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Windows 10 v1709 AMA - Why has Creators Update Fall treated creators so badly?

Brass Contributor

I'd like to know how the incomprehensible change in stylus behaviour, which severely impacts those who primarily input with pen, was ever considered a positive?

 

The multiple adverse effects are cropping up via user complaints, which a quick web search will reveal. Rather than provide a summary list I can illustrate the ill-thought out nature of the change using just one example.

 

Pen flicks and navigation has been rendered completely unusable but yet is still a component part of Windows 10. Personally I've relied on pen flicks as a productivity tool for as long as I've been a pen user - which is now over ten years. At a stroke, ironically, this feature has been broken through incompetence or neglect - either fit so take your pick.

 

Please provide an answer or even better a timetable for reversing this calamity.

 

Regards

 

Patrick

 

P.S. Any typos entirely the fault of the 2nd incomprehensible decision to replace the fully featured on-screen keyboard with a finger friendly but condensed keyboard. Doesn't the Windows 10 engineering team have any pen-centric members on board?

69 Replies

I wish all tablet PC devices had an off Switch. I'm on a Surface Pro 4. Is it possible to investigate if that option alters any particular registry key? So we at least can figure out a hack to completely disable it. Otherwize I guess my next tablet PC willl be a Wacom Mobile studio pro, or something like that.

 

There must be a way to manually Switch it off.

I have searched the registry like crazy trying to find something that would turn off the new behavior on a Surface Pro.  No luck.  :(  I wish there was.  Another alternative to the Wacom MobileStudio Pro that's coming out at the end of this month is the HP ZBook X2. It's pretty pricey, but that was made in partnership with Wacom, so it has their same drivers, pen, and programmable bezel buttons. Check out those specs though. :)

Hmmmm, You just gave me an idea!!! First thing tomorrow when I arrive at work I will connect an intuos pro to my surface, install drivers and try disable windows ink that way. Since wacom figured out how to disable this abomination, an external wacom device might do the trick as long as you can install the drivers and use the wacom settings to turn it off. It's worth buying a cheap external drawing wacom tablet just to get the off switch.

Fall update, has had a negative effect on the pen in tablet mode, previously used as a pointer, like a mouse, with click ability like a mouse, now this function is flawed not working properly can not point to a letter in a word just the front or end of the word, then use keyboard arrows, highlight text click to bring up drop down deselect...so no more cut and paste.

This is on everyday use, eg emailing, ms edge, ms store just using the pen becomes more of a hindrance, so surface pro is real a laptop now, I dropped samsung galaxy note for pathetic support and upgrading making 2-3 year old devices obsolete, dumb, please do not go the same way windows/ms. 

I tried connecting a wacom tablet to the surface pro 4 and disable windows ink. It didn't have any effect on the Surface Pen though, only for the Wacom Pen. Figures! I was hoping it was a system wide block of windows ink in selected apps.

After a bit of investigation I found some controls for pen properties in the registry.

There's a few group policy settings in GP edit but nothing in regards to scrolling.
User Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Tablet PC/

There are some pen settings in this key. (But pretty much the same settings you can find elsewhere)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Pen\SysEventParameters

Wisp.dll seems to be the related to windows ink as it stands for 'Windows Ink Service Protocol'

After a bit of googling I found an old thread that might hold some further clues, but I need to investigate further if it can help in this case.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1260

So far 1703 is still very usable and I don't plan to go back to 1709 (FCU) any time soon if if this isn't resolved. If I some time in the future will be forced to update, without any fix for this maybe last resort will be one of these options.

* Getting help making an AutoHotKey script that translates all pen input in certain apps to mouse input. I'm already using an AHK-script to enable hover right click for the barrel button.

* Contacting some experts at Either TabletPro or LazyNezumi to help create a 3rd party app that can catch pen input and convert it to mouse input, in certain selected apps.

TabletPro a really nice tool for Tablet users, that can do all sort of things like converting touch input to mouse, adding touch button interface etc, so I bet they could do the same for pen.

LazyNezumi captures pen input and can apply smoothing and many other effects in various drawing softwares, so they might have some expertese in how to get around the pen scrolling.

I really hope Microsoft Ink Team get their act together and fix this. I don't wanna rely on 3rd party apps and scripts and hacks to make my pen a usuable tool. If there's no other option, maybe a crowd funded project to pay some experts to create what we're after is the only option.

