If you’ve ever used a tablet before, you’ll know that the Inkling is a pretty amazing prospect. Wacom’s drawing tablets have always tried to mimic the experience of drawing on paper, but the majority of the time you’re applying a pen to a blank plastic surface and then looking up at a screen to see what you’re drawing; it’s not anywhere near the same as sketching on paper, and it comes with a significant adjustment period. Even using the expensive Cintiq line, which lets you draw directly on a display built-in to a drawing tablet, doesn’t really feel like drawing on paper.

With the Inkling, digital drawing feels like traditional drawing because it is. The Inkling is basically an A4-sized clipboard that works with any old piece of paper you have lying around, complete with a pressure-sensitive drawing stylus that’s actually a pen. You draw on your paper clipped to the Inkling using the pen, and a detachable sensor records your strokes so that you can later upload them to your computer via USB. Tapping the sensor also creates new layers, so that you have a more flexible file to work with after import. The Inkling is wire-free and rechargeable with an estimated 8-hour battery life, so you can use it wherever you want, and the pen takes standard Mini Ballpoint refill cartridges, so there’s nothing expensive or specialized to replace.

Using Wacom Sketch Manager software that ships with the Inkling, you import your images as vector-based drawings that you can then manipulate in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, as well as Autodesk Sketchbook Pro or Sketchbook Designer. You can also save files as plain old unlayered JPG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, SVG and PDF files if you’d rather not do much advanced editing to them after upload.

If the Inkling still doesn’t impress based on my description, check out the official video from Wacom below. It pretty much guarantees, along with the relatively inexpensive $199 price tag, that I’ll be ponying up for one of these when it arrives mid-September.

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Let’s go over how to import your iPhone photos to the two programs that come with the Mac, Image Capture and iPhoto. I’ll be covering using your iPhone with Aperture and Adobe Lightroom in a later post.

Determining what program, if any, opens when you connect your iPhone

Some people like having an application open when you connect your iPhone; others hate it. Regardless of which camp you fall into, it’s easy to set what program (if any) launches when you connect your iPhone.

1. With your iPhone connected, open Image Capture (it should be pre-installed in your Applications folder by default).
2. You will see your iPhone under devices. Click the iPhone icon.
3. Down at the bottom, you will see “Connecting this iPhone opens…” with a pull-down menu under it.
   
4. Select what application you want to open. Choosing “No Application” will naturally open no applications.

Image Capture

Image Capture is a hidden gem. For iPhone users, Image Capture lets you do two things very easily: mass-delete unwanted photos, or import them to a folder of your choosing. This eliminates the need to store them in a program like iPhoto.

Connect your iPhone to your Mac and open up Image Capture. You’ll see a screen similar to the one below:

From here, simply select the photos you want to do something with. If you want to delete them, select them and choose the delete icon; it’s the red circular icon on the bottom to the left of “Import To.” If you want to import them, select the pull-down to the right of “Import To” and choose a location. Also, if you want to both delete images and import them to a program like iPhoto or Aperture, you can do that here.

Image Capture is my preferred way of deciding which iPhoto images I get rid of. In the end, I keep very few. They could either be shots that totally failed, or a reference photo from a store, or a photo that was a one-time “wish you were here” photo. The ability to delete unwanted photos, and send ones you do like to iPhoto or Aperture is great. Unfortunately, if you use Lightroom it won’t show up in the import list.

iPhoto

Since iPhoto comes with every Mac sold by Apple, it’s a logical favorite for sorting and storing photos. Even though Lightroom is my post-processing tool of choice, I still use iPhoto to sync images to my iOS devices as well as store general images — all my desktop wallpapers, images used in presentations, and images grabbed off the web.

To import photos into iPhoto, connect your iPhone and open iPhoto. You will be greeted with a screen similar to this one:

Select the photos you want to import and click on Import, or Import All if you want to just take everything. Fair Warning about iPhoto: if you keep “Split Events” checked, it will auto-create Events based on the preference you set in iPhoto. If you have a lot of pictures spread over a long period of time, make sure you uncheck that, since it will split your photos into a huge number of separate events Naturally, if you do have an Event’s worth of photos (two weddings, for example), feel free to split the events. Based on my usage, I take one or two photos at a time and forget to import them, so it isn’t useful to have iPhoto automatically divide them based on dates.

