Can a Magic Trackpad Be a Drawing Tablet?!?

In a future post, you’ll read about a great, affordable graphics tablet (under $100) that even professional graphics designers consider good enough for their daily professional work. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the limited precision of your Apple Magic Trackpad to do some cool things like handwriting recognition and even decent drawing functionality in apps including my favorite Pixelmator and free apps like GIMP and Inkscape1. You can even draw in most of the Adobe apps, from Photoshop Elements on up to Photoshop CS6 and vector apps like Adobe Illustrator.

Here’s an old blog/review that compares a Wacom Bamboo, the Magic Mouse and the Magic Trackpad.

The developers at Ten1Design have two applications that support drawing on the Magic Trackpad: Autograph, an easy way to sign documents using a trackpad in seconds, and inklet, a way to use the Magic Trackpad or any of the more recent MacBook integrated glass trackpads as a drawing tablet.

Using a Ten1Design Pogo Stylus for Magic Trackpad - available here from $9 is an option for people wanting precision beyond finger painting, something necessary to get the handwriting recognition that works well (and is integrated into Mac OS X, see below).

 

Using inklet with Photoshop:

Using inklet with handwriting recognition:

 

There are tons of other “hacks” to do similar things, as the native settings of Mac OS X does not support English or western European countries with our character set, only input of characters for Asian languages2.

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Be sure to check back for the blog post about the greatest find I’ve had in graphics tablets ever, the Tursion. It’s the same tablet as the Monoprice, but the Tursion is the least expensive of them, coming in at just $47.49 as of this writing on Amazon. The USB-based drawing tablet with 8 hot keys measures 10 x 6.25 inches and is a powerful alternative to the Wacom models with little difference according to many graphics designers. There’s a great review of the Monoprice 12 x 9 tablet over at deviantArt courtesy of draw2much. FYI, I highly recommend the smaller tablets but the 12x9 is considered less useful (without the hot keys) by many.

Important note: the Monoprice/Tursion software is Windows-only except for the drivers. This is not a problem, since Mac OS X has pretty much everything you need to use the tablet and the software included for Windows is for Windows versions of Microsoft Office and not very useful.

1. GIMP now runs natively in Mac OS X, Inkscape still requires Apple’s X11/Xquartz and you will be prompted to download and install them by OS X if you do not have that installed already.

2. More from Apple on using multi-touch trackpads for Chinese character input is here.