Tablet Pro and Artist Pad (Windows App Review)

Do you use a Windows tablet and sometimes find that the user interface for some drawing programs to be too small? For example Photoshop CS5 or CS6's menus or tool buttons, palette input boxes are too tiny to click with finger or stylus?

There's actually a Windows 10 tablet app called Tablet Pro that tries to solve the problem of using user interface on high resolution small-sized screens.

Tablet Pro is an app with several in-app products, each with different features. The feature that artists will find useful is Artist Pad (USD $9.99).

After you install and configure the buttons, you can have the whole set of shortcut buttons docked to the side of the screen. These shortcut buttons are linked to the keyboard shortcuts from Photoshop.

To configure the buttons, after installation, you should click and hold on the small mouse button at the taskbar. Then click on Layout where you get to map buttons and change button layouts.

This is the screen you get after clicking Layout.

Make sure from the Layout dropdown menu (circled in red), you choose Artist Pad: Large. By default, there aren't a lot of buttons. To add buttons, just clone the existing ones and modify from there. A comfortable number of buttons to have without making them too small is 27 (that's 9 rows with 3 columns).

It will take a while to map the buttons if you want a lot of buttons.

After that, just save the set of buttons into a file. I saved mine for use with Photoshop. You can create a different set for other software, e.g. Illustrator, and save that into another file.

Conclusion

Overall, I find that Artist Pad works well. It's incredibly convenient to have bigger buttons that you can easily access. It just makes Photoshop more usable on such a small screen. I've used it on both Surface 3 and Surface Pro 4.

The downside is if you're using a drawing software without many keyboard shortcuts, or there's no way for your to assign keyboard shortcuts within the drawing app itself, then Artist Pad will have limited use.

If you have any problems, just post a question on the Tablet Pro support forum.