SNIP IT AND SEE

Dick Pountain/13 May 2009 15:48/Idealog 178

Over the last 15 years I've documented my numerous attempts to turn my personal computer into a truly useful aide for research. Back in DOS days that meant using pop-up editors like Sidekick Plus, then came Windows and free-text databases like Blackwell's Idealist. Palm's launch of its original Pilot gave me a note-taker in my pocket, and I still use a Treo 680 phone and keep addresses in Palm Desktop. Last time I raised the topic here I'd just started to use the marvellous Firefox add-on Scrapbook to store web content like white-papers and cuttings that might be of future interest (it still serves me well, completely replacing Firefox's own duff bookmarking functions). Just recently though I made a modest purchase that has moved me up to a whole different level, namely Wacom's Bamboo graphics tablet.

I've always been a fan of Wacom's low-end tablets, buying my first ArtPad back in 1994 (the year PC Pro was launched!) purely for drawing with. It came with seriously cranky driver software that sometimes hung the system at boot-up, and needed a separate power supply. In 1999 I replaced it with Wacom's Graphire which powered itself from the USB port and doubled as a wireless mouse, though its driver was still wierd enough to be a nuisance under Vista. So when Wacom launched the Bamboo I coughed up £60 without a qualm, not influenced in the least by its matte/shiny black finish which *exactly* matches my Vaio TZ21...

The Bamboo works perfectly well for drawing, also takes powers from USB, and its driver finally seems at home in Windows. It has four programmable function buttons and an iPod-style touch wheel as well as the pen, and I soon found that using the wheel to zoom pictures in Paintshop Pro and text in Firefox or Word is something I'd hate to be without. The Bamboo came with a CD of applications, which I'd normally ignore because they're usually Noddy-in-Toyland drawing programs for kids or something similar. Not this time though. I became mildly interested when it mentioned that Bamboo supports the Tablet PC interface in Vista, which I'd never bothered with up till then.

The whole Tablet PC thing passed me by, when, after some agonising, I settled for another ThinkPad instead of a tablet several years back. I didn't like the feel of any of the ones I tried, and distrusted the flimsy swivel hinges on their screens. Occasionally I've felt an envy pang while editing Simon Jones's Applications column as he waxes lyrical about OneNote, but never deep enough to do anything about it. So I was browsing the Bamboo's pen setup dialogue to set the pen functions I prefer (lower button for double-click, upper button for right-click) when I encountered Windows Journal, which is assigned by default to the tablet's FN1 button.

Basically Journal is a simplified version of OneNote that lets you scribble handwritten notes and converts them to text, can format text in fonts and colours, accepts pictures, and lets you rearrange all these components to taste using the pen. It enables you to strip all the interesting bits out of various web pages or local documents and stuff them into the equivalent of a card file, which Journal keeps in order for you. This in itself was pretty neat and a good complement to ScrapBook, allowing me to gather all the best bits onto the same page. And then I noticed for the first time Vista's Snipping Tool, which had always been there on the Start Menu.

The Snipping Tool final does what I've always wanted to do, but never quite could, which is to just draw a freehand red (or blue, or whatever) line around anything on the screen and just cut it out. No more capturing screenshots using <Alt-PrtSc>, no more horribly tricky screen capturing from within a drawing program. Just snip as much as you want, in whatever shape you want, maybe annotate it with arrows in any colour you want, and then two clicks will put it onto a Journal page, into a Word doc or a drawing, or email it to someone else.

For many years now, in fact ever since Byte days, I've been used to drawing my own technical diagrams, partly because I enjoy it (sad) and partly because explaining to an artist what you want is harder than just doing it. I still use the shareware program SmartDraw III which I prefer to all the more complex vector programs I've tried. Now I can rough out a diagram freehand on a Journal page using the pen, hit the Tools menu to recognise my scribbled captions as text, straighten the lines and make all the boxes square, then just cut and paste it straight into SmartDraw. My user interface experience now feels like something from Star Trek, a quick twiddle to zoom, hit FN2 for Window Switcher, a flick of the pen to delete. Bamboo is small, light and its USB cables detaches, so it slips into my shoulder bag alongside the Vaio barely noticeably. In effect I now have a Tablet PC in two pieces, without any of the disadvantages, and it even looks as if it was meant to be.

[Dick Pountain is not yet sponsored by Wacom, but he's open to all reasonable offers...]