Surface Pro 3 Tip: Customize Surface Pen with the Surface Hub App

A newly released Microsoft app for Surface Pro 3 allows you to customize how the Surface Pen interacts with your device. The Surface Hub app lets you configure what happens when you press the top button on the pen as well as the pressure sensitivity of the pen tip.

The Surface Hub app was telegraphed last week when Microsoft released an out-of-band Surface Pro 3 firmware update that the firm at the time said "enables additional upcoming configuration options for Surface Pro 3." A representative from Microsoft there would soon be an app in Windows Store that lets you assign any button to any function you want (with some limitations).

This is the first version of that app. And based on what I see here, it will be expanded based on feedback to accommodate additional functionality.

It's a humble start, but here's what works so far.

Pen pressure sensitivity. Here you can fairly dramatically change the sensitivity of the Surface Pen's tip.

Pen top button configuration. This is currently a simpler way to switch between OneNote (desktop) and OneNote mobile app, but it will clearly be changed in the future to accommodate other apps.

In kind of an interesting twist, this app also reports what the effective desktop resolution of the Surface Pro 3 really is, since most people use display scaling. In my case, at 150 percent scaling, the resolution is reported as 1474 x 1192. (The native resolution of Surface Pro 3 is 2160 x 1440.)

You can download the Surface Hub app for free from Windows Store. It only works with Surface Pro 3, and not older Surface Pro devices.