CorelDRAW Ideas Portal
First, there are some touch features that work well and should be preserved or extended:
Touch to zoom works as expected in CorelDraw (but not in PhotoPaint)
It is nice that it automatically can recognize if the PC is changed to Tablet Mode, like removing the keyboard from a Surface Pro or Book or flipping around the screen on an HP Spectre or Dell or Lenovo convertible
But, there is a lot of key touch support missing or not working as it should for a standard experience, all of these should be the same whether in Touch Workspace or not:
Corel seems to have made a core assumption that if a user is using touch, that it's in place of a mouse or pen. For those of us doing work in CorelDraw and PhotoPaint, I can't imagine that's a very big percentage of users. Instead, touch is used in conjunction with a mouse or pen. This means they should do fundamentally different things. I do agree that for the small minority of users who are trying to do full work via touch, the current approach should be preserved as an option.
Touch to Zoom in PhotoPaint is sluggish, even with a high end graphics card and 6 core 8th gen CPU. Worse, it doesn't zoom exactly where the fingers are. Touch to zoom in PhotoPaint seems to work like it's triggering a press of the zoom in and out buttons, where it should instead allow for very precise zooming in on the exact midpoint space between the two touch points, and simultaneously reposition so that if one finger is on a nose and another on an eye, as those two fingers move, the nose and eye stay exactly under those same two fingers. That's the zoom we're all used to from our smartphones we use every day. Note that CorelDraw gets this right, PhotoPaint does not.
Dragging background or canvas should not be a select operation by default, or whatever other tool is currently active for the mouse. It should drag the image. This allows for easy scrolling of the image while zoomed in to get to the area that needs work and simultaneously using the pen (or mouse) to make changes. I know that CorelDraw and PhotoPaint support a 2-finger drag to accomplish this, but at least I find that small addition of requiring 2 fingers to make the feature nearly unusable for efficient and fast work – we drag with our index finger, because it points. That's intuitive and instinctive. Shifting to 2 fingers breaks the intuitive nature of using touch and will also change the zoom level even if we don't want that to shift (because 2 fingers also zoom).
Support the erase button on the pen. At least on my systems, the eraser does nothing in Corel applications. When I move the eraser over something I've written with the pen in other applications or system areas (e.g., Windows built in handwriting and Ink systems or the built in Paint 3D application), it erases them.
I would similarly like to be able to lock the pen to a particular brush and color or shape creation tool, while still using the mouse for other operations (maybe there's already a way to do this?). In my case, I often use touch, pen, and mouse all together, because each has its strengths and weaknesses. I want to keep the pen locked to, say, a particular color brush so that whenever I apply it to the screen, on the canvas/drawing area, it adds that.
I expect to use touch to move the image around and zoom in and out. I will shift to the mouse to select objects and do any menu or tool changes. Of course, if the pen is touching a tool icon or menu, it could work the same as the mouse, but if it's touching in the drawing area, it would be nice if there was an option to lock it to a particular tool. Maybe a simpler way of tackling this from a development perspective would be to allow the pen and mouse to each have its own active tool (maybe even handle touch the same way, for those users who don't expect it to always drag the canvas like I do). So instead of there just being an active tool, there is an active tool per input method. And for those users who don't want that or would find it confusing, simply flip a setting so that all inputs use the same active tool (I don't care which is the default, just want the option).
