MacWorld Feels the Pressure

Mac apps add pressure-sensitivity; now the norm

Recognizing that pen computing will soon be the norm, not the exception, application developers at the recently-held MacWorld Expo showed they are rapidly incorporating pen pressure-sensitivity capabilities into their commercial offerings. With applications that support pressure-sensitivity, the harder the user presses on the pen, the thicker the line becomes. Or putting it another way, by varying the pressure of the pen on the digitizer surface, users can control the density and thickness of lines just as you do with traditional pens and brushes on a non-computer surface. These capabilities are particularly important with drawing packages used by artists who use realistic drawing techniques to create more realistic images. Capturing pressure-sensitivity data can also be important in applications like signature verification.

Among the applications supporting pressure-sensitivity are: Adobe’s Photoshop; Aldus/Silicon Beach’s Digital Darkroom, Freehand 3.1, and Superpaint 3.0; Altsys’ Fontographer 3.5; Creative Software’s Easy Color Paint 2.0; Deneba’s Ultrapaint and Canvas 3.0; Electronic Arts’ Studio/32; Fractal Design’s Painter; Letraset’s Color Studio; Linker System’s Animation Stand; Supermac’s Pixel Paint Pro 2.0; MECC’s Easy Color Paint 2.0; and Time Art’s Oasis.

It comes as no surprise that the software was being demonstrated on Macintosh desktop computers with attached pen/digitizers, primarily those from Wacom (Vancouver, WA) and CalComp (Scottsdale, AZ). Among other digitizers, Wacom was showing for the first time its backlit LCD Integrated Table HD-648 for pen-based applications. CalComp, on the other hand, was showing it DrawingBoard II which connects to the Mac via the serial port.

To enable pressure-sensitive capabilities, programmers must utilize software development kits provided by the various digitizer vendors. We’ll be looking at some of these SDKs and reporting on them in the future.