Newton Poetry

Tony Kan from My Apple Newton:

The initial quake carried on for nearly a minute.

But it’s the aftershocks that have caused more stress. Occasionally one bumps through and the “here we go again…” thought comes to mind…

Schools are closed until Wednesday. All water needs to be boiled. Power, communications and water are restored to 90% of the city. Airports open. Railways closed. Reports of pools of quicksand appearing in one part of the city immediately after the earthquake. One woman fell into it and was up to her ears in it before her husband heard her cries for help and dragged her out.

Tony describes the scene from Christchurch, New Zealand’s recent earthquake. But if you know Tony, you know he’s got his Newton MessagePad ready.

Tony’s My Apple Newton is the premier Newton blog out there. Unlike Newton Poetry, which strays into Mac geekdom and random bits of culture, My Apple Newton is all business when it comes to the MessagePad. And here lately, Tony is on a much more prolific posting schedule than I can ever be. If you want to know more about how to use your MessagePad or eMate, and what makes it tick, Tony’s blog is the place to go. He’s the Newton user’s Newton user.

And in the middle of this natural disaster, Tony’s still rocking the Newton in posts like “Surviving the Christchurch Earthquake“:

Guess what was an indispensable tool in the aftermath? My Apple Newton. During the odd quiet moment I could relax by journalling what had happened and then email the updates to friends and family when power and communications were restored.

Even his updates are posted with his Newton, thanks to (I imagine) nBlog.

Pretty remarkable that something as “obsolete” as the Newton can come in handy during a crisis. It’s a tough little beast, and when the right kind of person wields it, the Newton remains a go-to tool.

All the best to Tony and everyone in Christchurch.

[Via Riccardo Mori at System Folder.]

Mike Grimm, darn near a neighbor to me over in Fowlerville, Mich., shared a collection of his own Apple portables – including an Newton eMate 300, several varieties of iBooks, and a PowerBook 190 (“Ready for PowerPac Upgrade“).

“Eventually there may be some of the vintage desktops, and maybe a couple of PDA shots,” Mike said over e-mail.

I don’t see the neon eMate styluses very often, but Mike shares a bright orange one in his eMate shots.

No one attracts news like Apple. Man.

As reader Joseph said, I kind of asked for this one, didn’t I?

The new iTunes 10 icon is nice. It fits with the rest of the circular, glowing orbs that Apple trots out these days. It’s simple and clean, and has the old-school Aqua look to it.

And as Steve said during the keynote, the CD era is about to be eclipsed by everything digital. With version 10, now is the time for a change.

The idea behind One Thing Today (or the Touch version, above) is great: focus on completing one task every day. You get that done, you feel successful.

I’ve operated this way for years. “Tonight I’ll do the dishes, and tomorrow is my writing night, and Thursday I’ve got laundry to do.” As long as I do something productive each night, I don’t feel like a loser.

So Line Thirteen does an app for the Mac and an iOS app that puts all that in software form, where each day has some task and only one task. And as much as the app seems worth it for $9 (Mac) or $0.99 (iOS), it seems like you could set up a free version with iCal or a text file. Here’s an iCal version:

Here’s a text file in Notational Velocity that will sync to Simplenote on my iPhone:

If this is the way you think, there’s no reason you can’t make your own system. The benefit of One Thing Today is automatic scheduling and maybe a nicer interface – and I do think it’s neat that someone thinks the way I do and went ahead and made an app.

However, if I can do it myself with the tools at hand – especially sync-ability with NV and SimpleNote – why not give it a try?

Well look at that: the Newton-emulating Einstein connects to the Internet. Matthias Melcher got this little experiment up and running.

[Via @newtsoup on Twitter.]

The United Network of Newton Archives, or UNNA, is looking at clearing the cobwebs and hosting new Newton-related software after long last.

Morgan Aldridge, UNNA wrangler since 2007, gave the above hint on Twitter – a sneak peek at the Recent Additions page. It shows the latest 25 uploads to UNNA through a moderated database, says Morgan.

“Any new files uploaded and existing files that have new descriptions added get added to a moderation queue,” he said in an e-mail. “If it’s just a description, it’s just a matter of tweaking and approving the description. If it’s also a new upload, the moderation tools support publishing the file to the final destination as well.”

The previous UNNA moderator, Victor Rehorst, stopped taking new UNNA submissions in 2004, and then handed off UNNA’s hosting to Morgan. Finally, he says, he’s getting around to adding new stuff to the archive.

“In the past few years a number of Newton-related sites have disappeared for good and I and others have become increasingly worried about preserving all of this data,” Morgan said. “The least I could do is get UNNA opened back up. So, a couple months ago I started moving forward.”

Between some detective work, trying to figure out how Victor managed all the data, and some version control issues, Morgan plunked away at the project a few hours at a time. Now the Recent Additions page is his way of testing out the uploading and moderating tools. UNNA has preserved Newton sites along the way.

The idea is to keep the Newton software and sites in a downloadable vault to keep it from vanishing. As I’ve found, more and more Newton sites are disappearing. The same can be said for software: companies go out of business, people move (or die), computers crash.

