Yup, another product review. I am almost out of freeware, and I have been resorting to web apps. Therefore, there may be blogging less frequently. But to keep it this way (weekly), please click some of the ads in the sidebar. Every click counts!

The Bamboo ($80) is definitely the best 1 week in advance of purchase thing I’ve ever bought. Basically, wacom makes pen displays and tablets. the Bamboo is a Pen Tablet. While at a friend’s house, I tried out their older version of the intuous. I was amazed at what accuracy and speed you could achieve. Of course it was a little hard when I first picked it up, because it is a little different from a mouse. The bamboo has a square surface. If I hover 3-5 mm over the surface of the active area (the inner square) with the pen in the exact middle, the pointer will go straight to the middle of the display. Basically, while hovering, the position of the tablet is the same as the position on the display. to click, just touch the pen tip to the surface of the tablet. Do this twice in a row quickly and you have just double-clicked. The bamboo is pretty much just a faster way to navigate, draw, touch-up photos and even hand-write notes.

Let’s take a look at the pen.

As you can see, then pan has 2 programmable side switches. By default, hover over the tablet (3-5 mm) and push the top button to right click. hold the bottom button while moving the mouse from bottom to top of a document/webpage/anything window. Basically, it is a pan/scroll. Personally, I have found that it’s a lot easier to have the bottom button to be right click and the top button scroll/pan. Other than that, there really is nothing much to it.

Let’s take a closer look at the tablet.

The inner and lighter square is called the active area. This is where the pen is responsive. But over all that you see these buttons called ExpressKeys™. You can assign these to do pretty much anything from forward/back to open an application/do a keystroke. The inner circle is a touch sensitive ring. you can have this zoom in or scroll. It is not the nicest piece of touch sensitivity I have ever used (the iPod touch is!) though. But being a 2 monitor person, I ned a way of switching between them. To do this I have to go into system preferences and select which monitor I want–Monitor 1, Monitor 2, or I can even have it go across both monitors if I want. But If I was on my extended monitor (Monitor 2) there would be no way for me to access the system preferences to change back to monitor 1. So I only had 1 thing left to do: The ExpressKeys™. If I could use the left arrow to go to the left monitor, right arrow to go to the right monitor, and the FN1 do span across both, it old be perfect. But how? There is no setting for those keys to do that. So I used something I’ve never used before: Automator. Id never used it, but it was actually really easy. To do monitor 1, I just hit record, open system preferences from the dock, go to Pen Tablet, go to details, monitor 1, close, then go into the menu and hit quit Then I stop the Automator logger. I can then save it as an application, which I then programmed the right ExpressKey to do that.

Overall, for the price tag of $80, i’ll give this one a 6 out of 5. AMAZING! The things I can do with it are amazing.

Check out what I’ve done in photoshop with it so far!:

Wave Of Emotion

Flocks Of Love