Best Practices for Touchscreen or Wacom Intuos Tablet?

  • 14 December 2020
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I have this dream of being able to fluidly and seamlessly present and work with a group using Miro and Zoom, and what I would really like to do is to use both touch to navigate the Miro workspace, and a pen or stylus to write and draw, just as I would on an actual whiteboard.

I'm hoping for a single interface to address both.

I have tried using a “standard” touch screen monitor, but found the one I tried was only sensitive to a finger tip and the drawing/writing detail was not fine.

I have a Wacom Intuos tablet, but have found Palm Rejection with this tablet is not supported in the Miro interface. When using the stylus I have to turn off Touch manually with a switch on the side of the tablet otherwise when I rest my hand on the tablet to draw, it zooms and pans the Miro workspace unpredictably.  I find this is clunky and slow when I am trying to get into the flow of working and presenting to a group.

My current workaround is to use a mouse for navigation, and then the tablet for writing. I find this slow and cumbersome for me to switch modes, plus each time I switch it takes me time and focus to sync my brain between drawing on the tablet surface and seeing where the marks align on the screen.

It’s hard to get into a flow state with this attention to manually switching modes.

Is anyone else successfully using touch and pen/stylus while facilitating collaborative groups?  If so, what is your hardware setup?

 


1 reply

Hello Steve, I'm new to Miro and also using a Wacom tablet. I don't get the palm rejection issue you mentioned but my Wacom is having some problems with the touch on. It registers clicks even when I'm not even touching it. Because of this, I decided to keep the touch off. I've tried a few setups with Miro. The one I like the most is as follows:

  1. I created an application-specific setting for Miro in the Wacom preferences;
  2. Set one of the pen's buttons as "navigation > pan/zoom". This allows me to move around the board by pressing the pen button and hovering around. if I keep the button pressed and put the pen on the tablet I can drag up and down to zoom;
  3. Set one of the tablet's buttons as "keyboard > keystroke > p" to choose the pen tool easily;
  4. Set another tablet button as "keyboard > keystroke > v" to be able to go back to the selection tool;
  5. Set the pen eraser as "keyboard > keystroke > delete".

I prefer this setup over the others because it puts the move and zoom functions in one button, leaving the tablet's buttons free to use with other shortcuts. One drawback is the cursor jumps when I release the button, this happens because the cursor freezes in the place the movement begins but when the button is released it has to move to the pen's location.

The other setups are similar to each other. The difference is mostly in the navigation mode you chose.

  1. Set a pen button as "navigation > pan/ scroll";
  2. Set a tablet button as "keyboard > modifier > command" to use zoom with the pan/ scroll button (replace command with control in Windows);
  3. Set other shortcuts you need, like "p" or "v"

The same drawback shows here and the cursor jumps at the end of the movement. Two other useful navigation functions:

  1. navigation > scroll
  2. navigation > pan/ scroll (legacy)

Didn't give me smooth scrolling but could work well in your system. Also, setting a tablet button as "keyboard > modifier > space" to move around the board is an option, but you would use two tablet buttons, one to move around and another to zoom. I couldn't provide a solution to use touch input but maybe one of the suggestions can help.

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