Our friends at Wacom have announced a new, wide-format member of their professional tablet line. The new 6×11″ Intuos3 looks like a great match for the aspect ratios of modern monitors.
We’ve been adding features to Photoshop to improve the experience for tablet users. The Intuos 3 offers touch strips for two-handed input, so in Photoshop CS2 we changed zooming to center on the mouse cursor. Now you can be painting with one hand, and zoom in on those pixels using your other hand. (Tip: You can also zoom using a mouse wheel, or the two-finger input on a PowerBook trackpad; hold Opt/Alt while using the wheel to zoom. To make this behavior the default (instead of panning), enable the new preference “Zoom with Scroll Wheel.”)
The painting engines in Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2 also support the barrel rotation properties of the new 6D Art Pen. And to make things better for those using a Cintiq or TabletPC, we made it possible on Windows to move the menu bar to the bottom of the screen. That way menus pop up, rather than down, meaning your hand is less likely to get in the way.
If you’re using a tablet and have ideas on where we should take things from here, please let us know.