Please add a "pen only" toggle as an express key option!
Got cats? Got kids? Got shaky hands? Then you've probably also got a workflow problem when your ExpressKeys or touch responsive tablet gets extra input. Windows open and close, setting menus pop up, things zoom in and out, Pantone codes insert themselves in meeting chat...
It's enough to make a person (me, and certainly thousands of others) go without a huge amount of the functionality that led us to choose Wacom in the first place. It's just too much hassle to fix little things that go wrong, and the potential for catastrophic loss with some settings is too much to contemplate.
My solution: Offer an ExpressKey setting that toggles between the currently loaded preferences file and a state where only the pen/mouse and that one key are enabled. So when we need to use touch or one of the other ExpressKeys/Ring, we can tap that one button, do whatever we need to do, and lock it back down. Or even better, we can keep everything enabled (cue the choirs of angels!) and just hit that one key to lock it down when we see the cat coming to take a nap in his favorite workday spot.
It won’t 100% eliminate the potential for accidental input, but it will dramatically reduce it while allowing us to make use of all the great features that Wacom tablets offer. And by making it an ExpressKey setting, we can assign it to whichever key we want, with no hardware changes necessary.
This should be quite easy to accomplish compared to most feature requests, because the main elements have already been created.
- Devices without a physical switch already have an ExpressKey option to enable/disable touch input.
- In the options menu (at least in Windows, and presumably on Mac) there is already a one-click way to disable "all ExpressKeys, touch rings, rocker rings and touch strips" at once.
- It is already possible to save/load sets of button settings.
How about it, Wacom? It wouldn’t have any impact on those who don’t need it, but for those who do, it would be a HUGE win.
Wacom community friends, thanks for taking the time to read and consider my suggestion. Please let me know if this would help you too, and if you have ideas for improvements!
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Hi Paula Rewa,
I too often have some furry cameos in my video meetings. Often a double feature.
I completely understand where you are coming from as this has lead me to completely disable touch for most times and pretend that ExpressKeys don't exist.
Not sure how the execution of this would look though. I guess what we would want is something more akin to a profile manager and the ability to switch profiles at the touch of a key. So you could use a "solo" profile and a different profile for when you have company.
Either that or a "toggle all but [insert function]".
I will send this feedback to the devs.
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Awesome, thanks for sending it along!
And yes, that's exactly what I'm picturing. So you'd set up your device with everything you want to use activated (including the physical switch for touch, on devices that have one) and assign the new "lockdown" action to one Express key. In my case, it would be the one at the top, which my years of field testing tells me is the least likely to be stepped on by my cats. Pressing it once would switch to a state (either an alternative profile set up by the user, or a standard "only pen/mouse and the assigned key" profile that could be included in the software). Pressing it again would return it to the main profile with everything set up according to the user's preference.
Please keep me posted, and I hope you have a fantastic day!
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