My Desk with my New Toy
My Desk with my New Toy, originally uploaded by djwudi.

When Prairie asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I just couldn’t come up with an answer. There really wasn’t anything that was jumping to mind — I’ve got tons of music, tons of books, a good selection of work and school clothing…. We batted ideas around for a while, until I mentioned that I’d occasionally dreamed about updating my little Wacom Graphire2 (actually, I think it was an Artz, the progenitor to the Graphire line) 3.5x5 tablet.

I’ve never been a big fan of mice. In rough order from least preferred to most preferred, my choice of input device is somewhere along the lines of

TrackPoint < trackpad < mouse < trackball < tablet

Upgrading from the smaller 4x5 tablet to the larger 6x11 widescreen tablet is so nice! There’s more space to work with, so fine details are easier and more precise, and since the tablet matches the widescreen format of the screen, there’s no horizontal compression further affecting the pointer mapping. Plus, it’s quiet — which may sound odd, but between using a different material for the higher end tablets and including a better quality pen (the old pen rattles a bit), it’s gone from really quiet to near silent.

Definitely a worthwhile upgrade (and I can’t even draw, this is entirely a input device/Photoshop photo editing tool…a “real” artist would love these even more)!

[See also: Bad UI: Mozilla Thunderbird | How Many Have Died in a Blogging Accident? | Dan Rather’s replacement | May Day! | Humor in Tragedy ]

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