First generation ModBook.
I haven't had much drawing time lately, but the Autodesk Sketchbook 2009 deal fell in my lap (apparently they're bundling it with new units - you can download it for old ones given a serial number.) Pretty nice implementation of "pencil", and good use of pie-menus for selecting obvious things. Very much a "teaser" version, though:
That said, it did get me back into drawing (though I'll probably get back to using Scribbles, at my skill level Sketchbook Pro isn't really tempting, and the limitations of the downloaded version have already wasted my time after only two drawings.) I'm starting to consider picking up an old HP TC1100 (under-$400 "obsolete" tablet) to have something I'll carry around, though...
Just got a note from the author of Scribbles ( wave :-), and turns out that the one feature I was missing - the "eyedropper", the tool to match an existing color - was there all along; there's a small set of crosshairs next to the color selection button/icon, and if you click on those, you get a magnifying glass color selector.
Here I was, thinking "ok, there's subtlety to doing this right and I can see there being reasons to not get to it" - and those of you who have worked with me before know that I don't get to give user interface advice - but no, it's actually right there. I think the only reason I missed it was that it's the only small UI element in the whole app; the author clearly appreciates Fitts' Law... but there isn't any wasted decoration in the entire app, so I should have actually tried tapping it to see what it did :-)
Footnotes:
My modbook finally arrived. I'm using it for what I originally intended - not as a replacement for any of my other hardware, but as a wholly new thing, a tablet-screen mac with sophisticated and responsive drawing software.
I've always had trouble drawing with a mouse (and by "always" I mean "since back when you had to buy and configure them yourself") and I've never liked them much anyway (even the inventor didn't think it was the best choice, and the few large scale occupational hazards studies have implicating using they keyboard and mouse together, as a source of injury risk) but the "offset" aspect in particular has never worked well for doing anything as precise as drawing. (It probably didn't help that I didn't really do much of it outside of early grade school.)
I had similar problems with standlone tablets (like the Intuous Graphire) though they are an improvement - just not enough of one to come anywhere near scanning from pad and pen, or even photographing a dry-erase whiteboard.
TabletPCs for a long time have been
so I've glanced at them from time to time, but never been really tempted (the recent Thinkpad X-series convertible Tablets have be the closest... but the screens have always been disappointing - they went to "widescreen" early, and just never really had enough pixels, especially when held up against the T60p I'm typing this on.)
The Mac OS user interface always seemed like a good choice for a tablet; "real OS" underneath, ability to code fully rich apps in a real high level language (python), and a community-encouraged design aesthetic that said that you might not implement all the features, but you'd better make the ones you do implement look good and feel smooth.
Since I'm a couple of decades behind on actual drawing skill, I found a nice mac-look-and-feel drawing app called "Scribbles". Not as rich as ArtRage (which starts you out with selecting your paper texture - has a nice implementation of "real crayon on paper", but that's not where I'm ready to go just yet) but very intuitive and visual interfaces to layers, brush size, and color picking. A nice touch is a tracing mode - doesn't import anything, just makes the window transparent, so you can layer it over Preview or your web browser and start tracing. (I've used it heavily from the start to trace bird photographs I'd taken, to get a feel for realism in color vs. representational drawing.) I expect I'll outgrow it (though we'll see how it adds features - it's missing a color dipper for example EDIT actually it has one, see later post END EDIT but it's also only at version 1.2; they might keep up with my needs) though I don't really expect to ever get to the point of finding Photoshop or The GIMP useful :-)
It'll also be a while before any of my doodling actually shows up on the net. It's just practice anyway...
Footnotes: