Working on Surface Pro using Radial Menu

[Henry Stahle]

Affinity Photo is not very user friendly working on Surface Pro. I have the latest Surface and really love to see a better UI for make things more easy for me as a Surface Pro artist. In Painter I can switch my interface from default to simple and get a very good workspace on the tablet. In Krita there is a shortcuts menu pop up to make things easy. Clip Studio is also  good as well as Photoshop. The coming Adobe Gemini will make things easy on the Surface, Painter will probably make some new app that is good on Surface, as good as Sketchbook Pro probably.

Now I can use Affinity Photo by using Radial Menu, that I highly recommend. It works right out of the box, it is just to install it and start working. I added a TAB toggle button on the menu (see my illustration) to get the full interface "clean" for sketchin and painting without the interface distraction. 

If you use Affinity on Surface and have not yet used Radial Menu, do it! I Think you will like it as much as I do.

Microsoft has published the free code for the RadialMenu so someone that knows programming can customize the code to the program desired. Is there someone in the Affinity team that can do it? Or someone else?  It would be nice to have an Affinity Radial Menu for Surface while waiting for an UI like the one on iOS for Surface. 

(Pardon my English if it is bad..)

 

[walt.farrell]

Thanks; that looks interesting.

In case you're not aware, Affinity Photo and Designer already support the Microsoft Surface Dial, which is hardware-based way to get that function.

[Henry Stahle]

5 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks; that looks interesting.

In case you're not aware, Affinity Photo and Designer already support the Microsoft Surface Dial, which is hardware-based way to get that function.

Thank you Walt, 

I am aware of that Dial thing, but since Surface Pro is a tablet, not only used on (or mostly not) on a table top, the Dial is no alternative to a well designed UI. The Dial was designed with Studio in mind, not Surface, I guess. Using Dial sitting in my sofa is no good idea...

Surface, just like iPad, is depending on touch and gesture input. I got the keyboard attached to my Surface when writing this sitting next to my heavy duty desktop computer, so I can use all keyboard shotcuts and such. When I use it for art, I remove the keyboard to make the drawing and painting comfortabe and ergonomic good. Surface is a sketching and handwriting ideas tablet and is better of without keyboard for me. (Sometimes I use it as a laptop computer of course..:)

When doing heavy work I sit at my desktop using my Cintiq and need no Surface Dial. Affinity Photo works great at my desktop with my Wacom input.

There are some very good Surface software in the sketching / painting / illustrating line. Probably the coming Adobe Gemini will beat them all in functionality and workspace. I have tested the Photoshop Sketch for some time so I can understand what Adobe is going to offer.  By consulting a large group of digital artists Adobe's developing team have found out what we need. And one thing is a good UI to work in! 

Sadly I have read some answer from the Affinity team that they are not considering a tablet UI design for Windows tablet. Only for iOS. So that is probably where I have to make a going-back- to-Adobe decision when the Gemini is out.