Henry Stahle Posted May 8, 2019 Share Posted May 8, 2019 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..) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walt.farrell Posted May 9, 2019 Share Posted May 9, 2019 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. Quote -- Walt Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases PC: Desktop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Laptop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU. iPad: iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard Mac: 2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Henry Stahle Posted May 9, 2019 Author Share Posted May 9, 2019 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.