MICROSOFT SURFACE DIAL
Price: $100 (£TBC)
Move over, mouse and keyboard. Take a seat, Surface Pen. Microsoft has a new input device: the Surface Dial, a silver hockey puck designed to make life simple for digital artists.
Mice move, pens draw; the Dial turns. If you tap it a radial menu appears. Turn the Dial, and you can quickly access the corresponding shortcut. It’s as simple as that.
The Surface Dial was designed as a peripheral for the Surface Studio. It will work with the Surface Pro 3, Pro 4 and Book as well, but with the Studio, it can control the tablet while resting on the screen – an interaction that isn’t there on the older tablets.
In some sense, though, it is a solution in search of a problem. Within the Maps application, the Dial can currently only be used off-screen, as a sort of mouse replacement. Spin it one way, and the map zooms out. Tap it and enable ‘Tilt’, and the Dial controls the map’s orientation.
For artists who spend their days using a drawing application, however, you can begin to see the potential. Consider the various gradients and percentages that can be applied to the opacity of a line, or the contrast of a scene. Generally, these controls are governed by slider bars in a control panel. An artist may have to adjust one, then draw, making adjustments back and forth until everything looks right. With Surface Studio you can have one hand on the Dial and the other on the Surface Pen, even leaning on the screen. Adjustments can be made quickly – and even, reportedly, on the fly, though it depends on the app. At the Microsoft event, executives demonstrated a CAD app that required a stepped adjustment: draw, adjust the thickness of the line, then draw again. Other apps, however, will enable Dial users to draw one continuous stroke, adjusting the properties of the line as it’s being drawn.
A niche audience
In 2012, Microsoft flirted with a radial menu for OneNote, and the Dial is that design motif in physical form. We wouldn’t call the
peripheral a necessity – in fact, for basic tasks it simply isn’t as fast or functional as a mouse’s thumbwheel. In PowerPoint, for example, one of Dial’s options is to zoom the window. But the ‘tap’ on the device is a bit more than a tap: the Dial requires you to hold it down for about a second before it triggers the radial menu. In some applications, where the mousewheel is already programmed for the same action, the Dial becomes useless.
In a specialised artistic application, however, the Dial becomes far more useful. As a massive tablet, reclined in a way that gives the artist full access to a digital painting, fumbling with a keyboard shortcut or control panel is a chore. In that sense, the Dial smooths out the workflow and keeps the artist’s attention focused on their creation.
That’s a pretty limited niche, however. We think it’s fair to say that most Surface users rarely touch the Surface Pen, and even fewer will use the Dial. But we also expect that Microsoft’s odd little puck will probably attract a cult following.