



ORIGINAL POST

Regular visitors to the site will probably be wondering where I've been hiding for the last couple of weeks. Believe it or not, and despite my best efforts, SurfaceProArtist.com barely earns enough income to pay back its hosting costs, so as much as I'd love to do this full time, I've got to earn a living.

I'm starting up a new digital tv venture that takes me back to my roots as a network programmer so I won't be able to post here as frequently as I have over the past year. But I promise I'll be here as often as possible to bring you the latest developments in Windows tablet tech.

If any of you are interested in helping to pick up the slack, just drop me a line via the website contact form.

When Microsoft unexpectedly chose N-Trig over Wacom for the Surface Pro 3, many worried that the venerable digitizer tech giant would forego further development of its tantalizing but imperfect Enhanced Tablet PC drivers (also known Feel IT or Feel drivers).

I regularly check in with my contacts at Wacom and last week I was granted access to a preview build of a new driver version that should be available this week.

I've installed this new driver on both the Surface Pro 1 and 2, the Asus Vivotab Note 8 and the Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga and in every instance, the new edge calibration tool has resulted in much improved edge accuracy.

Using the 25-point calibration tool requires some patience and you will have to aim carefully to reach the tiny bullseye targets along the edges while holding your pen in a natural position. Fortunately, it's a simple matter to cancel and start over.

While I'm not a stickler for drawing all the way to the edge (that's what panning the canvas is for), edge accuracy is often an issue when trying to access menu bars, a hidden taskbar or the various Windows 8 Charms bars. On both my Surface Pro 2 and Thinkpad Yoga, I often had to choose between being accurate for most of the screen and being able to unhide the taskbar with my pen. For some reason, with previous calibration setups, I would always end up with just enough offset on the bottom of the screen that the pen would refuse to trigger the taskbar.

With the new edge calibration included with this driver, I am able to access both the hidden taskbar and the top-most menu items with my pen.

The radial menu was probably the most welcomed addition to the previous driver incarnation. But many of you fretted about having to sacrifice your single pen button which many use to reproduce right mouse button clicks.

The new driver solves this by allowing you to assign right clicks to the center of the radial menu. I tried to capture an image of this in action, but I couldn't trigger a frame grab with the radial menu active. And using my iPhone camera, the right click icon was overexposed.