them, and save the results as a collage, as I did with these pictures of the lovely ladies of the Legion of Super-Heroes:
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I Don’t Understand Anything

As I mentioned, I reinstalled Windows on my laptop last weekend. It went okay, for the most part, though it naturally took a while to reinstall all of the programs I wanted back on it – plus some new ones – and to get back all of my customizations (even after doing the Windows Easy Transfer thing, which lets you transfer over your OS and application preferences).

One area where I had some trouble, though, was in reinstalling some of the applications from HP. My laptop is a Tablet PC, with a dual-mode touch-screen that lets you use either a stylus or your fingers, and HP pre-loaded it with some applications designed to take advantage of the touch capabilities.

I didn’t use them often, but I figured I should have them anyway. However, with the exception of the Wireless Assistant and the DVD software, I couldn’t get anything to install. It would act like it was installing, but after finishing, the programs weren’t actually there. Basically, the installer would create a folder with nothing but icons in it. And I mean that literally – actual icons, as in .ico files, the little pieces of artwork that the actual icons themselves consist of. No executables, no .dll files. Just icons.

As I said, I don’t use those apps often, but I wanted them installed, especially since one of them is necessary for accessing the webcam. Which, again, I don’t use often, but…I have it, therefore I want it to work. I’ve since learned that other programs – Windows Live Movie Maker, OneNote, Skype – are able to access the webcam and use it, but I don’t have the handy little program that would let me quickly take pictures and videos and apply different effects to them.

Oh well.

One problem I had before the reinstall, which I’d hoped would go away, involved the touch screen. If I left “touch” – as in, using your finger – turned on, it would engage in “ghost clicks.” Just randomly clicking on the desktop as if it were being touched. This could be a problem, as it frequently would launch things like the control panel, and a series of ghost clicks could start uninstalling important programs and OS components. In the past, I dealt with that by simply turning off touch, and simply using the stylus as my input device.

But, as with my webcam, if I have it, I want it to work. So, having reinstalled Windows and installed a new driver, I’d hoped the problem had gone away. Alas, it hadn’t. I decided to try downloading the driver directly from the touch-screen manufacturer. While there, I noticed that they’d apparently added all sorts of multi-touch enhancements, letting you do all kinds of interesting things by pressing one, two, three, or four fingers on the screen at a time.

Neat.

So I downloaded their driver, and, per the instructions, uninstalled the HP driver. This necessitated a reboot. Once that was done, I launched the setup for the N-Trig driver…which promptly failed, saying it couldn’t detect any N-Trig hardware.

Annoyed, I checked Device Manager, and, sure enough, there was an exclamation point on something called “Unknown Device.”

Several reboots, a System Restore, another System Restore, and a lot of Googling later, I completely powered down the computer, took out the battery, let it sit for a while, then started back up.

This time Device Manager showed “DuoSense HID” under the “Digitizers” category. Yay! So I launched the driver setup, which actually started to install without saying it couldn’t detect the hardware, which looked promising. So I wandered off and let it do its thing, only to come back some time later to find that the installation had failed.

Multiple power cycles later I tried again, and this time it came up and complained that the old software was still installed and that if I clicked “Yes” it would remove the old software and shut down the computer, and that it would resume setup once I turned the computer back on.

Daring to hope once more, I proceeded.

Success!

Except…

I don’t have all of that multi-touch coolness that I’m supposed to have. Putting multiple fingers on the screen – except when doing the standard “pinching” to zoom out/in thing – doesn’t do jack.

I found another driver on HP’s site that says that it adds the multi-touch capability, but I’m wary of trying this again. I even downloaded and installed some “wintab” API that’s supposed to make the “N-act Hands-On Gestures Vocabulary” work, but no dice.

So I don’t understand. Is there something I’m missing? Presumably the drivers I (finally) installed were what was given to HP, who customized them in some fashion, but I’m pretty sure those were the drivers I had installed back when this whole mess started.

I don’t understand anything.

In any case, despite wanting to be able to do cool stuff like what you see below, I’m going to leave well enough alone for now. After all, it was bad enough when I thought that maybe I’d somehow fried the actual hardware. Most of my Googling on the subject had talked about the only resolution being to return it to HP and have them put on an entirely new screen. Which is fine, if, unlike me, your warranty didn’t expire a month and a half ago…

Edit: Ahhh...okay, maybe I understand something. Looked at the N-Trig page again and found something that says that a trial download of N-act Hands-On Gestures Vocabulary will be available in the “summer months of 2010.”

