Intuos4 Unboxing

Yes, that is the pretty new toy. After a bit of delay with things such as work, family, supporting friends, etc. I've finally gotten a chance to get up the pictures I took of my Intuos4 unboxing. As you can see, Wacom has stepped things up on their packaging, and seem to have done a nice job on the look of both the tablet and the box it comes in. The front of the package is quite simple, merely showing the product. You know their name, you know what a tablet is. If they need to tell you more, then this product is not really for you. Oh, and they also show down in the bottom left corner which of the sizes this tablet is. I like their subtle nudge that they have four of these, with two larger than the one I got.

The back of the box is pretty and informative (I have a larger pic for this one). They call out all the main features, including all the ooohs and aaahs that they should evoke. One main point of interest for the international (aka non-US) crowd is down at the very center bottom. It states "MOUSE INCLUDED", since I've read that the overseas version has to be purchased separately. Also they note that the tablet is shown actual size, so it is very helpful for a potential customer browsing in the store.

The front and back are part of a cover that slips down over the actual box. Once that is removed we see the box itself. It says "intuos4" in nice friendly letters on the cover. By this point I can see that Wacom was definitely taking lessons from Apple on their packaging. (I should also probably point out that I am not very practiced in photography, so the flash tended to wash things out and reflect a bit. Given that the battery on my camera was busy dying, I decided not to try to set up something more complex).

Lifting up the first flap of the box reveals "Where it all begins" in several languages. Again, friendly and welcoming. Also they have directions printed on the inside of that top flap. The three steps seem to be

1. put in the disc
2. install the software
3. connect the tablet

They realize that nobody really reads the directions, so they need to get things going as simply as possible.

Lifting up the second set of flaps reveals the tablet itself resting comfortably in it's nice protective foam sleeve. Like the rest of the packaging, this is a very pretty black (my flash did not do it justice). Also at this point I was struck by how light and efficient the packaging was. It definitely conveyed at least the feel of being more eco-conscious.

Sliding the tablet itself over a bit reveals more of the plastic it was sitting on, along with the stylus just below. All the rest is still hidden... probably to impress you more with the two parts you really care about.

Finally the view we have been waiting for. The tablet and stylus removed from their protective wrappings to bask in all their glory. The flash picks out the different textures, but in person all the parts are just about the same shade of black. The left edge is a high-gloss translucent finish, whereas the rest of the frame is a matte finish with a nice feel to it. Quite comfortable to rest one's hand or arm on. You can also see that the eraser end of the stylus is quite different.

I set my Intuos3 stylus down for a side-by-side comparison. The front looks just about the same, but the back is shorter and the eraser is definitely more "nubby." The Intuos4 stylus also had a lighter feel to it.

This next shot really shows off the glossy side with all the buttons. Under normal lighting the buttons and touch wheel do appear to be almost the same black as the glossy hard plastic. The way the buttons are all on one side now are quite evident, along with their placement to facilitate easy single-hand operation. Here you can see the "wacom" at the bottom, which hits where the tablet starts to curve down. There is a corresponding logo on the top, upside down, for when the tablet is used in left-handed mode.

Lifting out the black plastic tray reveals the packing of the additional bits. To the left is the nice, long USB cable. In the middle is the very Apple-ish box with the driver CD and such. On the right is the revamped stylus holder. It has secrets. We'll see more on that next.

Here is a shot with the stylus holder opened to reveal its trove of goodies. The top comes off with a quick quarter-turn to reveal a foam bed with ten nibs and a changing tool in the middle. This seems like it will make things much more convenient.

Under the box with the CD is hidden the nice goodie (at least for those in the US)... the new mouse. As with the other pretty parts, it's in a nice protective cover so that you will be the first one to get to scratch it up.

There's the new mouse. One negative is that the two buttons on the side are now gone. However, it has some secrets to make up for that. More later on that. One thing to note is that this shot does give a good idea of the actual colors of the different pieces (the flash didn't wash it out too much).

Here we have it all together. The flash is really washing out the smooth blackness of the normal appearance. And the mouse definitely is not blue nor gray; just two textures of a nice black.

For comparison I set the Intuos3 mouse and pen next to the Intuos4. The new mouse is definitely more rounded, and the styling on the stylus holder is even nicer. It is also clear that the Intuos4 mouse is smaller. I'm not sure how it will work for people with larger hands, but it fits mine quite well.

Another angle on the accessories.

Comparing the Intuos4 medium to my Intuos3 6x8, the evolution of the tablet is easy to see. The newer area has a widescreen aspect ratio, to match modern displays. There is also a bit less tablet above and below the active area.

