On a design hardware front…
Anyone have any recommendations for a small graphics tablet which works well with a Mac?
I’m particularly likely to use it with my old PowerBook G4 and Freehand MX.
thx
Hugh
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I have a Wacom from a few years back. At the time I got it, it was the smallest/cheapest model they sold. I don’t use it all the time, but when I do, it works really well.
Unless you need a particular feature on a fancy one, I’ve found that Wacom doesn’t make junk, and you can shop on price as long as you shop from Wacom.
One other thing about tablets: I used to work at an agency where we had these monster 18 inch jobbies, and I found I hated using it. Too much large motor action to get from place to place. Unlike a mouse, there’s linear acceleration on a large tablet, and a 1:1 mapping of screen to tablet.
Walter
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Hi Walter,
Thanks for that, I think Wacom is the way to go. There are a lot of small tablets about, plenty of ‘Bamboos’ on eBay! But I worry that the active pad area on these is too small. On the other hand I don’t want to lug an “18 inch jobbie” to Borneo!
Not sure I fully understand your ‘large motor action’ or ‘linear acceleration’ phrases, but I’ll mostly be using it for drawing maps, effectively slowly drawing irregular lines as layers on top of a jpg sketch, or similar.
Hugh
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On 17 Apr 2010, at 16:14, hugh wrote:
Thanks for that, I think Wacom is the way to go. There are a lot of small tablets about, plenty of ‘Bamboos’ on eBay! But I worry that the active pad area on these is too small. On the other hand I don’t want to lug an “18 inch jobbie” to Borneo!
See if you can try one first Hugh. Don’t be too concerned about the smaller sizes either; I’ve been using Wacoms for the past five or six years, and I’ve always bought the smallest size possible (used to be A6) and used them for all kinds of stuff without problems, including drawing paths with the pen tool in Photoshop, accurately. I was put off the big ones after I tried an A4 tablet belonging to a friend of mine; it was awful, you were forever swinging your whole arm in arc to get anywhere.
I’m using a Bamboo now, and I use it for everything, don’t use a mouse at all. The built-in buttons and scroll pad are terrific, and I have the four buttons set to next/previous page and Top/Bottom of page. Makes surfing a joy.
best wishes,
Paul Bradforth
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Hello Paul,
That’s useful…more than useful. Appreciate your user experience and as it’s current and you’ve dispensed with a mouse I’ll take that as a thumbs up!
And I guess there’s no harm in starting small, can always move up the ladder if need be.
OK, bamboo here I come!
Thanks and regards
Hugh
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On 17 Apr 2010, at 16:41, hugh wrote:
That’s useful…more than useful. Appreciate your user experience and as it’s current and you’ve dispensed with a mouse I’ll take that as a thumbs up!
And I guess there’s no harm in starting small, can always move up the ladder if need be.
OK, bamboo here I come!
Glad it helped, Hugh. I’m using an older Bamboo, but the newer ones look even better; they have touch input as well as pen, so you can use ‘gestures’ to navigate. Might be tempted myself …
best wishes,
Paul Bradforth
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This is precisely what I meant by large motor action. When I draw, I
tend to move only my fingers (known as fine motor action) and draw in
a very confined area. A small tablet serves that need very nicely.
On the acceleration thing: notice when you are using your mouse, that
if you “flick” the mouse quickly in a direction, the cursor will shoot
a huge distance across the screen; and if you move it slowly in a
direction, the cursor will travel a much shorter distance on the
screen. This property is known as acceleration in mouse lingo, and it
is the reason why you can have ridiculously large screen (as I do –
two 20" apple wide-screens side-by-side) and still navigate across
them on a comparatively-small mousepad without lifting the mouse a
dozen times. This is also one of the things that Windows (any version)
characteristically gets tragically wrong.
On a humongous tablet, there is no such thing. Instead, there is a
direct mapping of one pixel on the screen to an equivalent x/y point
on the tablet. (Most tablets are ridiculously high-resolution, since
they are basically analog devices with a simple map to the digital
world, and that map can be made any resolution necessary on the fly.)
So when you want to move to the top-right corner of the screen, you
have to reach there with a dramatic sweeping gesture of your entire
arm. While this works fine on the stage, it takes considerable
practice to attain the same degree of precision that you naturally
enjoy when using your fingers to move a few centimeters, with the
result that you tend to overshoot your target, then have to adjust. If
you touched down rather than coming to rest in a hover over the spot
where you want to fine-tune your approach, you may find that you
trigger some other action than you wanted to.
I find the whole thing rather tiring for long periods of time,
probably because I am really well attuned to the mouse and it’s
natural ability to distinguish between hover and click or click+drag.
I tend to use the tablet only when I need it – for pressure-sensitive
brushes in Photoshop or Illustrator, primarily – and don’t use it for
Finder (shudder) at all.
Walter
On Apr 17, 2010, at 11:22 AM, Paul Bradforth wrote:
it was awful, you were forever swinging your whole arm in arc to
get anywhere.
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On 17 Apr 2010, at 17:11, Walter Lee Davis wrote:
I tend to use the tablet only when I need it – for pressure-sensitive brushes in Photoshop or Illustrator, primarily – and don’t use it for Finder (shudder) at all.
I’m fine with it in the Finder, but the one application that it really is awful with is … Freeway! I find that if I click a box with the pen, in a box-model layout, the box will shoot somewhere else instantly, and I have to Apple-Z as soon as I’ve touched it. The minute I touch a layout with it, Freeway rearranges everything. I suspect it’s due to the fact that when I touch the box, I impart a slight movement to it because, unlike a mouse, you can’t just apply a straight downward click; there will always be a sideways moment to it in one direction or another. I’m sure there used to be a setting in the Wacom driver for that, but I don’t seem to be able to find it. I also find that if I click the ‘close’ button on a site (the leftmost of the three OS X buttons at the top left of the window) it never takes; I have to do it about four or five times.
best wishes,
Paul Bradforth
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Yes I would second that problem.
I did give a bamboo tablet the time to get used to and tried it for a
month for everything. It seems OK and quick, but I started to get a
bad strain in my shoulder/arm, and did not think the tablet was the
cause, as a test I stopped using it and the arm was OK within days.
What I was doing with the tablet was different to a mouse where the
arm is supported.
Now I only use the tablet when I need a Free hand stroke in Photoshop
or illustrator.
David
On 17 Apr 2010, at 18:05, Paul Bradforth email@hidden wrote:
but the one application that it really is awful with is … Freeway!
I find that if I click a box with the pen, in a box-model layout,
the box will shoot somewhere else instantly, and I have to Apple-Z
as soon as I’ve touched it.
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Interesting comments.
I do really only want it for drawing, where I find a mouse, maybe because of its acceleration, not precise enough and somewhat jerky. You also get a kind of clam-claw pain after a while, like you’ve been holding a crayon like a 3yr old for hours.
I really do only want to replicate drawing with a pencil. Rest of the time I’ll use the mouse.
Hugh
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I used the smallest Wacom back in the day of ADB connectors, and then the smallest Graphire later on and found them satisfactory. But I found using them to maneuver menus and such more difficult than using a mouse. I now have a middle range (which is plenty large enough) Intuos which has a higher pen resolution for somewhat more tactile drawing feel, but it’s still more difficult to use for getting around in the Finder than a mouse for me. The wireless mouse the Intuos comes with on the other hand is quite useful.
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Thanks for all the answers on this.
I got a wacom Graphire 3 - rudimentary, but tests suggest it will do exactly what I want it to do. Cheap on ebay and does the job!
Thanks all.
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