Nosce te ipsum

As someone who has always had an intense creative streak running through the majority of what I do, I'm always trying to make my working environment more ideally suited to that fine balance of form following functionality. In many of the applications that I now fine my self spending significant amount of time in, the mouse just doesn't always feel like the best solution.

While coding, it goes without saying that Vim, Pico, BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, TextMate and others are far more useful in the hards of someone who really knows how to make those apps sing with some good old fashion keyboard wiizardary. However, for many of the other apps that are more graphic centric, the mouse was just feeling really un-natural and I felt it was really holding me back in certain areas.

To that end, I've successfully wrestled away our shiny new Wacom Intuos3 table from my son (who has been giving it a very through breaking in period as he routinely puts it through it's paces in Adobe Illustrator (and to think, as kids we were thrilled to death at the thought of a new pack of Crayola Crayons and some blank paper. You knew you were really special if Mom bought you the big industrail size box of 75 crayons, complete with the built in crayon sharpener right in the front. State of the art baby! Now a days, my son is using the industry leading computer illustration package along with new Intuos3 - 6x8 tablet (which just so happens to be hooked up to an Apple dual processor PowerMac G5 2.5Ghz that is teathered to the Apple 30" Cinema display so roughing it this kid isn't (kind of makes out fancy smancy new book of crayons not seem so cool anymore!) Anyway - I'm serious trying to integrate the Intuos3 into my workflow, so much so in fact, that the mouse if rarely seeing any action these days and I've even gone so far as to remove the mouse's batteries (it's a blue tooth mouse) so I am pretty much forced to use the tablet for any and all mouse related activities.

Initially this was really quite an adjustment to get used to. It feels similar to when I purchased my first Titanium Powerbook with it's tackpad (something that I'd previously disliked quite a bit) when I was quite used to the track-point style 'mouse' that was on my previous Toshiba (which was running Linux of course, even I have certain things that I just won't do willingly!) But this was a quick lesson on Apple's attention to doing the job right and within a few hours, the trackpad and I were getting long fabously and the Toshiba's track-point felt more like a stuby pencil with the erraser on the end instead of a person's primary way of interacting with the GUI and subsequently, I've not looked back since and one final note along those lines, the brand new touch pads found on the recently rev'd Powerbooks are really nice and well implemented. Putting two fingers together to scroll both vertically and horizontally initially sounded awkward and of questionable usefulness but after using it now for nearly a week, it's completely second nature.

Could I possibly get any further off track here? Anyway - back on point. While my bread and butter centers are writing code, there are always elements of user interfaces to content with so Adobe Photoshop, DVD Studio Pro or other applications always seem to be running, not to mention Illustrator, Painter among others so I've made the decision to see if I can literally replace the vast majority of the things you normally do with a mouse with my Wacom Intuos3 tablet. This particular tablet comes in three sizes, 4x6, 6x8 and 9x12 and I'm currently using the 6x8 model which felt appropriate for me at the time I bought it but I am considering a possible move up to the larger size in the future. My main concern (oh poor me) is that since the default setting (which makes considerable sense) is that the tablet essentially mirrors your screen, meaning that the upper right hand corner of the table represents the upper right hand corner of your screen (which as a fairly new tablet user takes a little getting used to but feels completely logical once you get the hand of it). If I moved up the 9x12" model coupled with the Apple 30" Cinema display (which defines the idea of a very large display when running at a resolution of 2560 x 1600, doing a drag operation with the tablet from one corner of the screen to the other is just..well, I'm getting tired just thinking about it! However, for doing digital photography and retouches in Photoshop, that larger tablet would really just rock.

