Hi, I'm also looking into this tablet, and wanted to share some info I've aquired on non Wacom tablets and these 2 applications. I currently use on my home PC an Aiptek 12x9 tablet. It's pen is like that on the Averatec and uses a battery, and the drivers are not Wacom. It works fine in both Painter and Photoshop, as well as other programs like Open Canvas. Also like the Averatec pen it registers as an HID compliant input device, so I doubt there would be any problem. Has anyone actually used this tablet for Adobe Photoshop or Painter? The only app I've heard for sure has problems is a Macromedia application.

It probably won't work.

What the Averatec needs is a driver like the one Wacom released for Penabled tablets. That driver basically becomes a wintab replacement, which pipes tablet information from the wisptis drivers.

Wintab and wisptis are both documented pretty well. It would be neat if someone could develop a generic pipe for this. Only Wacom has done this so far with their Penabled drivers.

So there are a couple directions people can attack this problem right now:
1. Push Averatec or UC Logic to release a wisptis->wintab translator.
2. Start Sourceforge project to develop generic wisptis->wintab translator.
3. Try to trick Wacom's Penabled drivers to operate as wisptis->wintab translator.
4. Push Adobe and others to support wisptis.
5. Push Microsoft to support wintab programs within wisptis.
6. Disable Ink Services, or install normal WinXP, and install UC Logic serial tablet driver.

Basically the fault here is with Microsoft. They knew that the vast majority of programs out there supported wintab, but did not provide a way to emulate wintab functionality within the new Ink Services drivers. Wacom partially cleaned up Microsoft's mess by releasing their own translator.

I assume when you say that you mean it probably won't work as a pen .. it should work as good as a mouse would, correct?

Right, it will just not have pressure sensitivity.

If you only ever used a mouse in Painter anyway, this will probably not be as much of an issue.

However for anyone who already uses a graphics tablet, not having pressure sensitivity is unacceptable.

That's why I want to see if this can be fixed before shelling out any cash. $1300 is relatively cheap, but it's still not a minor purchase.

This is a software issue, so there is no physical reason this should not work.

Ok .. I can live with that, but only because I have to think that it's a short-term issue. If the pen does support pressure-sensitivity and tilt-sensitivity (which is what people seem to be saying), at some point they'll work out the kinks and get it working with software better.

Graphics aren't the primary reason I ordered the C3500, so this doesn't change my mind. However, I do look forward to them getting this taken care of.

CF

I can now confirm what others have said earlier in this thread. Corel Draw and Photo-Paint do not seem to support whatever pressure-sensitivity the C3500 provides. I do know that there IS pressure-sensitivity, since I was able to use it in the OneNote tools. Hopefully this will be fixed/solved soon.

I have Microsoft and Wacom engineers talking together about something interesting, so don't give up hope.

There's bound to be a few growing pains with this first tablet from Averatec, but fortunately most of them seem to be software-based, and therefore fixable at some point.

Haven't given up hope yet .. but getting close ;)

Anything happening here?

CF

Just checking in again on this issue. Contrary to many of the posters here, I have had no problems with my c3500 and am pretty pleased with it. However, this is the one thing I'd love to see fixed.

I found the following in a sample chapter from a book on writing tablet pc applications "Building Tablet PC Applications" by Rob Jarrett and Phillip Su:


WinTab
Some alert readers may be aware of another standard tablet input API called WinTab (http://www.pointing.com/WINTAB.HTM). It was discovered during the development of the TIS that using WinTab would prove problematic—WinTab's API design puts all responsibility for functional conformance on the shoulders of the driver's implementers (third parties). Some already released WinTab drivers' behavior deviated slightly from the spec, so it became difficult or impossible for the TIS to support WinTab in a generic way. Contrast this with the HID model in which the device or device driver has to specify only supported functionality (named usages) and Windows takes care of the API nuances. It was therefore decided that HID devices were the better way to go.

The HID driver, like most other Windows XP drivers, runs at the kernel level, constantly acquiring data from the tablet device and packaging it into HID format if it needs to. This allows the TIS to read input data from the device in a generic fashion.

So, it looks like there's going to be a long wait for this.

James