Is the Pen Mightier Than the Mouse?
The mouse is the computer world’s most popular pointing device, but there’s more than one way to point and click. The trackball--a rotating ball within a stationary housing--is a popular alternative that’s ideal for cramped desktops. The original PowerBooks contained trackballs, but Apple, like most laptop makers, now uses touch-sensitive trackpads.
A distant cousin of the trackpad is the graphics tablet, a futuristic mouse pad whose special pen lets you not only point and click but also draw. Touch the cordless pen to the tablet, and sensors within the tablet measure the pen’s position and motion. Today’s tablets also measure pen pressure, providing exceptional realism in graphics programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. Press harder, and you get a wider or darker line.
Graphics tablets are popular among artists, draftspeople and photographers--people who use pencils and airbrushes and want a pointing device that feels more like these tools and less like a toy car.
The largest supplier of graphics tablets is Wacom Technology, whose family of tablets ranges from a $99 model with an active sensor area about the size of an index card to an $819 beast that boasts a 12-by-18-inch active area.
Wacom introduced its newest tablet line, called Intuous2, on Monday at the SeyboldSF publishing conference in San Francisco. I’ve been testing the $399 Intuous2, which has an active area of 6 by 8 inches and connects to the Universal Serial Bus port on a Mac or Windows computer. It includes Adobe Photoshop Elements, a simplified version of the legendary digital darkroom, and Corel’s Painter Classic, a painting and drawing program that excels at simulating real-world media such as pastels and watercolors. The Intuous2 doesn’t support Mac OS X, but it will soon.
The Intuous2’s active area is covered by a translucent overlay. You can tuck artwork beneath it for tracing. At the top is a strip of buttons that mimic the function keys on a keyboard, letting you choose common commands by tapping the buttons with the pen.
I’m accustomed to driving a mouse, and I found the Intuous2’s pen awkward at first. But with practice and Wacom’s tutorial software, my penmanship quickly improved. A pen puts your hand in a natural position that leads to less wrist fatigue. Using a pen for actions that involve dragging--copying files, manipulating video clips and, of course, drawing--also puts less stress on your wrist and fingers.
The side of the Intuous2 pen has a two-position button that you can program to perform various tasks. Press one side of the button, and you get a double click. (You can also double-click by tapping the pen on the tablet twice.) You can even program the pen to insert entire passages of text when you click the button. And on the top of the pen is--what else?--a digital eraser. Turn the pen upside-down and slide it across the tablet, and you can rub out text or graphics.
The Intuous2’s pen may be mightier than the mouse, but the lowly rodent is often easier for basic tasks such as choosing menu commands and moving icons. You can use your existing Mac mouse for these chores, but you also can use the cordless mouse that comes with the Intuous2 tablet.
The mouse is comfortably contoured, and unlike Apple’s, it has two buttons. The second button summons the pop-up shortcut menus that the Mac OS and most Mac programs provide. (With the Apple mouse, you must press the Control key while clicking to bring up shortcut menus.) Between the two buttons is a small wheel that lets you scroll through windows without clicking and dragging.
Budget-minded users should consider Wacom’s less-expensive Graphire2 family, which provides less precision than the Intuous2 line but still includes the cordless mouse and pressure sensitivity. Wacom also offers the $1,899 Cintiq, a 15-inch, pressure-sensitive, flat-panel display that enables you to draw directly on the screen.
Talk about a trick no mouse can match.
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Jim Heid is a contributing editor of Macworld magazine.
