Newton Poetry

If hosting a blog has taught me only one thing, it’s that people find your site through some very interesting search site inquiries.

Take the above listing – a snapshot of Tuesday. Notice a trend?

When you type in “christmas chick” in, say, a Google Image search, a post I did last Christmas on Macenstein’s “Mac Chick of the Month” comes up third in the list. Her name is Morgan Kennedy. Except, really, nothing comes up – I deleted the post.

I appreciate all the search hits Ms. Kennedy’s pictures brought me, but in the end I decided (a) that it really wasn’t my post that was drawing the attention – Macenstein did all the work; and (b) this is a site about the Newton MessagePad, not half-naked (but very lovely) women.

Even though that original post, dating back a year ago now, is gone, the picture remains. But not for long. I’m deleting that, too. That means that I’ll sacrifice several hits a day in lost search engine traffic.

Really, they weren’t here to see me, anyway. They were here to see Morgan.

“I suspect Newton is used as a name because the device can easily be dropped (and probably as easily broken) thus confirming certain precepts of gravitation developed by Isaac Newton.”

– John C. Dvorak, computer columnist, when the Newton was announced. Dvorak calls the Newton one of the “top ten tech turkeys.”

Maybe I should have waited to download a chess game for my eMate.

Daring Fireball author John Gruber says the Newton’s “best chess game,” Joachim Bondo’s Deep Green, will be available for the iPhone.

“Deep Green is the one indie Newton app that I was most hoping would make the jump to the iPhone,” Gruber says.

Deep Green for the Newton is still available and is freeware, which is why I wish I would’ve waited to pick my chess game. But I can still give it a try.

It’s nice to see Newton apps making it over, after a spit and polish, to the iPhone. Catamount’s PocketMoney is the one Newton app that I’ve tried on my iPhone, and I use it everyday.

Learn more about the iPhone Deep Green here.

Something to think about: if Apple were to come out with some sort of tablet, would you buy one?

Say you’re a Newton user, and this new iTablet comes with everything you’ve been dreaming of. Would you abandon your Newton?

Discuss in the comments section. It’s something I had to think about when I bought my iPhone 3G: would my Newton get much use when the Jesus Phone comes along (answer: it hasn’t)?

So what say you: would you buy an Apple tablet? What would you use it for?

Whew – that was close. Got it done on deadline.

Now it’s official: I’m MobileMe-less.

Found a cool blog, System Folder, that highlights a technology called Mac ‘n’ Touch – a precursor to the finger-controlled iPhone. Author Rick Mori dug through an 1993 copy of MacUser and found this Mac ‘n’ Touch technology, developed by MicroTouch, was an add-on to monitors that allowed users to interact with software without a keyboard or mouse.

Unlike the Newton, Mac ‘n’ Touch used a “capacitive sensor” that worked only with touch, not a stylus, much like today’s iPhone.

As you can imagine, this kind of innovation was aimed at the education market. Kids love to touch, right?

Read the rest of Rick’s post for more details. Touch-screen Mac rumors have been around for a while now, especially since the iPhone came out. It’s nice to see that a touch-controlled Mac isn’t such a new idea after all.

Last week I successfully connected my Newton eMate 300 with my iBook G4 running OS X 10.4 Tiger using Escale. This week, my project was attempting to connect the eMate with my iBook G3 blueberry clamshell, running OS X 10.2 Jaguar, using NewTen, another Newton connect app.

More… »

If first impressions are everything, then MobileMe never had a chance.

After I bought my iPhone 3G, I signed up for the trial MobileMe account. Back then, it was only a 60-day free trial, but Apple soon added 30 days onto that, and then 30 days onto that, after MobileMe’s launch arrived like a lead balloon.

The idea seemed swell enough: sync your Address Book, iCal, and Mail settings and entries with the ever-present Cloud, and your iPhone. But since July, I’ve run into more problems than solutions, and MobileMe has been a frustrating mess.

My free trial is up on Monday, Dec. 8. I’m going to cancel my account.

Looking back, I never really needed MobileMe to begin with. Because I plug my iPhone into my Mac almost every night, any new entries in either iCal or Address Book get synced each way – from the iPhone to my Mac, and from my Mac to my iPhone. I don’t need the “push” capabilities MobileMe claimed to offer because my syncing schedule was fast enough.

It’s too bad. Apple had a big uphill effort replacing the .Mac service. MobileMe seemed like a decent-enough resolution to everyone’s complaints against .Mac: not much storage, lackluster syncing, no star features that made it seem worth the $99 annual subscription. With it’s modern browser interface and over-the-air syncing, MobileMe looked great on paper. In practice, however, it failed to live up to my expectations.

