Touchscreen future
Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2013 1:08 pm
Hi guys, I just want to share with you my experience with new touch tablet/laptops with music production
As you probably know, Microsoft put lots of energy in new touch oriented Windows 8 system. There are some good things and bad things. Bad is main idea of two system - PRO x86/x64 and lite RT based on arm, which is total failure, and hope it will be ditched with only x86/x64. And second bad thing is forcing of new Metro style apps, that also nobody is developing. But one positive thing is thing is that Windows 8 opened whole new chapter in PC era with gave us many new hardware touch solutions, and after that (I hope) all developers will adopt their apps for better work with touch.
One more important feature of those new tablet/laptops compared to iPad, beside ability to run normal DAWs is active digitizer pen . This is extremely useful feature, it works by detecting your pen, even before you touch your screen, and hardware know which input are from your fingers, and which from pen. So you can use your one hand to scroll, or zoom with your fingers, and on the same time use your second hand with pen to precisely input data, draw envelope, or add notes.
And whats more, pens are pressure sensitive so you could control you effects in three dimension with one touch, or maybe play drum pads with different velocity.
And regarding the new hardware, I can see 4 new categories:
10" - 12" Tablets with active digitisers, good for DJing, working on ideas on the go: Surface Pro, Sony Tab 11, Samsung Ativ 7 Pro
13"-15" Foldable laptops/tablets with enough power and pen , ideal for placing them in front of you and connecting them to second monitor, with 9.1 update you could have your clips in front of you with touchscreen, and arrange on second monitor. Coming soon are Sony Vaio Flip 13-15, and new Acer R7 (Haswell), Ativ Q
19-24" Portable All-in-One with Touchscreen, Or you can call them mega tablets, unfortunately right now without active digitizer : Dell XPS 19, Sony Tab 21
20"-27" Touch screen monitors, easy to fold on the table, (and there are first units with pen support) : Acer T272HUL
And lastly my short experience running Ableton Live on Samsung Ativ 7 - its awful and useless, its impossible to control anything, there is no support for pen, where there could be tons of new control possibilities. I'm not talking about complete rewrite of Live for Metro, I'm saying that Ableton should add better support for touch control, and active digitizers (wacom and N-trig) - with all those new hardware could incredibly improve work flow.
As you probably know, Microsoft put lots of energy in new touch oriented Windows 8 system. There are some good things and bad things. Bad is main idea of two system - PRO x86/x64 and lite RT based on arm, which is total failure, and hope it will be ditched with only x86/x64. And second bad thing is forcing of new Metro style apps, that also nobody is developing. But one positive thing is thing is that Windows 8 opened whole new chapter in PC era with gave us many new hardware touch solutions, and after that (I hope) all developers will adopt their apps for better work with touch.
One more important feature of those new tablet/laptops compared to iPad, beside ability to run normal DAWs is active digitizer pen . This is extremely useful feature, it works by detecting your pen, even before you touch your screen, and hardware know which input are from your fingers, and which from pen. So you can use your one hand to scroll, or zoom with your fingers, and on the same time use your second hand with pen to precisely input data, draw envelope, or add notes.
And whats more, pens are pressure sensitive so you could control you effects in three dimension with one touch, or maybe play drum pads with different velocity.
And regarding the new hardware, I can see 4 new categories:
10" - 12" Tablets with active digitisers, good for DJing, working on ideas on the go: Surface Pro, Sony Tab 11, Samsung Ativ 7 Pro
13"-15" Foldable laptops/tablets with enough power and pen , ideal for placing them in front of you and connecting them to second monitor, with 9.1 update you could have your clips in front of you with touchscreen, and arrange on second monitor. Coming soon are Sony Vaio Flip 13-15, and new Acer R7 (Haswell), Ativ Q
19-24" Portable All-in-One with Touchscreen, Or you can call them mega tablets, unfortunately right now without active digitizer : Dell XPS 19, Sony Tab 21
20"-27" Touch screen monitors, easy to fold on the table, (and there are first units with pen support) : Acer T272HUL
And lastly my short experience running Ableton Live on Samsung Ativ 7 - its awful and useless, its impossible to control anything, there is no support for pen, where there could be tons of new control possibilities. I'm not talking about complete rewrite of Live for Metro, I'm saying that Ableton should add better support for touch control, and active digitizers (wacom and N-trig) - with all those new hardware could incredibly improve work flow.
