Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch Review

Tablets are an underrated interface. A lot of people think they are only useful for artists. Most of those people have never tried one. I’ve been using tablets for years and find them great for annotating PDF documents, touching up photos, and making simple diagrams. Recently, Wacom provided me a review unit of their Bamboo Pen & Touch Tablet that I’ve now been using for several months on my iMac.

The Bamboo Pen & Touch offers a 5.8” x 3.6” active area for the pen and a slightly smaller active area for the touch functions. The tablet itself is approximately 10” x 7”. The package also includes a stylus and software discs containing drivers and a software bundle CD that has Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 for mac (7.0 for Windows) and Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0.
The Bamboo Pen & Touch accepts both stylus and multitouch finger inputs. For laptop users who want their multitouch on their iMac’s, this is the only solution. The touch input is a nice feature but not as transparent as the touchpad on your laptop. For instance, I was unable to get it to work with the three finger swipe in BusyCal. I’ve been spoiled by Apple’s touch surfaces and the Pen & Touch surface felt a little too abrasive against my fingers. It is not so abrasive to be a show stopper but noticeable.

The pen mode features 2540 dpi resolution with 1024 pen pressure levels. Where the surface wasn’t ideal for the touch gestures, it felt just right for the pen, and much better than the texture on my 2 year old bluetooth Wacom. Clearly Wacom had to make some decisions selling a device that that supports both pen and touch. Wacom made the right decision here optimizing performance for the pen, that presumably gets used more often, over the touch input.

The tablet has four customizable buttons and an LED indicator that distinguishes between touch and pen mode. There is also a small, low tech, fabric tag to hold the stylus. The whole package fits nicely under an iMac ready to drop into your work area when needed. Because it is so accessible, I find myself using it all the time.

If you allow yourself to find your tablet groove, it is nice having an always ready pen input at your computer. Tasks like photo editing, drawing, and annotation quickly become second nature with the pen. Combining the Pen and Touch is really handy. You can draw with the pen and zoom and scroll with the touch features. The Wacom Pen & Touch is a nice upgrade to your iMac. The street price on the Bamboo Pen & Touch is $99 and you can find them from both online and brick and mortar retailers.

Home Screens – Jonathan Cost

This week’s Home Screen post features Jonathan Cost, host of Mac Tips Daily and publisher of thinkmac.net. In addition to being a prolific podcaster, Jonathan loves his iPhone

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

Dragon Dictation.
I use it frequently when I am on the move and can’t fiddle with the keyboard/screen to write a text message. I can quickly dictate, and it’s usually very accurate and typically doesn’t require corrections. Once it recognizes my speech it has a button that allows you to send it as SMS. It’s quicker, safer, and my preferred way for texting most of the time.

DVR Remote. It allows me to control my TivoHD when I can’t find the remote. It also comes in really handy when you need to do keyboard entry on the Tivo.

What is your favorite app?
Tweetie.
Not because it’s the best twitter app, but because it’s the app I probably launch the most.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?
[Spikey’s Bounce Around.] (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spikeys-bounce-around/id328206413?mt=8)
The ‘lite’ version had me hooked after a few levels, and then I bought the full version for $1.99. You are a spikey ball and your object is to free butterflies by bouncing around on trampolines and walls. It gets tough. I’ve been stuck on level 36 for about 4 days now. It requires little time or dedication to play, but it’s GREAT fun.

How many screens have you filled?

I have 10 screens with items on them, but they are not all full. One screen has 8 GPS apps on it.

What is the app you are still missing?

The app that allows me to stream my iTunes music to my iPhone.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone?

Uh, Like every 10 minutes. Definitely addicted to it. It’s pretty tough on the battery unlocking/locking all day long.

What is your favorite iPhone feature?

The ability to be connected all of the time. I used the iPod Touch for awhile, but lack of Wi-Fi spots made it more of a game/music device for me. Once I was able to become connected via 3G all of the time with the iPhone, it really changed how I used the device, especially with Twitter & Email.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Some of my other cool less frequently used apps are: ”Boxcar’, ‘NPR News’, AutoStitch’, ‘CubeCheater’,’ESPN Score Center’, ‘CheckPlease Lite’, ‘Mathemagics’, ‘Pandora’, ‘Trapster’, ‘Squarespace’, ‘Dragons Lair’, ‘Scrabble’, ‘CraigsPro+’, and ‘Instant Queue Add for Netflix’.

Thanks Jonathan!

RipIt Review

All this talk of bit rot is starting to get to me. For years I have been burning the family videos to DVD and collecting commercial DVDs. While I only own a few DVDs for my use, we have stacks of the things for the kids. The problem is, the kids watch DVDs repeatedly and beat the hell out of them.

So a few months ago I started to look at ways to convert the family DVD library to a digital format. In the process, I discovered an excellent application called RipIt. This application, released by The Little App Factory, takes just about any DVD you throw at it and create a mirror image file on your hard drive.

It doesn’t just extract the primary movie files but gives you the whole enchilada. The process takes about an hour and when it’s done you can eject the DVD, click on the file, and begin browsing the DVD menu as if you still have the DVD in your computer.

This has numerous advantages. If you’re watching the movies on your laptop, there is no need to spin a DVD and it will use less power. Once the DVD is ripped, you can put it back in its case and on your shelf and not worry about it being subjected to scratches, maple syrup, a game of frisbee, and any of the other amazing things our children conspire to do with DVD media. It also can save room. All of my ripped DVDs are now consigned to a cabinet in the garage and out-of-the-way.

In a world where most video transcoders have more buttons and sliders than the cockpit of a fighter jet, RipIt is drop dead simple. You insert the DVD, click the button, and go do something else. You come back in about an hour and it’s done. I have never had it fail to rip a DVD. According to the developer, it has been proven to work with over 250,000 unique discs. They guarantee that if you find a disk it will not work with, they will go buy a copy and fix it.

While rip it does a great job of mirroring the DVD, it does not take the next step of putting the media into iTunes for you. For that, you need to pull out the individual tracks. I have been doing this with the open source application, Handbrake.

If you do have munchkins in your house that have creative uses for DVD media or just want to make backups of your DVD library, you need to check out RipIt. A license is $19.95 which can be expanded to a household pack (five licenses) for another $9.95. You can learn more at TheLittleappFactory.com.

You can listen to this review on the Mac Review Cast.

Mac Roundtable Live at Macworld

Thanks to Chuck Joiner for putting this together. I didn’t contribute a lot to this group because I knew I was going to speak later with the Mac Power Users and wanted to give everyone else a chance. A little known bit of trivia is that resurrecting the Mac Roundtable was my idea a few years ago after having lunch with a group of podcasters at Macworld. You can download the audio here.

Nuance Purchases MacSpeech

Today Nuance (maker of the PC DragonDictate application) announced its purchase of MacSpeech, publishers of MacSpeech Dictate. This is not a huge surprise in light of the fact MacSpeech has been licensing the Nuance speech recognition engine for several years now. My two cents on this deal:

  1. I hope the MacSpeech team was well compensated. They were the first company with the moxy to put professional grade dictation on the Mac.

  2. As a user of both DragonDictate on a PC and MacSpeech on a Mac, I hope they bring some of the PC features over to the Mac version.