(Don't) Trust Your Intuition

As mentioned yesterday, I decided that I simply had to spend some amount of money.
Buying the Touch didn’t really cut into my bonus, as it was essentially purchased with the disposable income left over from my regular paycheck after paying bills.
So far I like it – I went with the 16 GB, which means that I can fit a lot more music on it than I could on my 2 GB Nano, obviously.
The interface is decent, and the underlying OS is pretty responsive. The multi-touch screen does actually make for some intuitive interaction, which is always touted as one of the strengths of Apple products.
That being said, John C. Dvorak recently wrote an article about how there really is no such thing as “intuitive” technology, and I tend to think that he has a point.
In particular, you run into the question of “Intuitive to whom?”
As a veteran PC user, there are certain approaches to interacting with anything computer-related that strike me as intuitive, though to a Mac user, or a complete newbie, they might very well seem counter-intuitive. Of course, I’m also a veteran Mac user, so making the shift isn’t really that difficult.
However, where the intuitive – to pretty much everyone who isn’t a Luddite or from a pre-industrial society – aspects of using the Touch end is when you run into the brick wall that is iTunes.
All of the non-Apple mp3 players I’ve had in the past generally worked like this: you plug it into the computer, the computer recognizes it as a storage device, and you drag and drop content directly onto it.
From pretty much any standpoint – Mac user, PC user, Linux user, etc. – that is extremely intuitive.
Much more so than having to launch a specific application (after you download and install it, along with another application that you may or may not want, but have no option not to download and install), telling it where to look for the files you want to put on the device, then going through a rather lengthy “synching” process.
Again, that leads to the question of “Intuitive to whom?” In the case of iTunes, I would say that the answer to that question is “Certainly not the end-user.”
Granted, this isn’t a particularly arduous process, but it certainly lacks the elegance of simply grabbing what you want and dragging it over over to where you want it.
Really, where intuitiveness comes into play with the iTunes model is from the perspective of a product/service provider. Tying your end-users to a particular, proprietary application, which you can then use as a means of delivering additional for-pay services to them, is incredibly “intuitive.”
Still, those quibbles – and some irritation over the way it organizes, or more to the point, doesn’t organize photos, which I won’t get into – aside, the Touch is a decent product.
Given that, minus the actual phone and the camera, the Touch is essentially an iPhone, I did consider actually taking that additional step and going all out and buying an iPhone.
The main reason I didn’t, though, is that it wasn’t all that long ago that I dropped a considerable chunk of change on my current phone. Given that there’s nothing wrong with my phone, I see no need to replace it.
(Technically, there wasn’t anything “wrong” with my Nano, either, but I did want something with a higher storage capacity.)
Beyond that, while I have come around to liking the whole smart phone concept, I don’t really see the need to combine my cell phone with my mp3 player, and I believe that there’s something to be said for having distinct devices that perform specific functions, even if there is some overlap.
(And of course, there are my objections about the inherent pretentiousness of iPhone ownership, and my desire to avoid diving any deeper into Apple fanboyishness, but those are just knee-jerk reactions and not actually major considerations, or really in any way serious, for that matter.)
In any case, so far it seems like a worthwhile gadget to have dropped some money on.
Speaking of which, after discussing it with Scott – who concluded that I would “use the hell out of it” – and watching some YouTube videos of it in action yesterday, I’ve decided that once I get my refund, I’m going to drop a huge chunk of change on a Wacom Cintiq.
I was initially thinking about going with the more affordable 12” model, but eventually said, “Screw it,” and decided to go all – or at least mostly – out and get the 20.1” version, which I think has the advantage over the 21” model in that it’s widescreen. Not to mention the fact that it’s $500 cheaper.
Kathleen made a suggestion, which I’m seriously considering: register Heroic Portraits as an LLC, which would allow me to claim the cost of buying the Cintiq as a business expense.
It’s a good idea, and one definitely worth pursuing. The only problem is that it leads to the inevitable conflict between practicality and impatience.
To wit: I want the Cintiq now!
(Well, not right this second, but as soon as I have the refund money. Okay, I do want it right this second, but I’m able to wait until I get the refund, but waiting beyond that? I’m not so sure.)