Trust Flex Design Tablet on Mac OSX - How to make it work!

UPDATE: after some suggestions from my readers (thank u guys!), I recommend you to go to this page and download the CyberTablet 12000 driver for MacOSX! That will work great with Photoshop and any other program, enjoy!

The Flex Design Tablet by Trust is a really neat and cool graphic tablet I’ve seen yesterday on a Saturn store in Assago (Milan). It’s produced by Trust and it’s a small and portable graphic tablet, an ultra thin model, made from some sort of soft rubber material, similar to a simple mousepad. The moment I’ve seen it in the store I was tempted to buy it. Lemme see the price… what?! Only 25 euros?! Man, it’s mine… wait a minute. The box says it’s compatible with Windows only. In these days?! Is this possible? Not really.

I already own an Intuos 3 A4 Oversize which is really huge, I planned to buy a Bamboo but since this Trust tablet looks soo cool and is so cheap and portable I just decided to give it a go: I did a nice move, now I have the ideal tablet to use on the move with my MacBook Pro when I’m not at home. Even if it was not considered compatible with Mac OS, I thought that it was just impossible. Usually, any device works plug and play on a Mac, if it doesn’t, it’s just an easy to solve driver issue (and, usually, you don’t have to cry for days on google to find a way to install your drivers like in Linux). So I just bought it. Let’s see what we are talking about:

Key features

• Stylish, ultra thin and space saving tablet with 155 x 120 mm (6 x 4.6 inch) working space for picture editing, freehand drawing and other graphic applications
• Paper thin design with anti-skid bottom for a comfortable and ergonomic position of your hand, preventing excessive straining
• Small, lightweight and energy efficient design: ideal for mobile users
• Including ergonomic wireless 3 button pen with 1024 step pressure sensitivity
• Advanced software for drawing and editing pictures included
• Fully supports Windows 7 & Vista advanced tablet functions, such as pen pressure sensitivity, and converting handwriting into digital text.

Package contents

• Tablet
• Pen
• 2x pen tips
• Pen-tip removal tool
• USB cable
• 1x AAA battery
• CD-ROM with software
• User’s guide

System requirements

• Windows 7, Vista or XP
• USB port

Once at home, the tablet indeed worked plug and play, apparently: the screen size was exactly the same as the active area on the tablet, it could be used like a mouse, buttons where all working, I just had to to turn PhotoShop on and see how well the cheap tablet performed. It didn’t work at all in PS: only some points here and there where drawn and there was no way to draw a normal brush stroke. Not to mention the impossibility to have pressure sensitivity. I was surprised, in ArtRage the table worked but with no pressure levels… actually, pressure levels where random. Well, I bought it already and I simply never give up on software issues. There had to be a way to use the Flex on a Mac.

That’s how my google search started. It took the whole yesterday evening to come to a solution. It’s true that Trust has no support for this tablet on a Mac and it’s true that, if you try to contact them via mail, they’ll just tell you that you had to read the box better. But there’s a driver out there which will  transform the tablet in a perfectly Mac OSX compatible device! You just have to go to this page and install the driver for the CyberTablet Z7, an Adesso tablet! The Flex will work like a charm, with full pressure levels support and all the rest, making you happy!

I really had an hard time finding a solution and there’s no blog post, for as far as I’ve seen, able of explaining how to solve this problem! It’s incredible that the Trust support won’t help a customer solve this small issue, since a driver’s out there indeed. There are pieces of information in various forums but nobody will tell you which model of tablet is supported and which driver you have to download. All I can imagine is that this CyberTablet Z7 has some hardware similarity with the Trust Flex Design: surely there’s nothing looking more different in the world, really, the two tablet look definitely very different from each other, though the driver works and that’s all we need to know! Isn’t it? So, if you find the Flex Design Tablet in a store near you with a very convenient price and you just need a starter tablet to draw, or an extra one to bring with you in any damned place, man, this is probably the tablet you’r looking for!

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~ by thedarkmaster on October 22, 2010.