« Tufte Taking Orders for Beautiful Evidence! | Main | Bacchus Parade »
February 24, 2006
Wacom & Creative Suite for Medical School Notes
I've been teaching myself how to use Adobe's Creative Suite 2, the leading design software suite, by using InDesign (Creative Suite's layout program) and a Wacom tablet to take notes in medical school. It is entirely too time-consuming and I'm right back to pencil and paper. I compared a Wacom tablet with InDesign to a TabletPC with Onenote, and decided that of the two, the tablet was worse. I learned a skill with InDesign, but the overhead time cost was not sustainable because the work (getting the information into my head) flowrate plateaued at an unacceptably low level. In other words, as I got better with InDesign I realized even a skilled user can only produce at a certain rate, which I estimate to be five times slower than pencil and paper.
Paper and pencil also provides far richer tactile feedback as the pencil shears graphite onto the rough paper surface and the pressure and position of my fingers change over the paper and against the pencil. Using a Wacom tablet feels like drawing with a new felt-tip on the back of a photograph. Extremely smooth. Pencil on paper is also visually richer. A computer screen is 100 dpi at best, which the human eye can resolve probably 2400 dpi in the pencil strokes. I can also use a much larger visual space. In terms of satisfying my brain's craving for rich information, pencil and paper are literally orders of magnitude better.
Posted by Niels Olson at February 24, 2006 12:22 AM
Comments
Why not use a TabletPc?
Posted by: mike at February 25, 2006 12:08 PM
I thought about it, but was already invested in InDesign and a Wacom for other reasons, so I thought I'd give it a go. Some if not all my classmates who started out used tablet PCs seem to be coming to similar conclusions.
Posted by: Niels Olson at February 27, 2006 10:01 PM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)