Back to the Wacom Intuos3. This absolutely has to be the sleekest looking and feeling tablet that I've ever had the good fortune to use. It's colors are similar to a dark charcoal on the outside with a very dark, almost Daring Fireball gray on the actual portion that you touch with your pen. I really do believe that as a designer / developer, the tools that you use can greatly influence the products you are building. Any study on the subject of Hackers that is worth its salt knows that Hackers always tend to work exclusively with the tools, languages, hardware, software, operating systems, etc that they know to be the best and having the wrong tools can doom a project before it even gets off the ground. Forcing these folks to use say a programming language like Java because that's what the PHB recommended after reading about in the in-flight magazine (it must be good because 'everyone's using it philosophy). Paul Graham argues these points fair better than I could even dream of but suffice it to say that I think if really good, alpha Hackers ever had a need for a graphics tablet, they would choose the Intuos3. This tablet has a very high tactile value for the user - it's one of those products where you get an idea in your head before you've ever even touched it about what it should feel like and it certainly doesn't disappoint. It's appearance is extremely glossy and refined and you almost barely notice the 8 buttons and two slider track-pads built into the until. Using the device for that first hour, you wonder how you'd ever do without those extra buttons.

By this stage of the game, drawing tablets are hardly new ideas, yet they are far from common place. That not withstanding, you pretty much just expect the basics to work right out of the box, which it does in spades, but like some many things in the world of high tech, it's the software that truely sets this device apart. The Intuos3 comes with the usual pack of software which I believe includes things like Painter, Photoshop Elements (not the most recent version, etc) but in my own case, if you are buying a top tier tablet like this one, chances are, you've already got your tablet friendly tools in place from long before you ever think about getting a tablet. Over the years, programs like Photoshop and Painter have really made some serious improvements in many of their tools to accommodate tablet users but what is really blowing me away is the Mac drives that Wacom is distributing with the Intuos3. Previous to this model, I owned a Graphire series tablet (also from Wacom) and I don't recall having near the functionality in that model. Wacom has posted a product matrix to give you an at-a-glance type summary between their various tablets and their uber-desireable Cintiq 21UX that world renowned digital artist Bert Monroy uses to craft his master pieces.

The Intuos3 drivers that appear as an item in the System Preferences under Mac OS X are setup to give you everything a beginner would need right off the bat without a single change but dig a little deeper and you'll find an incredible amount of flexibility just waiting to make the Intuos3 considerably more useful. Much like the Griffin PowerMate, this tablet lets you create totally distinct button profiles for individual applications as well as a default global setting. In the real world, this means that you can custom configure the tablets buttons to do one thing while you are in Safari for example, very web specific things such as opening a new tab, moving back / forward, increasing or decreasing the font size, close a specific tab, refresh a page, etc. and those exact same buttons with perform entirely different duties when Photoshop is the front most application. Once you get the hang of using the tablet, it's actually quite comfortable to just sit back, put your feel on the desk and have the tablet in the your lap busy working away with the keyboard and mouse left back in the desk. With the settings properly configured, you can get by without too much fuss solely with the tablet which is a thing of beauty. I'm really looking forward to the day when the tablet goes wireless and we no longer have to contend with being tethered to the nearest USB port.

The tablet includes a very comfortable pen tool that serves as both drawing tool and eraser. The pen tool has a two position 'switch' which you can customize to do whatever you like, the default behavior I belive is to have that switch act as a click and double-click. The Intuos3 also comes with a mouse that runs with in the tablet drawing area itself but honestly, I so picky about mouse and keyboard selections for my owndan good so I tried the mouse for a few minutes, decided it wasn't my cup of tea and went back to using my BT500 Bluetooth mouse from RadTech but I was impressed the Wacom did provide you with pretty much everything you'd ever need to make this unit fully functional (which is sadly not the norm in product design these days.

All in all, after a solid few weeks of daily use, the Wacom Intuos3 has become a critical part of my working environment. An unexpected side benefit has been that after using the mouse for (entirely too long) over two decades now, what was once an interesting input device has quote honestly just gotten stale and using the tablet is just a breath of fresh air. To me, it just feels more natural to have a pencil like device in my hand, especially one that behaves as one would expect from a pen / pencil with tilt / pressure sensitivity, angles, etc -- it just all feels so right. With continued practice, my accuracy is getting better and I keep finding new and unique ways to configure the tablet.

Bottom line - if you have been thinking about trying a tablet or are just curious about what it's all about, I would recommend taking a look at the entire Wacom product line and see what floats your boat. Their product quality is definitely improved and they seem to have that just right mix of innovative features with real world problem solving that first attracted me to Wacom so long ago.