I like how the creator uses the Newton to speak with the audience. Also a cool demo of the wifi capabilities of the MessagePad 2000 – complete with Apple sticker.
I’ll tackle the wifi project when I nab a 2100 sometime this summer, but in the meantime you can learn how to send a fax with your Newton.
It was bound to happen. Now there’s a social networking site – like Myspace or Facebook – dedicated to Apple users.
It’s called MyAppleSpace, and according to Brian Floe, it’s the networking site “for the rest of us”:
iPhone, iPod, Mac or even AppleTV users now have a common home to explore the everything Apple, share experiences, network with other users, create usergroups within the community, create their own profile with their own private blog, upload Apple related video, photos and even music.
MyAppleSpace is pretty simple to start out. It has some customization features (my profile is “Bondi”) and the ability to comment and blog and share videos. All pretty standard stuff. I created a group called “Newton Users” (nach), and it was a snap. Now we’ll see if anyone joins.
Because that’s the power of social networks: the bigger, the better. But an Apple-themed site can stay just small enough to be comfy and familiar.
Check it out, and join my Newton group. I’ll see you on MyAppleSpace.
[UPDATE: Read my interview with MyAppleSpace creator Brian Flow.]
Like it hasn’t happened before, right?
This time, our green friend made Wired.com’s “Lamest Fetish Items” list. Gear lust gone bad? Says Wired: “Most misunderstood gadget ever? Or biggest flop? Both.”
Flop this. Newton seems to appear on every list ever made by a technology-based site, for good or ill.
Enough’s enough already, folks. We know the MessagePad was both cool for the time and a big commercial flop. We get it.
Happy Memorial Day.
Nothing lasts forever. The Buddha taught us that. So what happens when, someday down the road, all the Newtons currently in operation cease to work?
It’s bound to happen. MY MessagePad 110 is now about 15 years old; that lifespan is probably way longer than Apple ever intended. Consider that versus most iPods, which last a few years at best. They’re made to be replaceable.
How will MessagePads operate 10 years from now, or 20? Will there even be a point in owning one that far down the road?
It’s not like Apple is going to make any more Newtons. All that exist at this moment in time are all that will ever be. What we have is it. Sure, someone may discover a lost hoard of MessagePads locked in some corporate vault someday. But eventually, even those will stop working.
Is this discussion even worth having? Will we care if there are working Newtons in operation 20 years from now? Will our kids? Will their kids even know what a Newton is/was?
Deep thoughts on this night. Perhaps too deep for rational thought, but worth bringing up if only because rumors of a new Apple tablet are still floating around. The Newton is probably being replaced, philosophically, by the iPhone and iPod Touch. What comes after that? Will there ever be a Newton 2.0? What will the Newtontalk list discuss in 2018?
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Arthur C. Clarke’s third “prediction law” states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
In that case, I have a magic Newton, because after showing it to my grandma the other night, she’s convinced that what it does is beyond this world.
Grandma usually has a list of “to do” items every time I visit her – take some books out of the attic, say, or troubleshoot her iMac – so I decided to take my Newton to her place to take note of these items.
“What’s that you’re using there?” she asked me.
“I call it my ‘memory box,'” I told her. “It’s called an Apple Newton.”
I explained to her how it keeps track of my calendar items, and to-do lists, and simple notes, how to recognizes my handwriting – all the stuff the MessagePad is great at.
But it was when I showed her how to erase something, and the “poof” graphic that appears when you do, that her eyes lit up.
And the little trash can that appears when you throw a note away? That was magic, too.
I even let her try the handwriting software, but her super-fancy letters bested the Newton’s attempts at translation.
“I need one of those,” she told me, for the same reason I kept it around: tons of little notes were taking over her living space.
Grandma couldn’t believe that the 110 was made in the early 1990s, and she asked why Apple would ever stop making them.
Good questions, but I explained to her that we’ve since “progressed” to the iPod and iPhone for Newton-like tasks.
“Yes, but I don’t need a phone,” she said. “I want one of those.” She was sold. And who can blame her?
Advanced technology? Maybe not, but my Newton had enough magic in it to win over one more convert.
With the death of Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, what better tribute could a Newton user pay than to use the MessagePad as a tool during games?
Thankfully, Matt How (aka, “Papa Duck”) has developed programs for that very purpose.
Matt has created Newton Dice Roller and a Newton D&D spells ebook – both are available, with source code, on his Papa Duck page for free.
Matt was kind enough to e-mail me more information about his Newton D&D projects.
“I have used electronic devices to support my role playing games since pretty much the beginning,” Matt told me. More… »
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.
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.
An oldie but goodie: a 2004 Cult of Mac story about bloggers using their Newtons to upload posts.
Mike (above) runs his Dumb Blogs Have More Fun moblog “almost entirely from his Newton.” What makes the Newton so handy for moblogs? Says Kahney:
the important thing for moblogging is the Newton’s portability; because it’s easy to carry, it’s always handy, and moblogging becomes a regular habit. The same is true of camera phones.
Unfortunately the link to Mike’s blog doesn’t work (you’ll notice that a lot with Newton sites), but this was an interesting look into the beginnings of the blogging craze – especially because it involves Newtons.