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Graphics tablets
I SPENT SEVERAL YEARS reviewing graphics tablets for MacUser, praising their capabilities and deriding their shortcomings, while all the time secretly wondering why anyone would use such an awkward device. When each new tablet arrived I’d expect a liberating feeling, hoping that I could finally discard my mouse and sketch as if I was drawing on paper with a pencil. And each time I felt frustrated, because drawing on a tablet while looking up at a monitor is nothing like drawing on paper. And then I realized the problem. Graphics tablets take a lot of getting used to. Using a stylus is very different to using a mouse. For one thing, it isn’t tied to your computer, which means it can roll around the desk, drop into the waste paper basket and have to be rescued from among a pile of junk mail before it ends up as landfill. The stylus could end up anywhere: at least a mouse can’t be more than a cord’s length away. My main problem with the stylus, though, was that although it seemed perfectly adequate for shading and painting, it was too clumsy for web browsing and general use. There’s also the problem that while a mouse moves the cursor in the direction you choose – and you can site a mouse anywhere on the mouse pad while you drag it around – the stylus and tablet have a one-toone relationship with the monitor: the top left corner of the tablet represents the top left corner of the screen. You can’t simply position a stylus anywhere you want it and expect it to behave like a mouse. In theory, I could have used the mouse for some tasks, and the stylus and tablet for others. But the mouse wouldn’t work properly on the tablet’s surface, and in order to use the tablet I had to place it on top of my mouse mat and then take it away again to use the mouse. So the tablet always ended up sitting on the shelf until the PR agency who’d lent it to me in the first place sent out a courier to pick it up again. Then I was sent a combined mouse/stylus combination to review. Made by Wacom, it’s the cheapest tablet they produce: at a cost of under $100, I fully

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