Morgan says he doesn’t get a whole lot of submissions these days, but new entries trickle in every few months. Mostly, he says, Newton users have expressed “discomfort with the state of UNNA.” So he’s going to start fixing that. One of the first new entries: Brian Parker of Sealie Computing is submitting full versions of his NewtChat, NewtGlider, and MathFaster packages, and mirrors of the web pages.

“He’s still looking to see if he has the NewtGlider source code and such, but I’m already happy to have this work preserved,” Morgan said.

UNNA is an indispensable resource for any Newton user. I find packages in the archives that I try out just for fun, and Newton Poetry has only been possible through a lot of that old software. It’s great to hear we’ll be getting some new stuff up and available for download.

[Via UNNA on Twitter. Follow Morgan’s own Twitter stream, while you’re at it.]

Steven Frank of Panic on “Collections” with a capital C:

A reasonable goal, it seemed to me, would be to stick to systems and consoles that have deep personal meaning to me; the ones that claimed years of my life: The Atari 2600, the Apple ][ series, and the Amiga. And for spice maybe I’d add a few things that, although I never owned them in their day, were particularly unique or iconic, like the Vectrex.

…I wanted something that I could plug in, tinker with, repair, and show to anyone who wanted to see. A living museum, not a stuffy tomb of priceless artifacts. Real live working interactive history, not skeletons under glass.

The whole piece is great, but it’s this idea, that if you’re a collector, you should actually use the things you’re collecting, that stuck out for me.

I’ve thought about my own collection over the past few months. Newton Poetry hasn’t been the booming place it once was because I either don’t have the time to play with my old Macs like I use to, or I don’t have the inclination. A lot of the old hardware I have sits unused, and that makes me feel guilty.

There are a few exceptions. I still turn on my iMac G3 for my budgeting needs (with Quicken 2000) and to play WarCraft II. Lately the Mac SE has become a little journaling/writing station. It’s great to just flip it on, fire up MacWrite, and type away on the ol’ Extended II keyboard. But the PowerMac G4? The LC 520? The iBook G3 clamshell? I haven’t turned them on in months, and so I wonder what the heck they’re good for.

Sometimes I can’t wait to update my VHS collection to DVDs or downloads. Or to buy all my Super Nintendo games on the Wii and never have to worry about cartridges again. But then I think, “When does it all end? When will I never have to upgrade?”

We all face this at a certain point. If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt a collector of something – probably MessagePads or Macs. Maybe upgrading isn’t so much an issue as time and attention and space to dedicate to whatever it is you collect. We have limited amounts of each.

So I’ll keep thinking about it, and maybe reserve my time and space for the Macs and hardware I actually use. I like having a PowerMac G4; they’re neat machines. But maybe it doesn’t have a place in what Steven Frank calls my “living museum.”

From the New York Times’s original review of the Newton MessagePad:

The bottom line on the Newton Message Pad is that Apple promised too much and failed to deliver a useful device for everyday executive chores. On the other hand, the Message Pad practically hums with untapped potential, and six months (or moths) to a year from now it is likely to be a popular executive tool.

…When it was first described publicly more than a year ago by Apple’s chairman, John Sculley, the Newton was said to be a combination pen-based computer, personal organizer, fax and data communicator, and wireless messaging system.The Newton is indeed full of promise, but that’s not the same thing as fulfilling the promises.

I’m just trying to think of a situation where today’s Apple would release a product that had more “untapped potential” than actual usefulness.

The original iPhone, maybe? It didn’t have apps, cut/copy/paste, or any of the things we all take for granted now. But then we didn’t have to worry about faulty handwriting recognition. Today, it seems a new Apple product must have an immediate pick-up-and-use aura. Potential comes through iteration, sure, but you’re not left holding a device that inspires a yawn – or a question of its practical aspects.

The opposite argument is that apps didn’t come to the iPhone until a year after its launch, and then the whole world seemed to open up. With the Newton, it took until at least Newton OS 2.0 to get things in motion.

The kicker of Peter Lewis’s review comes at the end: “The possibilities are grand. For example, one can imagine cellular phone circuitry being shrunk to fit in the Message Pad’s credit-card-sized PCMCIA slot, or a Newton being shrunk to fit in a cellular phone.”

One can imagine, indeed.

[Via Gizmodo, via Retro MacCast.]

David and I had a very special guest on The hello Show, episode 12: Thomas Brand of Egg Freckles.

Thomas was nice enough to share some of his stories as a head Apple Store Genius, why he has such a cool job, and which were some of the worst Macs to repair back in the day.

His Egg Freckles blog has been an inspiration since the early days of Newton Poetry, and Thomas is always a good source of MessagePad-based stuff.

Much like Grant, talking to Tom for the show helps personalize the fun folks you talk to through Twitter or who leave comments on the blog. We now know what the guy sounds like, and that’s pretty cool.

Enjoy the show by downloading the MP3 off the site or subscribing through iTunes.