Support for Intuos Pen & Touch?

[tiltowait]

I'm thinking of upgrading from my Wacom Bamboo to an Intuos Pen & Touch. Will AP and AD also support the touch gestures for zooming in and panning? If not, I probably won't bother with the upgrade.

[MattP]

They will work, but do be aware that what Wacom actually did with their touch support is not the same as what Apple did with their gesture-based touch support... Apple detect gestures and send OS-specific events that signal a specific type of gesture is happening (it tells the program 'I'm starting to do a pinch gesture about this point', for example) so we can provide specific code for this, whereas Wacom detects in their driver that you have done a gesture then sends a scroll up/down message or a virtual keystroke to the operating system... so you get separate steps for each stage of your interaction because the application doesn't know if you just scrolled with your mouse wheel or not - I don't know if that makes sense to you or not?

 

Basically, it does work and it works fine, but it's not the same level of experience as when you use Apple's trackpads. I don't know why Wacom chose to implement it like this, but I imagine it's because the same method works for any version of Windows too - and they didn't have the notion of 'gestures' back then.

 

I do regularly try to pan the screen on my Cintiq 13HD by touching it (which it doesn't support!), so maybe if it just worked it would be a fantastic productivity booster whether it was a little notchy or not! :)

 

Thanks,

Matt

[maritan]

I assume these same issues exist when you use the Intuos pro with other apps, say, Photoshop?

[tiltowait]

Thanks for the reply. So from what you're saying, I shouldn't expect a 1:1 relationship with the gestures and actions on-screen?

[MattP]

@tiltowait - They definitely happen when you do something - but they aren't as smooth as Apple's own gestures because they're actually turned into discrete steps of actions, rather than one long gesture event... Use your mouse wheel to scroll up and down in the view, then use your trackpad to pan around - it's much smoother, but both actions did something you'd expect. That's basically what you'll get when you use the touch stuff from your Wacom, if I remember correctly...

 

@maritan - The behaviour is just how their touch stuff works - it's the same in any application that responds to it.