Maybe it was a lack of habit, but I never found myself missing MobileMe when I wasn’t using it (which was often). If I used my iPhone and Mac for business, the cloud syncing might seem like a bigger deal. But I had a system down, and it worked just fine for me.

The one feature that did catch my eye was the photo sharing galleries. My friend’s wedding photographer put together a beautiful presentation (the subjects helped) using MobileMe’s slideshow capabilities. But again: I don’t really need it. Flickr works just fine as a photo-sharing environment for me. I can make slideshows with Flickr that look fine for my needs. I’m not a wedding photographer. I don’t need anything fancy.

Another thing that bothered me? The fact that iDisk iDisk Sync [thanks commenters!] takes up the 10 GB of space from my hard drive. Maybe I’m a rare case, but when I launch iDisk, it takes away whatever space is available away from my Mac’s “available” space. Why store things on a fragile cloud when my hard drive works just fine? I love the idea behind iDisk, but my iBook is cramped enough without taking that additional 10 GB away.

Apple’s solution? Don’t use iDisk Sync.

The launch didn’t help things. We all remember that, right? The big outage that first weekend. How it took weeks and weeks of Apple tinkering to get even basic services like e-mail up and running for all MobileMe users. For a while there, MobileMe seemed like a big embarrassing misshap for Apple – right up there with the big system outage for the iPhone 3G’s launch. That kind of thing can leave a bad taste in the mouth. I guess it’s never gone away for me.

Part of me is skeptical about this “cloud computing” stuff. I understand that Google seems to have it down, barring Gmail outages, and – lord bless them – Microsoft is working on their own cloud syncing projects. But Google apps like Gmail are hooked up to my Mail.app, which runs from my desktop, and I don’t often make appointments or add contacts through a web browser. That stuff lives on my Mac. I like that I can edit a contact’s information on my iPhone and the change gets logged in Address Book in OS X. There’s no extra log-in-to-the-web-service involved.

If I had several Macs strung out over several locations, with only my iPhone in common, the idea behind MobileMe could come in handy. Backing up my data to the cloud? Sure. Do it all the time. But easy and reliable syncage still seems to be a giant Work In Progress. I’m not yet impressed.

So thanks for the couple of free months, Apple, but I’m saying “no thanks” to MobileMe. Maybe some day I’ll find a use for it – one where I can justify renewing my subscription. Right now, though, I can’t see any good reason to keep MobileMe around. It’s either been a thorn in my side or a non-starter, and life’s too short for either of those.

I love this post from John Hatchett over at Low End Mac:

I was in the middle of recording my vinyl Steely Dan albums to iTunes when it hit me: Why not turn the iMac into a digital jukebox? I could hook it up to my home stereo with a stereo mini-jack-to-RCA cable and have any song in my collection available to listen to. I could even use the iTunes database to customize song selection. And, of course, there is always shuffle.

How fantastic is that? I can imagine a visitor coming over: “Hey, what’s that iMac doing hooked up to your stereo?”

“Oh, that? That’s my jukebox.”

Totally geeky, and totally fitting with his theme of using old-school Macs in these weird times.

Here I thought J.D. Power and Associates only ranked cars. It turns out, however, that smartphones are also on their to-rate list.

And guess who’s number one?

Apple’s iPhone ranked above RIM and every other smartphone maker in this year’s Business Wireless Smartphone Customer Satisfaction Study. Apple wasted no time in bragging about the accolade: I spotted their full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal last Tuesday (above). And why not? J.D. Power and Associates ranks “ease of operation” the highest in its study (27% of the final score), and what’s easier to use than the iPhone?

Says the company in their press release:

Apple ranks highest in overall smartphone customer satisfaction with a score of 778 on a 1,000-point scale, performing particularly well in the ease of operation, physical design and handset feature factors. BlackBerry manufacturer RIM (703) and Samsung (701) follow Apple in the rankings.

The ad appeared on the back page of the A section of the Wall Street Journal, and aimed its message directly at enterprise professionals. Apple’s ad highlights the “enterprise support” and “hundreds of of amazing business apps in the App Store.” Any questions about Apple trying to attract the suit-and-tie crowd have been answered.

And here some fools think Apple is scared of RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry (money quote: “the number of shortcomings in the iPhone 3G far outweigh those found in the Storm.” Right-o).

With great rankings like those from J.D. Power and Associates, what’s there to be scared of?