Initial BamBoo Pen & Touch thoughts...
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 12:49PM So I've been using the new BamBoo Pen & Touch Fun Medium trackpad for a couple of days now. Some initial thoughts.
Touch
Pretty seamless experience. I like the way I can just extend my hand and the trackpad is there, no feeling for the mouse. The surface is very smooth, not as smooth as the glass trackpad on the MacBook Pro but smooth enough. Navigating the pointer across my three screens work fine, and unlike a mouse, it's no effort to swipe, stop and swipe again if you need too. Dragging across large monitors works fine but you sometimes need to reposition your finger before making the drag action.
Most of the most useful gestures are supported so single and double tap, two finger swipe to move forward and back and two finger scroll work just fine. There is also zoom support via pinch, but that only works within an application, not the desktop zoom. There is a rotate gesture as well but I never use that much.
The three and four finger gestures are not supported as in the latest MacBook trackpads, but the BamBoo does have 4 programmable buttons so it's easy to configure Expose support.
The only downsides I've found to date are:
- The double tapping to start to select a text string sometimes isn't completely accurate, it sometimes misses the first character in the string, this can be a bit frustrating. It's possibly that this is a technique thing so I'll work on it.
- The second thing is the ergonomics. With a mouse you tend to rest you hand on the mouse. With the trackpad, you tend to hover your hand over the trackpad and whilst it's not caused me any grief as yet, I'm aware that it's different to what I'm used to and have an inkling this may cause fatigue. I need to learn to rest my arm more, but again early days.
- It looks like it won't work if you use Teleport to control a second Mac from the machine to which the tablet is connected. Teleport is a utility to allow you to control multiple macs with a single keyboard and mouse. I tried to access my MacBook Pro using teleport and whilst the tablet does allow you to move across to the second machine, the cursor starts doing all sorts of strange things. No deal breaker for me as I've started to use Screen Sharing now on my Mac Pro to control the MacBook Pro, and that works just fine.
Pen
I've tried to use a pen based trackpad before on an older and smaller BamBoo, but I never mastered it. The smaller BamBoo didn't map to my screen properly.
The new large BamBoo maps perfectly to all three monitors. I didn't intend to use the pen much based on my previous experiences, but after experiencing the minor problems I was having with selecting text, I had some (well quite a lot) of file renaming to do by copying and pasting entries from a text file, so I gave the pen a second chance.
To my surprise, I quickly got used to it and it proved pretty effective. I may make the effort to use the Pen more often for navigation and editing, it was actually quite pleasant to use.
The technique of hovering above the tablet surface takes a bit of getting used to, along with holding the pen in the correct position to manipulate the pen buttons. The touch and pen technologies do not operate simultaneously. As you move the pen stylus near the trackpad surface, it switches to Pen mode, and then back to Touch mode if you remove the pen. Pretty neat!
There's a ton of functionality built into OSX in the form of the Ink technology, but I've not really had chance to play with this much. It's on my todo list.
Summary
So despite some minor irritations, I'm still more than happy with the BamBoo Pen & Touch Medium Fun tablet and yes, it has completely replaced my Magic Mouse. It does require some effort to get used to, but if you're an existing MacBook or MacBook Pro user and have used the laptop trackpad, you'll take to it like a duck to water.
I primarily got the device for the touch support, but the fact that the pen support also seems perfectly usable is an added bonus as far as I'm concerned. I'll most definitely spend some more time to practice with the pen and evaluate the situations in which the pen might come into its own. I've not tried the Pen with Final Cut Studio yet, that should be interesting.
Reader Comments (12)
Don,
One thing you might want to try is to use the keyboard more. Learn the short cuts. Selecting text is a simple matter of the arrow keys and the shift key. Application switching can be done with Cmd-Tab or by Pressing the Expose keys.
I notice on the screen casts you do almost everything with the mouse... so perhaps that has got you to be so mouse centric. On possible suggestion to overcome that is to follow the example of railscasts. He uses some software to display any special key strokes on the machine. So, I know when he is pressing Cmd-S or Ctrl-H or whatever.
The more you keep your hands on the keyboard and off the mouse/trackpad the more productive you will be.
BOb
I have had the Bamboo touch for a few days. The big problem I am having is that tapping with two finger sometimes cause the cursor to jump about 10cm and click if I have the click with tap with one finger selected or right click if I have the right click with two fingers selected.
Hi Don,
Have you tried tripple tapping and draging to select text,
starting from anywhere in the first word?
With a mouse you can double click and drag,
from anywhere in the first word, causing complete words
to be selected. Takes a little bit of getting used to but once
you have the hang of it you'll never look back.
This technique has saved me a ton of time.
Loved your show on Launch Bar by the way!
Cheers,
Marco
Hello,
i would like to post problem of the bamboo touch here. After i installed the driver, then suddenly a box appeared and it mentioned that bamboo touch mode driver is stopped working. Can you guys help me?
Han, probably not the best place to ask. Suggest you contact Wacom directly or check with the ScreenCastsOnline forums
Hi Don,
I'm also having the problems you mentioned on the your YouTube video concerning the Mighty Mouse (I love it when it's working) & MacPro. I haven't tried it with the MacBook since I use the track pad, but I'll give it a go with the MacMini and hopefully get some use out of it.
My question: Do you feel the BamBoo Pen & Touch Fun MEDIUM has enough real estate to use with a MacPro/30" cinema display or would it take several swipes to get across the screen?
BTW, you set a high standard with your SCO videos!
Best regards,
Curt
Curt, Yes! The medium is perfect for the 30". In fact I used it on a 3 monitor setup including a 30" and it was fine. I used it on a 15" MBP and it was much too big!
You mention navigation across 3 screens, one being a 30 inch, and then note that the Fun was to large for the 15 inch MBP. I have a 17 inch and at 1920x1200 it packs in lots of information. I favor trying the Bamboo pen, but solicit your thoughts on its small size verses the Funs Medium size for my 17 inch MBP? Also, do I get the sense that with a MBP the Bamboo Multi-Touch is redundant and unnecessary?
Soilman, I suppose I should have mentioned that I use the pen tablet as a complete mouse replacement. My comments on size might not be appropriate for someone using it as a drawing tool, but I don't use it as such.
I still think the Fun Medium is probably too big for a laptop.
As far as redundancy, it really depends. Yes you can use the built in trackpad for touch but if you're using the MBP for extended times o a desktop, and you're used to using the pen, it's great to be able to have both.
Is it just me who is having trouble during expose - my cursor jumps all over the place randomly! but only in expose while i choose a window to navigate to. As this is one of my primary function i use a mouse or pad for - i have to say it's a major flaw?
But no one else has this flaw?
Also this thing works so much better on a windows PC - i can hold down for a right click - everything works fine for windows and i get more functions. It's actually a pitty you can't program every input to do what you want on the mac. Sorry about the negative post - the pen does save my RSI somewhat
Hi Don, I have just installed the bamboo fun pen and touch, Now my desktop is enormous and wont fit on screen, did yours do this and how does one make it fit the screen again?
Thanks for your thoughts ....ant
Not quite sure what you mean? You can restrict the area of the pen tablet via the driver in system preferences