After reading Jeffrey’s glowing endorsements, I ran out and bought a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet this weekend. I went for the stylish all-white model. It only took a few minutes to get it up and running on my machine. I have to admit my fist impression well less than favorable. I hated the darn thing! With so many years of mousing under my belt, the Wacom pen pointer felt awkward and unnatural. It seemed jerky and impossible to control. But after about 20 minutes of playing around with it and refining the settings, the Wacom pen began to grow on me. Within an hour I was hooked and saw the light. I can’t believe I didn’t get one of these things sooner. It just feels so good! I think Jeffrey is right, it will probably make me about 20% faster on Revit. The pen has two settings, “pointer style” and “mouse style”. While the “pointer style” feels more like real paper, I found the “mouse style” requires a lot less arm and shoulder movement. By the way, the companion mouse that comes with that the tablet is excellent and will most likely be what I use for word documents and the like.
The only down side as far as I can see is that it is a bit of a hassle to put down and pick up the pen in between typing text. The Graphire 3 comes with a little pen stand, I guess I’ll just have to get in the habit of using it. Also problematic is the lack of a scroll wheel. I double splurged and replaced my 6 year old keyboard with a new Logitech keyboard with built in scroll wheel. Now I’m on fire!