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 of some kind and a driver program (i.e., TabletMagic!) to translate the device's cryptic chatter into coherent system events.
TabletMagic provides a Preference Pane interface to start and stop the driver, and to configure and test tablets. The driver 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.
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.