Newton Poetry

“Wow, it’s so big!”

In low-brow humor circumstances, that would seem like a compliment. But in relation to the Newton, it’s kind of embarrassing.

I whipped out my MessagePad at work one day to scribble in something I didn’t want to forget, and my boss saw it over my shoulder.

“What the heck is that?” she asked.

“It’s my Newton. I use it to keep my memory straight,” I said.

I told her it was the first PDA, invented by Apple, and hails from the early 1990s. “That thing is huge,” she said. I didn’t blush, but I did agree that we’ve come a long way since 1994. She knows I’ve been saving up for an iPhone, so I told her the Newton was my stand-by.

Newton users get a similar reaction fairly often, from what I’ve read. It’s happened to me twice. The other time I brought my Newton to a friend’s house while working on Newton Poetry. Someone saw the MessagePad and couldn’t believe it was so bulky. He switched it on, played with the handwriting recognition, and called it a “giant green brick.” I explained what it was, too, and we had a good laugh about the advance of technology.

And it’s true. When I rest my iPod on top of the MessagePad, it still amazes me the size difference. My iPod has a 30 GB hard drive and the ability to hold thousands of songs. The Newton, on the other hand, needs a 2 MB flash card to store data. Plus it’s monochrome and lacks the lush, movie-playing screen of the iPod.

But still, having the Newton around is a great conversation starter. Everyone has an iPod these days, but Newtons are so rare they inspire outbursts like…well, like the one above.

by Mother Goose

Bow-wow, says the dog,
Mew, new buys the cat,
Grunt, grant says the boy,
And squeak goes the rat.
Tu, why says the oul,
Quuck gmoik, says the duck,
And what the cuckoo says you know.

[Read the original. I get a lot of hits of my onomonotopia stuff, and this one was kind of fun. Find out why this rhyme is misspelled.]

Check this out:

The Handwriting Recognition team is seeking an engineer who will be responsible for advancing Apple’s handwriting recognition technology for Mac OS X. The ideal candidate will be an expert in the area of pattern recognition, with an excellent understanding of handwriting recognition issues. The person will also assume primary responsibility for maintaining and enhancing existing code and tools. The recognition technology you create may extend beyond Mac OS X to other applications and the iPhone.

This is from Apple’s job site. Someone shared the post from Macrumors.com, who reminds us that “Rosetta technology has found its way into Mac OS X under the name ‘Inkwell,’ but requires a tablet to be installed for use.”

So what do you say? Got what it takes to invent the next Newton?

After the iPhone SDK was release, I wondered whether it would make sense to throw a Newton emulator in the mix. Shucks, I wondered whether it would even be possible.

Leave it to Newton programmers to actually do the digging.

From Jason on the Newtontalk list:

Well, I started out by ensuring that Einstein would build on the new
SDK. Then tried changing targets to see what would happen. I did this for KLibs as well as Einstein. K Libs seems to build fine as a static library using the new target which was sort of surprising to me but since the BSD subsystem can be installed on the iPhone I thought perhaps it would work. When building Einstein for the new target I run into complications. There are two at the moment that I am facing. One is with missing X11 header files and the other with the K Libs dependency. Not sure why the compiler isn’t finding the X include files since I am certain the X11 SDK is installed and Einstein did build cleanly before. I am sure it’s just a configuration problem in the project that I’ve caused. So far I haven’t had any luck trying to resolve the dependency with K Libs that Einstein has by creating a new target, one that depends upon a new K Libs target for the new target device.

And a reply, from Matthias:

Do not build the target based on X11. X11 is not part of the iPhone
and so it is not part of the iPhone header files (they are different
headers than the system header files). Einstein for iPhone must be built using the special iPhone version of Cocoa, which is quite similar, yet not the same. You have to use UIKit to generate the basic UI and emulator surface.

I don’t know about you, but there’s hope to be found. Newton developers are working on the iNewton as I type this – and that’s a neat feeling. Give them all the support you can!

