TabletMagic Serial Wacom Driver
TabletMagic is an open-source donationware driver enabling Wacom Serial tablets (UD, SD, PL, CT, KT, GD) in Mac OS X. Requires Mac OS X 10.2 or higher.
How Does It Work?
Mac OS X has built-in support for serial ports. So if you want a serial device to work in Mac OS X all you need is a serial port or USB-serial adapter and a driver program (e.g., TabletMagic) to translate the device's cryptic chatter into coherent system events.
The driver part of TabletMagic is a small and efficient "daemon" program named "TabletMagicDaemon" that talks to the tablet and does most of the real work.
TabletMagicDaemon generates system-level "Tablet Events" that provide pressure, tilt, and eraser information for programs to use. Any application that responds to Mac OS X tablet events will work with TabletMagic! * Corel Painter 9, for example, understands these events, while Corel Painter 8 does not.
You can use TabletMagic's Preference Pane interface to start and stop the driver, and to configure and test your tablet.
The History of TabletMagic
When Wacom dropped support for serial tablets in Mac OS X it was a bitter disappointment. I love my ArtZ-II tablet and it was terribly sad to see it just sitting there collecting dust. So in early 2001 I donned my propeller beanie and started to work on the problem.
I downloaded the PDFs and code samples at Wacom's web site. With their help I was quickly able to write a program that spoke fluent Wacom, but it was only a prototype and not a driver.
Fast forward to April 2004. After three years of neglect I decided to make a true driver and go open source. TabletMagic 1.0 was ugly but it worked.
In May 2006 I locked myself in a room with a Cocoa programming book and replaced the rusty configurator with a shiny preference pane. This was released as TabletMagic 2.0.
TabletMagic on TabletPC
Late in 2006 I began to receive requests from people who had Mac OS X running (unsupported) on their TabletPCs and wanted a driver for the tablet-screen. In 2006 no one had yet figured out how to get Mac OS X to see the built-in digitizer on these sytems, and even if the digitizer could be activated TabletMagic didn't know the communication protocols anyway! I decided to wait until the first problem was solved.
It wasn't long before an enterprising geek figured out how to get Mac OS X to see TabletPC digitizers, and soon a hacker called "Khashoggi" publicly posted a modified version of the TabletMagic daemon capable of driving TabletPC. I should have been thrilled, but unfortunately Khashoggi had not contributed to the project in good faith. Instead he had changed the program output and copyright notice in an attempt to hide his use of the TabletMagic codebase. When I publicly confronted him about his deceit - with very clear evidence - he responded with transparent denials and faux indignation, and ultimately refused to contribute anything at all.
Determined not to be outdone by such a character, I collected as much information as I could about TabletPC digitizers and added the necessary hooks to TabletMagic to deal with these non-standard systems. At this point TabletMagic can enable and drive most TabletPC digitizers. I suppose in a way we have Khashoggi to thank for it.