I produce a webcomic, and I do it digitally from start to finish. But just because I don’t use paper in my process doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in new tools.

Wacom just released the Inkling. Here’s how Aegir Hallmundur from the Ministry of Type describes it.

What the device offers is convenience, and a bit of magic. It’s less hassle than scanning or photographing your notebooks, and you get scalable vectors nicely separated into whatever layers you want. You can draw an outline sketch and then feel free to scribble and annotate all over it, knowing each addition can be turned on and off and moved about at will, or even deleted entirely. That’s the real appeal of this thing.

Read his review. He covers how it converts the art, the software used to manage the files, and how it does vectors.

Personally, I don’t like it. Too hinky a system for $200.

The Wacom Inkling – a review

The Inkling at Wacom.com

This is a great critique by Bret Victor of the “vision” of the future that Microsoft trotted out in their recent popular video.

Victor:

My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.

This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you’re a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

Victor’s arguments really make Microsoft’s look into the future seem dull and unimaginitive.

Fascinating.

—–

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design – via Daring Fireball

Internet Explorer is now at less than 50% of web usage. Best news I’ve heard in a long, long time.

Internet Explorer is still an important browser, with a userbase large enough that few developers can afford to ignore—though sites that don’t need global appeal may well be able to safely ignore Internet Explorer 6—and at current rates it will remain important for a few years yet. But until and unless Microsoft makes its browser appeal to the influential geek demographic, it looks as if Internet Explorer has nowhere to go but down.

Die, IE6, Die.

The end of an era: Internet Explorer drops below 50% of Web usage – Ars Technica

From Marco Arment…

Fewer customers will choose Mac Pros as time goes on. Once that level drops below Apple’s threshold for viability or needing to care, the line will be discontinued.

I bet that time will be about two years from now: enough time for Apple to release one more generation with Thunderbolt and the new Sandy Bridge-based Xeon E5 CPUs in early 2012, giving the Mac Pro a full lifecycle to become even more irrelevant before they’re quietly removed from sale.

A few power users will complain, but most won’t care: by that time, most former Mac Pro customers will have already switched away.

This saddens me. I love my Mac pro. I’ve had it since April 2007 and it still feels fast.

I’ve saved money by being able to swap out dead hard and optical drives and upgrade the video card.

I’ve been planning to buy another Mac Pro to replace my current one. I just hope that they’re still around when I need them.

Scaling down the Mac Pro – Marco.org

Using iDevices to manage tasks and contacts, take credit card payments, and generally getting it done while on the move?

As a former and soon-to-be small biz owner, I’m paying attention to this.

It only looks like I’m playing Peggle Nights on my phone.

Ally: How I use my iPhone to run a small iOS device repair, development and consulting business – via tipb.com

Oof.

Bad.

Macworld Expo Rebranded as ‘Macworld|iWorld’ for 2012 – via macrumors.com

Among my favorites:

• A Freeform cork board mode
• More flexible note options
• and my personal favorite…Simplenote integration

Can’t wait!

LINKS

Scrivener 2.0 – Coming Soon (No, Really)

I think the Divide Text Frame would be useful when working with sound effects or shouted dialogue.

With this script you can divide multi-line text fields into separate text frame objects, making it easy to separate lists, navigation items, and more.

Speeding up the chopping up of a block of text could come in handy.

Another on that might cut down on some fiddling and CMD-Zs is the Metaball script.

This script will create connecting arcs from shapes you have drawn. Very useful when connecting basic shapes to create more complex shapes for logos, icons and illustrations.

I can see using this to create a more organically shaped balloon, much like the final balloon this week’s The Winchcombe strip.

But I like these scripts. Seeing stuff like this always makes me wish that I had learned how to do this myself when I had more free time.

By the way, I think I got this link from a post on Art Geek Zoo a while back. Check it out.

Links

10 Free and Extremely Useful Illustrator Scripts(vectips.com)

Art Geek Zoo

In this tutorial we’re going to explore the graphics created for the Olympic Winter Games recently held in Vancouver, British Columbia. Throughout the winter games, they had a continuing graphic theme of very stylized vector art. Here, we’ll achieve a similar effect using only Adobe Illustrator and a PSD file of a snowboarder. Follow along below to learn more about vector graphics.

It’s sometimes strange to realize that, despite the fact that I live in Illustrator for making my comics, I really only use a small portion of the application.

Links

Vector Effects in Adobe Illustrator

For my money, Adobe Illustrator is the best all around tool for making digital comics.

A few months back Adobe released Illustrator CS5, and I picked it up.

I’ve definitely noticed some improvements in the new version. Mostly in terms of stability and speed, but there are a few new features that I’m looking forward to trying out.

Layers Magazine has a review of this new version and some videos that highlight a handful of the new features.

Links

Illustrator CS5 – Layers Magazine