Hi Ricard,
You've done pretty throughout research here. I was already thinking of going through Factory reset for my Surface Book, but have to finish so much work which now takes much more time. May be on Christmas I will be doing this instead of celebrating. I regret doing Reset this PC without saving personal files, because now I can't just return to 1703. I even regret buying my Surface Book with Performance Base (i7 16GB 512GB model). Here in Europe it's 150% of the US price, so I'm not going to buy any new device soon. Now I'm really thinking Wacom Mobile Studio would be much better choice. I will think twice (no, even trice) before buying anything new from Microsoft.
Adobe already released the hotfix for their Illustrator CC 2018 regarding some performance issues. But it does not fix any pen issues, because the problem is not on the Adobe side.
The initial CC2018 release date was the same as of FCU, and they delivered the hotfix in 2 weeks.
Microsoft released another cumulative update the same time with no fixes regarding the pen. I'm not sure we will see any fixes till next big update in spring 2018. But it's more probably we will get even more issues instead of any fixes.
I've noticed I'm using my Galaxy Note 8 for marking screenshots for developers more and more. Never thought I will be doing my work on the phone. Probably because it has the S-Pen made with collaboration with Wacom.

I recently bought Note 8 and it is way more usable tool when it comes to inking.

It has better latency than my first gen Surface Book.
And it has better recognition for typing.

I was checking the new Surface Pro and the new Pen is amazing, but what kind of an idiot I would be if I bought the new generation when after so long time Ms didn't even confirmed the issue and did not tell us when it is going to be addressed!

You treat your customers with insane amount of disrespect!

you advertised surface as productive tool and you kill it by YOUR own stupidity and you behave like everything is great.

But no. Everything is wrong when I can be more productive on a phone than on my Surface which I loved working on.

Fix THE BLOODY INKING ASAP.

My patience has limits when it comes to work related tasks.

t his is PRODUCTION build so don't treat us as some open BETA testers!!!

I agree with you.

Surface products are marketed as Pen centric Professional tools with a pretty hefty price tag, and not so much regular consumer products. With that in mind it boggles me that there's so little customization, to pen behaviour within the system or Microsoft's own apps.

Once again OneNote UWP app, as an example. Devs just assumed that people with pen want to draw when they use a pen. I don't wanna draw. I wanna select, copy, and edit text with the pen. If I wanna draw or scribble I will use that setting myself. This is a clear indication Microsoft is deciding how you should use the pen, and not giving you any options to make settings that fit your workflow.

I get that regular consumers want to use the pen for scrolling when browsing the web, or take some notes in OneNote while in class, but for Power Users like us who use pen for everything we need to have it working efficiently, and we need to have options to set up behaviours to make our workflow as comfortable as possible.

This is where Wacom products get it. They have an Off switch. Options to Turn off Windows ink for certain applications because people need to be able to work in their own way, without lousy forced functionality getting in their way.

I hope microsoft take note of that and see that the Pen is a Pro tool, and needs customization, off switches etc. 

My current settings for pen is (1703):
* Flicks turned off, because it sometimes triggers when I don't want it to.
* Pen, Tap & Hold for right clicks, turned off because it can cause input lag, and trigger right clicks when drawing slowly in certain apps.
* Use Pen button as Right click. Turned off, because I prefer to have the pen doing a right click while hovering, so I'm using an AutoHotkey script to enable that functionality.
* Text selection I want it to be mouse like. Drag to select a span of text. Double tap to select word. Tripple tap, to select paragraph.
* Windows Ink workspace, disabled as it's not useful at all to me.

Pen Options that I'm currently missing (in FCU).
* System setting for hover right click.
* System setting to disable pen scrolling.
* System setting to not Ink by default in softwares like OneNote.
* System setting to have pen behave like mouse and not as touch for text selection.

I'm not comfortable at all with the FCU pen behaviour, and there is no way to change the behaviour anywhere. I don't know who WindowsInk is targeted at, but it's certainly not perofessionals. Maybe students and middle managers who wanna scroll pages, scribble and take notes on PDF files. NOT for creative professionals who use Pen intesively for Drawing, Text editing, copy, pase, selection, object manipulation, etc etc.

Same as all that have commented, here are the features that I missed before I rolled back out of 1709.  So sad to see such a large change to pen input without any thought for how people may be working.

In browsers:
- using pen to select text without a button press on the pen (Rosa in another thread commented about the detriment to our joints this will create, and repetitive motion syndrome is one of the reasons I use my pen instead of a mouse.)

- double tap to select a word

- triple tap to select a paragraph

 

I haven't checked for a while, but if the "Pen as mouse" instead of inking option is gone from the Office Apps, I'll miss that too.

 

And I don't use the Adobe apps frequently, but I see that someone has documented the issue with Illustrator and the new pen functionality.  I'll have that issue too.

