Turn Your Mac Touchpad into a Drawing Tablet with the Pogo Sketch

The new Pogo Sketch stylus may turn out to be a low-cost alternative to a professional drawing tablet.

The Pogo Sketch, from Ten One Design, is a new pencil-style stylus for use with all “capacitive touch screens,” as the product’s site explains.

What this means, for those that have no idea what “capacitive” is (e.g., me,) is that it is compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, and all Macbooks with multitouch trackpads, such as the Macbook, Macbook Pro, and Macbook Air. This means you can use the soft-tipped Sketch instead of your fingers on the trackpads of these products.

But what is truly interesting about the Sketch is that, according to Ten One Design’s site, the Sketch can be used on a Macbook’s trackpad like a pencil, making it a low-cost alternative to a drawing tablet. This means that users of the Sketch may be able to go about drawing and writing naturally in illustration programs without the need for a costly tablet.

It’s hard to say how well the Sketch performs without using it; a trackpad seems kind of small to simulate the act of drawing, no matter how natural the Sketch feels. But if it does in fact perform as well or close to as well as a full-fledged writing tablet, then the Sketch could make quite an impact on the digital drawing market, discarding with the need to get a bulky and expensive tablet.

Ten One Design also has a couple other selling points for the Sketch. They point out that the Sketch, which simulates a fingertip, can be used with gloves so users don’t have to worry about their hands getting cold when using their iPhone in the winter, and also ensures that users don’t get their iPod Touch all smudgy with their greasy fingers.

But really, these seem like trivialities compared to the possibility of being able to use Adobe Illustrator to draw naturally at a fraction of the cost of buying a Wacom tablet.

The Pogo Sketch costs $14.95 and is available here.