And switching them to give a better idea of lighting, etc. The matte edges of the Intuos4 really contrast with the glossy finish on all of the Intuos3.

From the left sides of the tablets. (trying to give a fair impression of their shape, etc)

From the right sides of the tablets.

And looking at the new mouse and stylus on top of the old tablet.

Even the bottom of the tablet is pretty and well designed. One thing to note here is that there is a slider on the left edge of the bottom.

That slider is used to expose and cover the USB connectors on the side. When one switches between right and left handed use, the slider will expose the connector away from the user and cover the other connector to protect it and keep it from becoming gunked up.

In my initial comparison to the Intuos3 a few points stood out

• The feel of the surface and nibs struck me as much more paper-like. This should make the artists out there much happier.
• The two touch strips were replaced by the single touch wheel. However the use of that is much more natural, and the addition of the mode toggle in the center makes for nice potential.
• The mouse has a z-axis!!! This is probably the top feature for mouse/puck use. Before this, one would have to move their hand aligned to the tablet itself, regardless of the angle of the mouse, in order to move straight. With the Intuos4 the mouse reports the "twist" of the angle it is on, and the drivers compensate for this to make it move like any normal mouse, regardless of the orientation of the tablet.
• There are OLED displays next to each of the programmable buttons. The stock software can make them switch per app (which is perfect for making the tablet suddenly say your daughter's name and freak her out)

I will have to revisit with some details on actual use later. However it seems to work well with OS X, Inkscape and decent with Windows. I did have a problem with the drivers triggering a sleep problem on a Windows XP laptop, but that might be due to XP in general. I was not able to test under Linux since the wacom drivers only now are supporting it in the dev versions, and I was not quite ready to try poking those in (need to update to Jaunty among other things).

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Wacom villain found and fixed!!!

After many months of toil and frustration, I finally tracked down the root of my problems with the Wacom tablet on Ubuntu. It was quite frustrating, since the tablet worked fine if I ran from a live CD, but failed once I installed to the hard drive. Everything else worked but the tablet. So I suffered and found work-arounds.

After compiling and installing new Wacom drivers yet again and another round of fruitless poking, I stumbled across a reference to a similar sounding problem. There was a post by some end user that was completely non-technical and involved talking about his admin and things that he had done when I hit a mention of the culprit...

It was the dreaded, the insidious, the crafty...

Mouse-Emu!!!!!

It turns out that the mouseemu software normally used to make a touchpad on a laptop more friendly had turned evil in this case. It perhaps was handling the touchpad fine, but it also got greedy and grabbed the external Wacom itself. The simple fix was to just go into Synaptic and remove mouseemu there. Voila! Happy-happy Wacom time!!!!

So if a tablet is showing up properly in the low-level view, but stops responding... it might be the tricky mouseemu.

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Eee PCs and Tablets and remote X11! Oh, My!

One thing that has slowed down some of my Inkscape development has been that Hardy is not happy with my tablet on the laptop I usually use. It worked fine when I booted up from CD, but fails once I install and run from hard drive. I had been waiting to see if the last few rounds of beta updates would fix it, or if I could give any helpful testing feedback. Alas, it was not to be. So on OS X there is no extended input from my tablet working for X11 apps, and on Ubuntu the tablet doesn't even work as a plain mouse. That, of course, means I can't work on things like pressure sensitive behavior, extended device configuration, etc.

However... this week I thought of something. The tablet is USB after all, and I do have a second little computer with USB, so perhaps that could be used to help some how. I did a quick search on the Eee PC's filesystem and found it had wacom drivers already. A few quick minutes hacking away on xorg.conf files and it actually worked! The tiny computer was running happily with my tablet.

Of course, I then hit the big problem that it *is* a tiny computer, and I don't have a workflow to get custom things compiled and installed yet (keeping it stock for now). But then the UNIX world came to save me with remote X11! Just toss in ssh and a little X11 forwarding and voila! the Eee PC is displaying the application and running keyboard, mouse, and tablet input, while the program itself is actually running on a different computer.

I had done a few test runs with ssh to my laptop from the Eee PC in the past, so I tried again. Well, the connection and all worked, but the version of GTK+ on there did not have extended input support compiled in. So even though the X11 front end running supports it, the application didn't listen to the X11 server. Off to another computer then! Tried it with ssh to run the app from an Ubuntu 7.10 box and it worked!!!

Of course I still want to use the laptop, so I ended up using ssh there too. So the development (Emacs), compiling and running is all done on a Linux box in another room, but my editor/IDE is displayed here on the laptop and the app I'm building and running is displaying on the Eee PC. Kinda kludgey, but it works.