Using your iPhone for geotagging

One nice benefit of taking photos with your iPhone is by default, it tags all photos with your location. My DSLR does not have a GPS, but I’ve gotten in the habit of taking one or two photos my iPhone during a shoot. After I import both the DSLR and iPhoto images and merge the Events, it’s a simple two-step process to copy the GPS tag to all of the photos.

1. Select the photo with the GPS info, right-click and choose Copy.
2. select all the photos you want the GPS tag applied to, go to the Edit menu and choose “Paste Location.”

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Connect your iPhone (and quit iPhoto, if it comes up) and fire up Image Capture. You will see that it recognizes your device and is ready to serve.

You could just click “Download All” to have your images saved to your “Pictures” folder, but you can do much more with the application. The first thing you should do is bring up the application Preferences and choose a new default option for what happens when you connect any camera to your system (I suggest choosing “No application” as you then have control of what happens when you connect any given image-oriented device).

Bringing up the Options panel lets you change the “delete” behavior upon import, what information gets stored with the image (in both the image and the Finder) and what happens when Image Capture opens with a device connected.

When “Download Some…” is selected, you are given the option to process selected images with custom, optional transformations. “Download All” does just what it says.

If you elect to store information with the photos, the Finder (and Spotlight database) will be nicely populated, too.

While Image Capture can help streamline the retrieval of digital snaps from your iPhone, if you combine it with some interesting folder actions, you may also be able to seriously improve your overall workflow.

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App4Mac has introduced Sequence 1.0b1 a simple, yet powerful, screen capture/casting application for OS X Leopard. With Sequence, you can very easily capture and save an image or a movie of your screen to your computer’s clipboard or to a file in practically any image format (bmp, pict, gif, jpg, png, tiff & pdf).

The welcome screen explains most of the functionality pretty well. You can choose between image mode or motion capture mode and select fixed, free selection or full screen mode. Just move the selection area around, resize (if in free selection mode) and capture away. It’s that simple. You may select where the image goes (including MobileMe)

For movie captures, you have the option of turning on your Mac’s microphone (if available) and also including input from your iSight camera (again, if available). You can choose what part of the screen the picture-in-picture display will be placed and all audio will be included (if you chose that option). It saves the output to a Quicktime “.mov” file.

“Doodle” mode enables you to make annotations on screen, but options are limited at this point in the beta release. Application preferences are also not fully functional at this time.

There are two truly amazing points about the program. First: both modes (image and video capture) work very well, even without binding to the standard capture keys (which is a forthcoming option). Second: it’s $9.00 USD with lifetime free upgrades. While it may not have the high end features of similar programs, there is no way you can go wrong with ability to do picture-in-picture screen/app-casting with audiio for nine bucks (which may go up after July 4, 2008, so you might want to grab your copy now).

If you do a great deal of screencasting, appcasting or screen image captures, let us know if Sequence is or may become a valuable tool in your workflow processes by dropping a note in the comments.

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You enable grabUp via System Preferences and can choose whether it is available at login and also whether you wish to give up any remaining, precious menu bar space (their menu bar item provides access to your screen shot history):

(That shot is also available via their site: http://www.grabup.com/uploads/5951fc424b702c5c85508f847f989369.png)

Uploading is fairly speedy and providing the ability to turn off ⌘+Shift+4 hijacking makes it a complementary screen grab tool as opposed to a competitor. I should also note that it does keep a local copy of the image capture, just like an un-enhanced ⌘+Shift+4 would generate.

I’d really like to see Growl support added so you know when the upload is finished and the URL is available, but there is built-in visual feedback for this if you do enable the menu bar icon (it turns green while the image is uploading). There is also no mention of how long your images will be available, but they are hosting over 15,000 captures as of this post.

If you download grabUp and give it a try, drop a note in the comments. (And, before there is a deluge, readers should be aware that Skitch provides a similar bit of functionality, but you do need to register to make use of it).

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