MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1234839
Experiencing The New Wacom One By Ric Getter The Pearl District represents all that's truly successful about Portland, Oregon, a city that managed to make the transition from a long manufacturing history to high tech and micro-brews (not to mention being home to some of the nation's best tea and coffee). The city has the traffic jams to prove it. Overlooking one of the more substantial, where I-5 bisects the Pearl, is the U.S. headquarters of Wacom, one of the first high-tech big-names to claim Portland as its home. The company, founded in Japan in 1983, is virtually synonymous with graphic tablets and, more recently, tablet-computers. The name, by the way, has its roots in the Japanese words for "harmony" (WAH not WAY) and "computer." Wacom's tablets have been a cornerstone of the desktop computing experience nearly as long as desktop computing has been around. MacDirectory was invited to visit Wacom's unique Experience Center for a tour and to pick up the new Wacom One we'd be testing out for this report. First opened in the summer of 2016, the Experience Center is both a showplace for Wacom's products for creative folks and a gathering place for artists, from grade-school students and novices, to the city's community of renown professionals (Dark Horse Comics is based just across the river). It's a place of teaching and learning, allowing Wacom to reach out to area schools and inspire students by giving them hands-on experience with the best digital art tools around. One evening a month, an older crowd gathers for Drink & Draw, an evening where artists share their experience and insights while sharing the produce of the city's best breweries and the state's world-class wineries just to the south. They're Experienced Greeting us was Don Varga, Wacom's V.P. of Marketing for North America, young, energetic, with a neatly-trimmed beard and casual manner that would be at home with both artists and executives. We spoke about Wacom, the products we've known so well over the years and a side of the company that's not so obvious to our readers. Dan spoke of Wacom as an "interface technology company" that fields not only a variety of products and components, but the proprietary technologies that's used by other industries. One side of the company works on those business-to-business operations, the other is entirely driven by the needs and desires of creative users. The company, for example, has been a leader in electronic signature recognition. It's probably safe to say that there are far more people using Wacom technology in checkout lines than studios. Don pointed out that that Wacom came of age alongside Adobe Photoshop. "For a long time, it as a matter of converting people over from painting on canvas and paper or photo editing with a mouse to a pen, which is the natural way to do it." Wacom has always strived to partner with education, so there is now a generation of digital artists who grew up with digital drawing. That's changed things. Now, he told us, the