Wacom Cintiq 21UX

Has anyone used or tried out a Wacom Cintiq 21UX or its smaller cousin the

17UX with SolidWorks? It's a 21" LCD with a clear tablet over the top. Kind of like back to the drafting board, although a really small one.
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Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"
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Jerry Steiger
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I use a Wacom Intuos 2, which I am guessing works the same way I use it quite a bit for relatively low precision work, it makes a nice change for my worn out right hand (I use a left mouse for everything else)

The only issue I have, (which frankly I cannot drum up the energy to resolve) is that there is significant keybounce when using the RMB functions. For some reason, this is really bad over the SW graphics area, but it is almost never a problem over the feature manager area. This means that all graphics area RMB functions are best (only?) done with a mouse (which by the way occasionally also exibits keybounce issues)

On one occasion I have had a problem using a RMB function while performing file folder management. The current folder disappeared and was later found one level up, so in this case the keybounce was more than a mere annoyance. Yeah, I spose I should call someone about it malcolm

Reply to
albert

Recently on a customer visit I was told that SW needs to do a better job of supporting tablets. I'm naive' on the subject - my last tablet was on ME10 in the late 1980's and I've never found a reason to return. Do you think that there is a fair amount of users out there that are using SW with a tablet as there main input device? What could we (SW) do to better support them? I guess the one answer that I would anticipate is that we could be doing things with our UI that better matched the specific features of a tablet or maybe it's more a matter of layout of the UI.

Regards

Mark Biasotti SolidWorks

Reply to
mbiasotti

I have a 6x8 Intuos 3. When in SW, I use it with the mouse exclusively. I don't see this as a limitation of SW at all. It would be tantamount to saying that Windows is limited because you can't work effectively with the stylus. Which I find to be true. The stylus is horrible for things like double-clicking, RMB, and scrolling. Maybe I just need to spend more time getting used to it.

My opinion is that the stylus is a very specialized input device designed to capture the motions of a pencil or brush, something which SW almost never needs to do (Matt's example is the exception, and I'm not even 100% on that). If somebody want's to use a stylus as a crippled mouse, then I suppose features could be added to make up the difference. Instead of using the wheel to zoom, hold a hotkey and drag with the stylus. Use a different hotkey to substitute for mmb drag to rotate the view, and so on, for all the things a stylus can't currently do.

Now then, the nicer tablets (like my Intuos3) have special features to alleviate some of this. I can use touch strips on the side of the tablet to zoom in SW. They work about as well as the touch pad on a laptop computer.

I wonder what it is that this particular customer wanted to do with a tablet. My first exposure to a tablet was on AutoCAD, where there was a fully customizable menu system in a tablet overlay. This seems largely redundant, since the advent of menus in windowing apps.

There is one area where a stylus might exceed a mouse in SW (other than emulating brushes and such), and it has nothing to do with drawing smooth curves. My stylus has pretty good tilt sensitivity. If I could spear a component with my stylus, and use the tilt control to rotate it as well as simply dragging it, that would be pretty cool. The same goes for view rotation. If the other limitations of using a stylus were addressed, and this was added, my mouse might actually begin to collect some dust.

I still don't see this as a serious limitation of SW. I can do what I need to do, and efficiently. Maybe that's because my tablet has a fully functional mouse (5 buttons + scroll wheel). A lot of tablets don't. I think people with those tablets should plug in a mouse with more than 2 buttons.

Since I don't use the stylus as my primary input device, I could be missing something.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

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