Newton Poetry

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.

Looking for loonies like yourself who enjoy low-end technology, outdated PDAs, and a knack for shaking their fist at Apple’s decisions?

Join a Newton User Group!

Chuma.org’s Newton FAQ has a listing of user groups, including where they’re at and their web site.

A few have since disbanded, but groups like Stanford’s (above) are die-hards, and I’m sure would love a visitor (visit their site here).  SNUG meets on the third Thursday of every month at 7 p.m. (right before the iPhone group) at Printer’s Inc. Café (320 S. California Avenue in Palo Alto).  Be sure to check out the group’s “gripe list.”

There’s a Michigan State group that’s just a bit north of me. I may check to see if they still meet. If they do, I’ll be sure to report back.

By the way, the Tennessee Valley Newton Users Group (TVNUG) meets the first Wednesday of each month at 5 p.m. Central at the Barnes & Nobel coffee shop, located on University Drive in Huntsville, AL, says George S. Hamilton.  The store is closing, however, so stay tuned for the new location.

If you want to do some research, check out Meetup.com’s list of Newton User Group cities.

I took my suggestion from the iPhone SDK announcement and posed an offer to the Newtontalk mailing list:

So who wants to take up a collection for the $99 developer’s fee, grab a bit of Cocoa, and make a Newton Touch app? I’ve got $5 toward the effort!

One reader, Simon, correctly pointed out that the software developer’s kit was actually free; it’s the right to upload software to, and therefore receive the blessing from, Apple’s App Store that costs $99.

The point is still there. With reports of 100,000 downloads of the iPhone software kit, there has to be someone out there that is thinking, “You know what would be fun? A Newton emulator!”

Is this even possible? Plenty have reported on the limitations imposed on software developers – no app can remain open in the background, no scripting, etc. – so that Apple can keep the platform secure.

Mattias of Robowerk.com says the limitations could cripple the entire thing:

The iPhone SDK has severe limitations in its license that would make an Einstein emulator useless. Apart form having to disable the ability to install packages in order to conform, we would also not be able to run in the background, so no alarm or calender events (it may be
possible to solve the first issue by wrapping Newton packages and have them installed through iTunes which would give the per-application control back to Apple). There is also the lack of pen input and a very high resolution, yet small screen, which makes HWR impossible and hitting a Newton button extremely hard.

But there has to be a way to, say, scribble something on your Newton Notepad app and have it show up in iPhone’s Notes. Or scribble in a contact into Newton’s Names and have it sync to Address Book. Same with Calendar and iCal.

This would solve one of the main dilemmas today’s Newton user faces: the difficulty connecting a MessagePad’s information with OS X. If an iPhone could run a Newton app, syncing would be a breeze.

On their own, the iPhone and iPod Touch are becoming what the Newton always dreamed of: a platform to organize your computing life on the go. So there really is no need for a Newton app other than to just play around with and show to your geeky friends. They’re based on two totally different input philosophies (though there is a stylus available for the iPhone now, as we’ve seen), and I can see why switching from one to the other would be pointless.

Someone on the Newtontalk list brough up Apple’s possible resistance to a Newton app being made available in the first place. All applications have to be certified by Apple before users can download them from the App Store, and Apple probably has no interest in seeing its ten-year-dead OS making any sort of reappearance. There are still jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches out there, though, that provide a handy bypass system.

The idea of the Newton lives on in the iPhone: novel input mechanism, calendar and contact syncing, e-mail, web surfing, dock-loading applications, etc. And when developer start churning out to-do apps and financial apps and gaming apps, all that will be left untouched will be the Newton’s handwriting recognition. The iPhone will be what the Newton wanted to be when it grew up, in full color.

But when developers program videos like babes washing your iPhone’s screen, or apps that mimic the Nintendo Entertainment System (as Newton developers did with Newtendo), a fun Newton emulator doesn’t seem like such a worthless project.

“The thing we knew about this computer was that it would be pen-based…”

Cool, first-hand account of the early days of Newton development from Walter Smith and James Joaquin. There’s a part 2, too, that you can find in YouTube’s sidebar.

Love the vanilla, hotel-conference-room decorations.

Pretty cool post over at the DadHacker.com blog everyone seems to be excited about these days (and for good reason – his Donkey Kong story is a trip). Seems the author was one of the original developers on the MessagePad:

There was a lot of great technology hidden away in the guts of Newton. I worked on some other pieces that were neat, but this is what I’m most happy about having shipped. It was a lot of fun to work on. Newton was one of those projects I always felt it was a privilege to be part of.

He tells a great story about the early days of flash memory, and how Newton’s system blew everyone away. Shucks, he says, if “the Newt had had a dock, decent docking support, and a few other things, it would have just killed Palm.” Amen, brother.

Lots of other good posts, too, including a link to a Newton video I’ll be posting soon.

Sad that, on the day the Newton died, Splorp’s Newted community went “deep toast.”

The system that has maintained the community for nine years crashed today, although the signs were starting to appear.

Already, the Newton community has responded by offering replacement hardware.

What’s “deep toast?” Says Hutchinson:

By the way, if you’re a Newton geek of any measure, you will have understood the nod to our little green friend in the title of this post. For everyone else, “deep toast” refers to a alert message indicating that some piece of Newton hardware (generally the rechargeable battery) can no longer be reliably used. An arguably fitting salute.

Just got accepted as a member of the Newted Newton community. Thanks to Grant for accepting my associate membership. He’s still taking members, which is good to hear.

My membership gets me 10 MB of server space for e-mails and web stuff, a free web site (under construction, of course), FTP access, and the ability to hunt through members-only message boards. Right now I’m just finding my way around the place, but it’s pretty cool. Sadly I get the feeling I’m in an abandoned part of town, because the message boards haven’t had many new topics posted, but the info I did find was pretty cool.

Grant is, of course, kind of famous around the Newton community for all he does and the help he provides.

More to come as I play around some more.