I ordered a tablet; now what?

So, I asked the Internet how to shop for tablets. The internet told me, “Get a Wacom tablet. Get the cheapest Wacom tablet you can find.” So I did. I hunted around for a while and then ordered a Wacom Bamboo CTL460 pen tablet for around $50.

Wacom is notable not just for being, essentially, the name in graphics tablets, but also for the fact that they're the only major graphics tablet producer that supports Linux-based operating systems. I happen to run a Linux-based OS (namely Ubuntu) on my computer, so that's a necessary feature. There are existing free and open source Linux drivers for Wacom tablets¹. All other companies that produce tablets, by not having such drivers, have voluntarily rejected my money, which made my choice as a consumer very easy!

(You can tell I'm an expert on the tablet market because I spent a few hours researching it on Google!)

The tablet is supposed to arrive between June 16 and June 21. Since most of the work of this project is in experimentation once I actually receive the tablet, I might be a bit stalled for the next 5-8 days. I guess that gives me plenty of time to learn about file formats – maybe I should write a program that can load, make simple edits, and save a .png file, as an exercise to make sure I know my stuff.

But that means I need to decide what programming language to write it in! I'd love to write it in Haskell, which is a truly wonderful language, but I haven't written much Haskell code before, and there are a lot fewer existing libraries² for it than there are for C/C++, which is/are the language/s I have the most experience in. I don't really want to stack the extra effort of learning Haskell on top of the effort of learning how to deal with the image formats. I'll come up with a different project to use as my “Eli Dupree learns Haskell!” project, I guess.

– Eli