Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Drawing tablets.
You've wanted one too, haven't you? At least all of us who like to doodle on paper but have found drawing on a computer to be something quite different. A proper pen to draw with instead of a clumsy mouse, that's the ticket.
It's always easier to blame the tools than your own skills, after all.
In any case, I got myself a titular Graphire 3 drawing tablet. My main motivation was to be able to draw directly in graphics programs like I do on paper, and in all it seems to be a real success.
The Graphire 3 Classic package has all the stuff I want and none I don't. It consists of the tablet (A6 sized active area), pen, mouse, a driver CD and one CD with a drawing package called procreate Painter Classic. Yes, they capitalise it like that. There's a more expensive package called Studio which comes with more software but lacks the mouse. I prefer the mouse to bundleware thanks, especially since I pay less for it.
The mouse is, in a way, the coolest rodent I've ever used. The thing is, both mouse and pen work by being charged by a magnetic pulse from the tablet and sending position/button information back for analysis. To cut to the important part: no batteries required! And also, which is what is so cool about the mouse, no visible tracking equipment is needed since the circuitry does all the work. You need to stay on the tablet of course, but I just can't get over the coolness of having a mouse with a completely flat and featureless underside ...
Being the weird person I am, I put in the driver and manual CD and had a look around before even connecting the tablet. The driver installation program for OS X didn't work. I think Wacom's FAQs has information and workarounds for this, but I just went and downloaded the latest drivers from the site instead. Without drivers the tablet works, but only as some kind of mouse-like device. I didn't play around with it so I don't know more than that, but drivers are highly recommended.
There are two modes for both pen and mouse, excitingly called "pen" and "mouse" modes respectively. In pen mode the surface of the tablet corresponds to the surface of the screen, or a portion thereof as per your configuration settings. That means things feel rather confusing the first time you pick up the pen after being a mouse user for years. The thing is you can't do classic lift-and-reposition moves in pen mode. A given point on the tablet is a given point on-screen, so if you want to reach something on the edge of the screen you have to point to the edge of the tablet as well. Just the way good old paper works.
Mouse mode on the other hand works the way you expect a pointing device to. Drag around, lift, reposition, keep moving. And also, of course, acceleration settings so you can cover more ground quicker. Which is something I don't think I'd like when drawing.
It's worth noting, in these days of relatively stable computers, that if you unplug and reconnect the tablet after installing drivers but before performing a restart of the computer, strangeness will occur. Seems like the tablet will think you're using the mouse instead of the pen until you do restart. Turns out the preferences file the tablet wants isn't created until after the first restart. Wacom has this information in their FAQ section, but it wasn't too easy to find.
Yes, there's more than just drawing! OS X comes with handwriting recognition built right in. As soon as I'd installed the tablet drivers a new icon labeled "ink" showed up among the preferences. There are plenty of options for adjusting your percieved writing density, delays before and after recognition and so on, and it's pretty cool to use. When the ink is activated you can suddenly write on your tablet to enter text anywhere in the OS. A nice expanding sheet of yellow lined paper pops up and accepts your input as soon as you start scribbling. When it decides you're done with the word it disappears, makes an educated guess at what you were trying to write and pops that text into whatever you were working with. Very cool, and certainly fun to play with. Entering things into a terminal window is somehow odd. It even supports Swedish and other esoteric characters if you check the right box in the settings.
If it's actually useful is a different question altogether. If Apple puts out a pen-based computer again, and perhaps hammers a bit more on the ink technology it's of course great to have it all built into the OS already. On a desktop or laptop the uses seem limited to people who can't use standard keyboards though. I certainly wouldn't write anything longer than an SMS (if even that) using the pen as long as I have a choice.