Working on a new Illustrator tutorial but your equipment slowing you down? For any artist or designer who wants to upgrade an old tablet to something that more resembles a pro graphics tablet, Tablet PC Mouse is a no-brainer; it massively enhances performance by adding any number of custom on-screen buttons, enabling you to quickly and easily switch between tools without having to plug a keyboard and mouse into your tablet.
Since we first looked at it a few months ago it's had a number of improvements; it's now out of beta and available to buy on the Windows Store, and it has a new name: Tablet Pro.
It's the perfect way to turn your Surface Pro into a fully-featured graphics tablet, complete with a virtual mouse and gesture commands, a zoom desktop feature and simultaneous pen and touch functionality.
Tablet Pro now works seamlessly with Maya and Zbrush, allowing 3D artists to get in on the action just as easily as 2D artists.
It's also picked up plenty of fans over the past few months, with artists from companies such as ILM, Codemasters and Blizzard providing support and helping the developers test new features to ensure that everything works perfectly.
There are plenty of new features on the way, too: upcoming improvements to Tablet Pro include PNG input support for buttons, a fully adjustable and scalable Artist Pad, accelerometer-based action and gesture mapping, directional multifunction buttons and a radial assist pad mapped to a pen button, which opens at the pen tip. There's also the promise of a huge secret feature that will change everything, completely. Exciting!
You can download the basic app for free, and its various features are available as in-app purchases; either buy the ones you need, or save money by getting a full package product licence – including a game pad feature for when you fancy a bit of a break – for $25.99.
Words: Jim McCauley
Jim McCauley is a writer, editor and occasional podcaster, and is available for space parties.
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