Suddenly remembered I had a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet I picked up f...

Posted 2023-09-02 | Back to blog index

Suddenly remembered I had a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet I picked up for like $3 at HARD OFF. Driver support was dropped long ago and I never got around to trying it with any of my old machines. Now that I set up the G4 running OS X for the kids, it seems like a nice toy for them to try out!

An iMac G4 with a Wacom tablet and pen in front of it. On the screen is Corel Painter 8 and MacOS X Ink.SPOLIER:(For the eagle-eyed viewer, off to the corner there is a grounded cable plugged into an extension cord in a way that the grounded pin sticks out)

This is my first time even touching a graphic tablet in my life, so it's pretty interesting. Kind of weird to get used to the absolute positioning of the cursor after having been a mouse/trackpad user all my life!

Until Apple dropped 32-bit support a few years ago, OS X had support for handwriting recognition (with the algorithm ported from the Newton), and this is my first time seeing it show up in System Preferences and trying it out!

It worked pretty poorly for me, I probably need practice

A screenshot of System Preferences in Mac OS X 10.4 but also showing an “Ink” icon A screenshot of Handwriting Recognition preferencesHandwriting recognition is: @ On O OffSettings Language Gestures Word ListMy handwriting is:Closely spacedWidely spaced• Allow me to Ink in any applicationPen options: • Pause momentarily to switch to mousing• Hold lower button to Ink• Hold upper button to InkAllow me to Ink above the tablet surfaceInk pad font: Apple Casual• Show Ink window~ Show Ink in menu barPNGPicture 1Restore DefaultsOptions... Writing “hello world” in TextEdit with Ink.Also showing the shortcuts for doing things like newline or undo. They kind of look like nordic runes.

It occasionally comes up that it's great tha Apple still keeps the software updates for the built-in updater in OS X online so it still works to install updates out-of-the-box.

Something I noticed in playing around with this is that they also keep a bunch of the built-in Help pages online! E.g. here's the help for Ink

https://helposx.apple.com/InkHelpR3/English/pgs2/about.html

https://helposx.apple.com/InkHelpR3/English/xpgs/xall.html

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