 

I was recently in the Microsoft store and remember seeing that big artist version of a surface, and I can't imagine people who would purchase that computer would be okay with the pen acting liking a finger...

Hi Jerry-

 

I have already e-mailed the Windows Ink address, but wanted to add my voice to this conversation as well because I am so disappointed in this change.  The changes to how the scrolling/dragging behavior of the surface pen have made me hate my Surface.  I previously was very happy with it.

 

Let me be real clear, this change will prevent me from buying another Surface when it comes time to upgrade.  I also work in IT and this change will prevent me from recommending the product for purchase in my organization.  It ruins the experience of using the pen to interact with non-ink applications.

 

As another user said, I already have 10 fingers. I don't need an eleventh finger for scrolling, I am content to use any of the 10 that are already on my hands. Please, please, please roll back this behavior or make the option configurable.

 

Thanks,
Derrick

Monte, note that when I log in to the feedback hub, I can't see your feedback to upvote it.

Jerry,

2 weeks ago you mentioned "quirks in apps", and I want to ensure you understand that this is not quirky apps, this is the way the pen functions in the latest version of Microsoft.

 

Not just certain apps, not just Surface computers and their pens. 

 

I'm on a Lenovo X1 Yoga 2nd Gen, with a Lenovo ThinkPad pen, and have the same issues.  Everything fails, not just certain apps.

 

I want to add that as soon as I realized my processing of 180+ web pages was going to be hindered by the update I installed this weekend, I rolled back to 1703. While doing my work process, I realized that I probably would have encountered pen issues in Adobe DreamWeaver as well, but since that is near the end of the process, I hadn't discovered it yet.


Saw that 17063 dropped in the insider preview build fast ring. Did anyone have time to check if they fixed pen behaviour yet? 

I couldn't find anything about it in the release notes. 

 

 

Hey Microsoft. I got the perfect solution:

Revert back to old pen behaviour so professionals can get some actual work done with their styluses. And then start selling a capacitive Surface Crayon for people who want to use pen for scrolling.

This change is idiotic and needs to be fixed ASAP.

I already have a design proposal for the new surface crayon here.

surface_crayon.jpg

I'm reluctantly reaching the conclusion this disastrous change will not be reversed. Unfortunately, complainants appear astonishingly few and far between. Despite 1,200 views there are only 12 contributors and I'm unable to find any other blogs etc. which have this issue cooking up a storm.

 

It appears the severe damage this change has visited upon professional pen centric users is just too small a sector to have MS spending resources/time either investigating or reversing. I have also tried reaching back out to Jerry Koh, having received no acknowledgment from the WindowsInk team, but his trail has now gone cold. I also messaged Rick Rodriguez of Surface Pro Artist thinking this change might have adversely impacted his work flow and a well-placed blog post would garner more attention than it seems this forum is able to. Again, no response leading to my reluctant conclusion.

 

As I'm unable to revert to Creators Update I am now forced to radically reassess my options as the pen interface is now simply unbearable on a daily basis As MS's unique pen functionality has now been degraded to such a degree it is no better than Apple's iPad pencil or Samsung's Galaxy Android Wacom stylus I can at least compare and contrast on an, albeit crippled, level playing field. No doubt a Wacom device will be required for my photoediting work but my mainstay tablet/mobility solutions no longer need be confined to the penabled Windos tablet of yesteryear or MS's next great hope, the Surface family.

 

The long and the short for me is a likely move away from Windows OS but alas not replicated in sufficient numbers for MS to notice or care.

I have staunchly stayed with Microsoft, despite the ridicule of my cyber security peers. I suppose I will start investigating creating a work build of a linux distro that provides all the functionality I need. I know my play environment (Steam) exists and probably is improved on Linux. Most things are, and the linux community is far more responsive to professional needs.

I have been on pen-abled Windows tablets since my first Acer C312x, and am just so surprised that the pen functionality I have used since Windows XP tablet would be changed so drastically without a thought of the customers that have been using pen/tablet functionality for 15 years.
Also, it has been publicly complained about since it's introduction in July, and no response. http://pocketnow.com/2017/07/29/windows-10-fall-creators-update

I've kept some of my pro tablets on the "Business" release ring for Windows Updates, and those thankfully haven't gotten the broken "Fall Creators Update" yet. Maybe other professional creators have deferred the update as well.

And I go back in time even further with the penabled Acer TravelMate C210 bought in 2007. After that revelation in user interface (pre iPhone launch) it was slate style all the way for me. 10 years later it looks like I'll now be saying bye to my final Windows slate style tablet PC.

 

All good things come to an end and it's been a fantastic ride up until the last month or so.