It’s public knowledge at this point that with Windows 10, Microsoft is aiming to bring its flagship OS to a broader range of devices than ever before. Major considerations have been made in order to offer a comparable experience to the desktop edition on touch-based devices, and it seems like that’s not the only alternative input method that’s being catered to.
Microsoft has grown accustomed to pen use thanks to its Surface range of hybrid devices, and a new blog post from David Bélanger of the Remote Desktop team states that work is being done to integrate the input device with remote PC usage.
Functionality of this type has been available since Windows 8.1, and Bélanger goes on to praise the pen in Windows 10 as a ‘first class input method’, on a par with touch, mouse and keyboard. Pen usage in a Remote Desktop session is said to be just the same as local use, with no special configuration needed in the majority of cases.
Apps will have access to all the functionality the pen has to offer, including button use, pressure sensitivity and even the angle the device is being held at, according to a report from Supersite for Windows. If this raises developer support for the pen as an input method, we could well see usage of such devices take off.
This feature might not appeal to the broadest selection of users just yet, but it’s a future-facing move on Microsoft’s part. The computing landscape is growing, with more devices than ever before being used to accomplish an incredibly varied selection of tasks. Windows 10 has been designed to cater to as wide a swathe of that landscape as possible, and that certainly seems like the most sensible path for the OS to take.
