The Mac’s dock is a handy shelf you can store icons on – just personalize the space by dragging apps on (or off) it. However, you cannot visually group them. That is, if you wanted to increase the space between your media apps and your web apps to make sure your potatoes don’t touch the apple sauce.

Enter “Dock Dividers” by Brandon Kelly – a clever little end-run around the whole business. Download these icons (which are little vertical or horizontal spacer bars) and simply drag them in where you need’em. The end.

Works in Tiger OS X 10.4 – probably in Leopard, too, but I can’t really tell. I’m stuck in the past, you see.

Did you get a thumbdrive for Christmas? Or have one kicking around, perhaps carrying a few files but otherwise not as useful as first hoped? Put your USB drives to work by using portable apps.

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Maybe you’ve been drawing or painting for years and have been wondering about using computers for your work. Or you’ve newly discovered a love for drawing and want to make the most of any digital opportunities. Setting up a digital drawing and painting studio isn’t rocket science and doesn’t need to cost much. Let’s get started. (more…)

Just FYI – a new version of Artweaver is now available. This version contains the following fixes:

• Sporadic errors in brush tool fixed
• Position edits in print with preview improved
• Display errors with Asian fonts in GUI fixed
• Various improvements and bug fixes

Get more information here or you can download Artweaver (Windows freeware!) here.

Bamboo Fun (with 'Mouse') Its a 4x6 inch drawing tablet with pressure sensitivity, a drawing stylus and a "mouse". I gave up on the 'mouse' as it was too sluggish for me (and its not a mouse in the proper sense of the word, either. It's a stylus shaped like a mouse but minus the pressure-sensitivity)

Inkscape (an open source vector drawing application) is my go-to-tool when I need to draw anything and everything in an easy-to-scale way. In other words, its like Illustrator or CorelDraw. Similar and yet different with its own unique qualities (and free! as in beer!). And I really like Inkscape’s ‘Calligraphic’ brush tool — it responds well to the drawing tablet with a solid feel.

My tablet is the entry-level Bamboo Fun by Wacom (Also used is a 6×8 Wacom but, as its serial only, its limited to use on an older, slower PC). Under every other circumstance (in Windows XP), the Bamboo is a welcomed replacement to drawing with a brick. I mean, a mouse.

To sum: Inkscape and the Bamboo are great tool every digital artist should have installed.

But.

Put them together on a PC using Windows XP and the stylus will track fine for, say, 10 seconds and then simply become non-responsive. Moments later, everything is back to normal.Then it stops working again. Very annoying and virtually useless.

So what to do about the Wacom Bamboo Fun not work in Inkscape? Clearly there is a software issue between the tablet and Inkscape (current version is 0.46) — but time well spent googling dug up a temporary fix — a rewrite of a supporing DLL which, when installed, fixes the problem. (For now; we’ll see if future versions include a fix.)

Link to discussion forum re: Wacom Bamboo tablet flakiness using pencil in inkscape | Search for “Patch for Inkscape”

There are brief directions on the above forum for installing this replacement DLL; you should be able to swing it no trouble.