Kelly:

I am not a graphic designer, but I do my fair share of drawing lines. As an analyst, I spent a pretty extensive amount of time on whiteboards sketching out ideas before beginning wireframes. I don’t see myself giving up my whiteboards anytime soon. However, I do have a sketchbook that has a flaw: I decide that this piece would look better over there. So I get out my trusty big eraser and redraw my layout. Nope. It definitely made more sense before. DOH!

Where’d that eraser go?

I decided to try out a tablet.

What sold me: My son’s high school algebra teacher. He stands at the back of the classroom with a tablet attached to a projector. He completes his lesson, saves it to a pdf and uploads it to the web for students to reference.

I was impressed. After some research, I decided on the Wacom Intuos3 USB tablet.

The first day, I installed the drivers on my Mac and also within my Fusion virtual Windows XP in under 30 minutes, including opening the box and unpacking the tablet.

I took to the pen immediately. As a matter of fact, I have not touched a mouse at all since Monday when I installed the tablet. I skipped the tutorial, and was able to modify the pen settings, customize the buttons and get going very easily.

At this point I have only used the pen and tablet. The mouse that came with the tablet is still in it’s box. For general use, the tablet is a wonder. I love the button right on the pen, which I have not changed from the default settings of right-click and double click. Selecting text, objects and moving items around are so much faster and my movements are much more precise.

What I miss: Scroll wheel. There is a semi-convenient scroll bar on the tablet, but I’d much rather not have to relocate my hand to scroll. I’ve settled on a two hand approach for now. Using my left hand for the scroll bar and buttons, and the right for the pen. But then, I need to switch over to the keyboard for some functions, which requires me to actually look down. Not optimal.

What would be awesome: Scroll built into the tablet surface, kind of like what touch pads do now. Move the pen quickly along the right side to scroll. Seeing as how I haven’t been through the tutorial or documentation yet, perhaps there is further customization that I can take advantage of. That is on the schedule to be this weekend’s research project. For now, I am enjoying my new toy.