A Wireless Mouse for Graphic Designers!

Apple Magic Mouse

I have tried wireless mice before and they have never worked for me for design work, just too much lag or inconsistent performance when doing intricate Photoshop or other similar work. I have been waiting for Apple to design a new mouse that takes care of the Apple Mouse (previously Mighty Mouse) track ball gunking issue. I love the way the Mighty Mouse works when the track ball isn’t having issues but if it’s been a while I know the frustration is coming soon.

Well then Apple came out with the Magic Mouse and it is Magic! I bought one Friday at an Apple store after making sure I could return it if it doesn’t work for my design needs and was assured there is a 14 day return policy. As soon as I arrived home I set it up and downloaded the driver update. I then cranked up Photoshop and low and behold the Magic Mouse works great! Finally I’m completely happy with my mouse and it’s even wireless. I was beginning to wonder if anyone would ever come up with a wireless mouse that is useable for Graphic Design.

The purpose of this post is to inform others about a wireless mouse that in my opinion works for design work but I’m also liking the functionality of the touch sensitive surface and gestures.

Apple Magic Mouse gestures

Pleases take the poll below

Could This Be Hint Of Things To Come On iPhone?

AT&T data detail filter options

This may be nothing but I don’t recall seeing all of these choices before on my AT&T iPhone account area? Does anyone else know if they have always been there? The view filter choices just seemed interesting to me.

Could it have to do with planned iPhone video calling, multimedia messaging, and video exchange? Maybe these are choices that have been there all along but I just don’t recall seeing them.

One of My First Wacom Drawings

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This is one of my first digital paintings with a Wacom tablet. I have a Wacom Intuos 6×11 right now but soon I want to get a Wacom Cintiq 12WX.

Sigma DP1 Full Size Sensor Point and Shoot

A full sized sensor in a point and shoot sized camera. The Sigma DP1 has a full sized DSLR Foveon X3 full color sensor. It should be able to produce higher ISO lower noise pictures than other small digital cameras. The DP1 site also says that they have produced a very high quality lens for the camera.

“The DP1 uses the same 14 megapixel (2652×1768×3 layers) direct image sensor as the SD14.”

The price has been reported at $999 US.
Reportedly available in Spring 2008.

Sigma DP1 site

Sigma DP1 announcement on DPReview

Sigma DP1 on DPReview

Come on Canon do this with the G 10!

colormunki from X-Rite & Pantone

colormunki is a color tool from X-Rite and Pantone which will profile your monitor, printer and projector and integrates with design applications to capture and create color palettes. You can capture colors from photos and anything that you can scan over with the device. Price is $499.

Check it out it looks cool.

Apple Store Down for Updates?!

The Apple Store is down for updating? What could this be? I hope it’s not just maintenance. It is Tuesday?

My Allsop Mouse Pad

Recently I bought a new ALLSOP mouse pad and it works great. My old mouse pad would slide across the keyboard tray but this one has a rubber grip pad on the bottom that works great. The new pad also has a decent amount of maneuver space which is important for graphic design  and photography work. There is also a larger widescreen format pad at their site which might even be a better graphics mouse pad than the one I just bought.

Update to AT&T Rural Coverage Posting

The link for Cellular Ones MI coverage area changed. I have changed the link on that posting and here’s the link for Cellular Ones MI coverage area. It now has both the AT&T and Cellular One logos on the page and att is in the URL so maybe you can use the iPhone in all of those areas now? Here’s the coverage area link directly from AT&T’s site.

Did Leopard Security Update Stop Sharing with Older Mac’s?

With Leopard my old G4 tower was showing up in my Shared area of a Finder window and I was able to access the G4 and share it’s screen. Yesterday I noticed that my G4 was no longer showing up in Finder windows? A Windows PC is all that shows up now. The only thing I can think of that might have changed things was the Apple Security update recently released for Leopard Clients and Servers? If Apple disabled this intentionally that is RIDICULOUS!

I can’t update my old G4 to Leopard and I am not going to go out and buy a new computer to share iTunes and backup files to. Has anyone else noticed this? I do want to make sure it wasn’t some other small change that I made.

OK I turned off File Sharing on my G4 and then turned it back on and now I have access again!

Whew I was nervous!

I thought about removing this Blog entry but I will leave it in case it can help someone if they run into this.

Amazon Kindle Electronic Book Looks Good

Amazon’s new e-book reader Kindle looks very interesting to me. It uses an electronic-paper display that looks and reads like real paper. The electroinc ink technology looks like real paper not a computer screen. It is not backlit. You never need to sync it to a computer or use cables of any sort except for recharging. It uses SD memory cards and better than that you can download books, newspapers, magazines, blogs and probably more wirelessly and there is no need to find a WiFi hotspot because it uses Amazon’s EVDO Amazon Whispernet which is built on Sprints EVDO network. There are no monthly wireless access fees because Amazon covers that, you only pay for the device and the content you buy.

Kindle weighs 10.3 ounces, the same or a little less than a paper back book. It is currently selling for $399.Basically you can read any book you want if it’s in their download library which now stocks more than 80,000 titles and more will be added daily. Wherever you are you just look for what you want to read and purchase it. The library includes 101 of the current 112 New York Times Best Sellers which are $9.99 unless marked otherwise. The device can hold about 200 books. All of your purchases are backed up for you online by Amazon in case you should need to download them again in the future.

I would have liked to have something like this when I was in school for text books rather than lugging a bag full of books all over campus. The only drawback is that it is currently black and white but E Ink who make the screen technology has a prototype for a color display. I would think they would look into this market if it would be friendly towards this technology but with the money the used textbook stores make on reselling there might be resistance?

Looks interesting. Maybe this e-book will take off?