Wacom has a new online service and free companion software tool download called  Bamboo Dock. The apps available so far are basic — a drawing/doodling app, a map you can draw on and a handwriting recognition app. The others I couldn’t demo as a Wacom Bamboo serial number is required.

The online service is a sort of virtual sketchpad, allowing you to doodle, draw, scrapbook and upload files to “spaces” which are like collections, and inside of each one can add multiple canvases with different contents, themes and such.

I am having a hard time imagining a use for the online portion, but the companion apps look like they might be handy and should be interesting to see how things progress as new tools are developed/released.

The Bamboo Dock also allows you to add applications on your hard drive to the Bamboo Dock as shortcuts. So far the Doodler app seems the most handy — just a quick sketchpad type application.

Bamboo Dock is based on the Adobe Air platform, so it runs on Mac or PC and of course requires Adobe Air to be installed. On my Mac running OS X, the Bamboo Dock takes up 100 MB of RAM at idle, so I doubt I will be running this thing often unfortunately. Seems all the Adobe Air apps have the same issue — lots of RAM hogging.

via Atomos