One of the little “to-do” items in life is some working knowledge of programming. I have no experience, besides basic HTML and CSS, and I’d love to be able to learn a real-life computing language.

While searching, I came across this Wikipedia entry on NewtonScript, the governing language of our good green friend.

Developed from a version of SELF, NewtonScript was designed by Walter Smith, who worked at Apple during the Newton’s heyday. He has a site dedicated to NewtonScript’s story.

Says Smith:

During the development effort that brought you the MessagePad, a new language–now called NewtonScript–evolved in parallel with the view system and object store. The language thrash made it possible: all those languages we looked at provided a wealth of ideas that found their way into NewtonScript. SELF was one of the primary influences.

Check out a great PDF of Smith’s findings here.

I didn’t know this, but according to Wikipedia, “the prototype-based object model of Self and NewtonScript was used in JavaScript, the most popular and visible language to use the concept so far.” I’ll be darned.

Newton Connection, one of the applications that lets you sync your Newton MessagePad to modern OS X Macs, released a 2.1 update that allows for screenshots.

Newton Poetry covered apps like NCX, and it’s nice to know Newton developers are still working hard on viable connection solutions. NCX does everything the old Newton Connection Utilities did, but runs under OS X.

// Via Cult of Mac

by Walt Whitman

I stand as on soml might- eagle’s beak,
Enstwurd the sea abscrhing, viewing, (nothing
but sea and sky)
The tossing waves, the form, the ships in the
distance,
The wild unrest, the snowy cuvling cups – that
inboiind urge and urge of waves,
Seeking the shorts fivever.

[Read the original. I plan on taking a big New England trip later this spring, and I liked the imagery Whitman uses in this one. Gets me excited about what I’ll be seeing for the first time. Find out why this poem is misspelled.]

Q: How many Apple Newtons does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

[Thanks to Wikipedia for the inspiration.]

It’s pretty universal that Apple product fans love to take pictures of their conquests. Unboxing photo galleries, videos of guys opening the first iPhone boxes, even retro photo tours – they all crop up from time to time on the Apple blogs (I’m guilty myself).

Sadly, however, unboxing a used Newton you just picked up on eBay doesn’t explode with excitement like today’s products. Thankfully, a group of Flickr users have dedicated a group to Newtonism that’s bursting with MessagePad photos of every sort.

If there’s a mayor of Newton Flickr City, it has to be Sonny Hung, who hosts tons of photo sets of his Newton finds.

Others are pretty great, too, including group founder Grant Hutchinson.

If you’re a Flickr user and know your way around a camera’s macro setting, be sure to snap some shots of your own Newton and share them with the group. New photo uploads are few and far between. It’s always nice to see some new ones.

It takes some strong willpower not to give in to temptation and grab a new 20-inch iMac for $999.

Apple’s refurb site is an endless source of lust for me. I’ve grabbed a few iPods as gifts off the refurbished list, and the deals are great.

What stops me from grabbing my tax rebate check and ordering a new Leopard-powered beauty? For one, I don’t have enough room in my apartment for a dedicated desktop machine. My iBook gets me by just fine, and I have a Bondi iMac G3 that gets me by as a “gaming machine” and Newton hub.

After seeing one of the new iMacs in person (the monstrous 24-inch model), however, I can’t help but yearn for one. My plan is to purchase an iMac after I purchase my own home, which may be a year or two into the future – or when I get my own apartment (I have a roommate, who has his own computer).

In the meantime, I’m hoping some angel stops by Apple’s site and surprises me on my birthday this weekend. Hope springs eternal!

Time for some links:

• Download iPhone apps to iPod Touch for free [via Simplehelp]
• iTunes now #1 music retailer [Ars Technica]
• Celebrity Mac/iPhone/iPod sightings [Macenstein – they have a whole series going, but this one was one of my favs]