Comments | shatterstripes: A Young Lady’s Illustration Primer, or, Peggy buys a Surface.

shatterstripes

A Young Lady’s Illustration Primer, or, Peggy buys a Surface.

Jun 09, 2016 02:07

This Sunday, I suddenly found myself thinking “I want to be able to work in Illustrator on a tablet badly enough to deal with Windows”.

I’ve avoided running Windows for my entire computing life, which stretches back to before MS-DOS existed, so this was a pretty surprising thought.

My first impulse was towards a Wacom Cintiq Companion; after ( Read more... )

windows, illustrator, surface, magic sketchbook

Comments 9

(The comment has been removed)

shatterstripes June 9 2016, 23:51:29 UTC

It's not like the Surface has a ton of ports either. USB3, DisplayPort, SD card, proprietary connector at the bottom for a keyboard, and headphones, vs Lightning and headphones.

Oh and also I think the power plug might be able to carry data, it's got like 8 pins.

I would have loved to get an iPad Pro ($800-1230 for a 13", plus $100 for the stylus, vs $800-1800 for a Surf Pro 4, mine was $1600), but it can't run Illustrator. And no mobile art app I've found can suffice for me. So instead I spent a couple days wrestling with an unfamiliar OS. Which is a hell of a lot less polished than iOS IMHO.

YMMV obviously.

merrycalliope June 9 2016, 18:56:27 UTC

That thing looks SO PRETTY. I'm used to the stupid hoops MS makes you jump through so the updating crap comes as no surprise. I also glad you are savvy to the security stuff. I'm sure you know to double-check and make sure that's all REALLY disabled.

It seems that even if you disable Cortana it she still runs as a background process. If you haven't already (sorry if I missed you mentioning it) open up the Task Manager (should still be ctl-alt-del hopefully) and check what's running. In true Microsoft fashion you will have to jump through hoops to truly disable some of the more useless crap but, ofc, there's plenty of help online.

I'm glad you seem happy with the result though! How is the pen tracking at the edges and corners of the tablet?

shatterstripes June 9 2016, 23:54:55 UTC

Pen tracking is pretty much flawless.

And yeah, I sat down and skimmed through ALL the settings in the Win10 settings app yesterday, turning off stuff that looked invasive. I think I've ended up in the task manager for other stuff and didn't see Cortana hanging around.

wootsauce June 11 2016, 02:04:41 UTC

I reeeeeeeaaaaally want one of these as a toy for sketching. Given that I mostly paint with physical old timey paint these days, I've talked myself into resisting temptation... So far.

shatterstripes June 11 2016, 03:26:41 UTC

From what I hear the Surface 3 is pretty good for art too, and is rather lower-cost than the 4...

wootsauce June 11 2016, 03:32:24 UTC

Yeah, a friend of mine got one for a different purpose and I played around with its pre-installed scribbling app, but I'd like to give it a try with some more robust software one of these days. I really miss the flexibility of digital sketching but just don't do a lot of it as of late because of various boring reasons, so I could see this being really useful. Plus, the laptop I travel with is huge and stupid. Hmm....

ultraken June 11 2016, 07:28:03 UTC

A few Windows things I use and recommend:
PatchMyPC (an all-in-one application installer and updater)
Classic Shell (to get rid of the live tiles in the start menu and get a Windows 7 style one instead)
7-Zip (extracts a wide variety of archive formats)
Notepad++ (far better than the stock Notepad)

shatterstripes June 13 2016, 01:20:53 UTC

Surprisingly enough, every Windows Is Being Dumbed Down! change that folks want to turn off on their desktops is exactly what works on a high-dpi tablet. Screengrab your start menu, shrink it to about 50%, and try accurately poking at it with your fingertip. Big live tiles that show me the time, battery life, and my calendar next to nice big icons I can poke with my finger? Hell yeah.

Thanks though, I'll have a look at the others!

ultraken June 13 2016, 01:25:28 UTC

Ah, true. I'm using Windows 10 on desktop and laptop computers where the live tiles aren't nearly as useful and dense-packed lists more beneficial. On a tablet touchscreen, the live tiles would be much more meaningful.

Overall, I don't have the hate-on for Windows 10 that some people have. I had to switch over to 10 at work and it went well enough that I switched over at home. Upgrading from 7 was relatively fast and easy, and I used similar privacy settings to the ones you used while setting up.