Inklet turns your MacBook trackpad into a graphics tablet

Why spring for a Wacom tablet when you can transform your existing unibody Macbook trackpad into a graphics tablet? For $24.95, Ten One Design will do just through their impressive Inklet OS X application.

The demo is both swank and intuitive. When not in use, the application sits in your menu bar, but Control+Option+i overlays the screen with a bright translucent box, showing you where, exactly, your penstrokes will be inputed. Draw on your trackpad with a finger or stylus and it converts the input into digital ink; hit the Inklet hotkey again and you can use your trackpad as normal. Simple, elegant and efficient.

Of course, there’s some caveats: the Apple trackpad won’t register stylus pressure like a real graphics pad, so Ten One Design recommends buying a Pogo Stylus from them for $14.99 to recreate that functionality. Needless to say, the trackpad also doesn’t have the surface area of a Wacom tablet. Still, for the idle doodler, occasional Photoshop artist or even the professional designer who wants to work portably without dragging a tablet around, this seems like a great little app.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in News, Software |

  • CaryMG

    Ooooooo !!11!!

    SoftWare that enables tracing lines on a trackpad to translate into onscreen imagery!
    How *ingenious*!!

    Golly, I wonder why Apple didn’t just incorporate that capability into trackpads in the first place?

    Oh, that’s right — they did.

  • http://ladyelectric.com Tana Brinnand

    What would really be great is if Inklet would turn the iPad into a graphics tablet.