And then finally the size of the Eee PC in relation to the tablet is something I find quite amusing. The poor little PC is basically dwarfed by the Wacom. Literally it is only as big as the active area on the tablet itself.

What makes it even sadder is that the Eee PC is pretty good for travel and presentations, so I'll now be stuck with toting around the ridiculous pair.

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First phase of tool committed

Here it is... The first part of the code for my new "eraser tool" for Inkscape is in trunk now. I've been working on the use cases probably more than the code even. However this is now a starting point for people to look at and start complaining. :-) This first part only adds in the functionality to cut away parts of objects you have selected. It won't do anything if you don't have something selected, and it won't do anything if the first mode is selected (the sub-toolbar has toggles for the two modes). However it does commit all the infrastructure changes including the new icons, new drawing context, verbs, switching, etc. I had been wanting to get that in first to shake down bugs in that support work. Moving forward I'll implement the "touch-delete" mode, and support for working when no selection is made. Probably a few more enhancements will come in as people try it out and give some feedback. I'm most excited about the pending "touch-delete", since it has a feel that strikes me as very "vector" and can differentiate the usage from raster drawing packages.

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Tablet Test Area

I've gotten a bit more committed to SVN for the new input devices dialog. It does tracking of buttons and axes now, with different graphics to show ones that have been seen, ones that have not, and ones that are currently active. There are two main benefits right off the bat (aside from the gratuitous "oooh, pretty lights" factor). First is that it allows a simple way to determine what inputs any given device really has, as opposed to what is reported to GTK+. For example, my tablet's pen says it can handle 7 macros, but it only has 3 buttons. And I've seen that although the driver reports six axes, I only get data on five (aka there is one 'dead' input axis). The second main functionality is to allow a user to see which physical parts of his devices are hooked up to what. For example, an Intuos3 tablet has buttons and touch strips on the tablet itself, but it may not be immediately obvious how those are configured. Under Linux, I see those strips as the x-tilt and y-tilt axes. Also using the visual feedback it is easy to see which buttons have which numbers. Then below I'm using progress bars to show the current values of the axes, so it's easy to get an idea of how those values range on different physical changes. I still need to add some visual feedback for those that have no bounds, but those are usually the ones mapped to x and y, so are already being used for positioning. Now the next thing is to get some feedback on how this works for other people. That will also help for the "Configuration" tab which will allow setting of things such as screen versus window mode, button actions, etc. Those may change with the user's current task, but the hardware usually will stay in one (or a very few) combination.

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New Tablet Config

I've got the initial cut of the new replacement for GTK+'s extended devices input config done.
The old dialog has been around for quite some time, and is really good for a low-level view of things. However, the needs of users have moved more and more into the high-level artist-centric viewpoint. This is a bit nice for me as a software engineer, but definitely is not as nice for my artist side. X? 1? 6? Which do I need? What do they mean? Also "pad"? Why is part of my tablet showing up just like my tip of my pen does? And for that matter, why does my eraser show up as something separate from the front of the same pen?
The work on a replacement has progressed to a point where something is visible and initially functional. One minor point is that the dialog is now dockable... but that's a minor item. The first functional point of note is a separation of hardware from configuration. The more common case will be that a user has a single tablet, but a few different ways of working with it. The next point is the Test Area. I've found that it is a bit hard to tell what's going on with tablet config. Currently the area should switch to indicate the device currently active on the tablet. Additionally it will dump events to stdout. This will allow for checking things like button numbers, axis values, etc.
This is in the current sources now, but needs USE_NEW_INPUT_DEVICES defined in verbs.cpp to turn it on (hint: this is for those of you able to build). So the next thing is to get some user feedback to see if it reports events correctly, detects actual devices, etc. So have at it and have fun. :-)

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Enhancing tablet support

For some time I have been wanting to help with tablet support in Inkscape. Things have finally come together enough for me to get started. We've had at least one RFE on this for a while (bug #171265) The first step of this is in, and now has a preference setting to enable switching the Inkscape tool as different devices are used on the tablet (pen tip, eraser, mouse, etc.) The implementation will probably need a bit of testing and refinement, but it should be ready for users to check out. The coding is not that difficult; most of the real effort is with figuring out the behavior that needs to happen. At the moment the tool switched to is always the same for the same tool, but very shortly it will remember the last tool used. In the long run I'll probably be replacing our use of GdkInputDialog to provide easier configuration. However, the main thing missing is how different tablet setups are configured. Multiple pens, multiple tablets, non-Wacom tablets, etc. That's where feedback from end-users and testers really comes in handy.

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