Newton Poetry

CUPERTINO, Cal. – In a surprising move, Apple, Inc. (AAPL) announced today that it would drop its award-winning OS X Touch platform on iPhone and iPod Touch models in favor of its long-dead Newton operating system.

The updated Newton OS, the software used to run Apple’s discontinued MessagePad PDAs during the early and mid ’90s, will be called “iNewton,” according to an Apple press release.

“We believe the Newton OS is, by far, the superior platform, and truly belongs on our Touch-based products,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice president of worldwide marketing, said. “We made a mistake. The mobile OS X was a good platform, but iNewton will blow everyone away.”

Featuring black and white graphics, a green screen, and a new stylus-based input approach, the iNewton OS looks much like the Newton OS it takes its name from. Apple launched the original Newton OS in 1991 with the MessagePad personal digital assistant, and followed up with a 2.0 release with the MessagePad 120 and later models.

The announcement sent Apple stock prices soaring, up $60 to a high of $200 per share as of the market’s closing. Worried investors, distraught over the recent nosedive in Apple share prices, rallied to bump up Apple’s stock to the highest level in the company’s history.

“The doubts about Apple’s ability to innovate are long gone,” said Isaac Naughten, a prominent Wallstreet banker, said after the closing bell Tuesday. “All the complaining about Apple’s walled-garden strategy in terms of development disappeared in an instant.”

Apple discontinued the Newton platform in March 1998, shortly after Steve Jobs took over the role as company CEO.

Now, Apple plans on launching a series of “n”-prefixed products – like “nMac,” “nPod,” and “nPhone” – in deference to the revamped Newton OS.

“We couldn’t call it ‘nNewton,'” Schiller said. “That would just be silly. But everything else gets an update in this new Newton-centric age. And you can call me the ‘nVP’ from now on.”

Apple’s goal of selling 10 million nPhones by year’s end may not take that long, said some Wallstreet analysts. The company may sell 10 million nPhones in April alone. Naughten agreed.

“I feel bad for those left with the old iPhone,” he said. “Because now we’re going to see a record spike in sales and adoption rates of the nPhone device.”

Newton MessagePad fans, a disgruntled but passionate underground community that still uses the defunct Newton platform, celebrated in online discussion forms. The previous Newton OS already featured a full software library, and many Newton developers said creating software to run on the new nPhone will a simple matter of porting.

There is no word yet from Apple on whether the Mac “Leopard” OS will be updated to reflect the n-centric naming scheme, but insiders hinted at a tablet-style Mac that will run the new iNewton software.

Executives at Microsoft, developers of the rival Windows operating system, were said to be baffled by the move.

“We didn’t see this coming,” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, said in a statement. “But you can count on our next Windows release being monochrome, too.”

The folks over at UnwiredView.com have posted mock-ups of a clamshell iPhone design that’s based on Apple’s own “dual-sided trackpad” patent drawings.

Says Unwired:

The main idea with this device is to separate capacitive touch sensor array and the phone display into two separate units. Then put the touch sensor array on a translucent (transparent) panel, make this panel touch sensitive on both sides – top and bottom and connect them with a hinge.

It’s a pretty cool idea – a smaller, multi-use hinged piece that swings down and serves as the main control.

What interested me was the part about drawing phone number digits with your finger and having the iPhone recognize them. Sound familiar? Instead of “handwriting recognition,” it would be “fingertip recognition.” And this wouldn’t be simple iPod or picture editing controls either. We’re talking about drawing a two with your index finger and a “2” coming up on-screen. Sounds an awful lot like our favorite green machine.

I like the clamshell idea because that’s how I like my cell phone. The Samsung model I currently carry is a flip phone. It folds up nicely into my pocket. Take that idea to the iPhone, and you’ve got what you see in the pictures at the top – sort of an idea for the iPhone Nano.

Even Unwired admits this is all speculation, and while their renderings are crafty, they probably have no relation to anything Apple would release. Few people get these kind of things right. Apple ends up blowing all the posturing away with a design so slick it beats whatever the Photoshop twerps come up with.

Still, drawing digits on an iPhone? The Newton idea keeps popping up.

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.

Giving all the guff that Apple has received lately about becoming more “green,” it’s no surprise that Apple would want to protect its reputation – especially considering it was founded by two liberals in Northern California.

I opened my shareholder meeting proxy vote ballot several weeks ago and found this little gem as one of the voting items:

TO CONSIDER A SHAREHOLDER PROPOSAL ENTITLED “AMEND CORPORATE BYLAWS ESTABLISHING A BOARD COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINABILITY”, IF PROPERLY PRESENTED AT THE MEETING.

Could this be the work of board member Al Gore? Or pressure from groups like Greenpeace? Or maybe it’s just Apple finally getting serious about recycling and sustainability.

Just how green is Apple? Before Greenpeace launched its campaign against Apple, highlighted by its mock apple.com site (that asks “We love our iPods, but can we lose the iWaste?”), Apple was phasing out production of lead-balloon CRT monitors beginning with the iMac G4. And according to Apple, the “greening” began ten years earlier:

Apple started recycling in 1994 and today we operate recycling programs in countries where more than 82% of all Macs and iPods are sold. By the end of this year, that figure will increase to 93%. Apple recycled 13 million pounds of e-waste in 2006, which is equal to 9.5% of the weight of all products Apple sold seven years earlier. We expect this percentage to grow to 13% in 2007, and to 20% in 2008. By 2010, we forecast recycling 19 million pounds of e-waste per year — nearly 30% of the product weight we sold seven years earlier.

Right. And just recently, Steve Jobs bragged about the MacBook Air’s environmental laurels onstage at Macworld. Its LCD is mercury- and arsenic-free. The circuitry is PVC free, and Apple plans to “completely eliminate the use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), brominated flame retardants (BFRs), and arsenic in its products by the end of 2008,” according to its website.

Plus, as you can see from these pictures, the packaging is much smaller and more efficient than other Apple laptops – by almost half. Even the aluminum laptop enclosure can be recycled.

Like they did when the new iPod packaging was released in 2006, Apple was quick to mention that smaller packaging helps the environment by using less resources to haul cross-country.

(You can also use iPod packaging in more inventive ways – see here)

You can even recycle your iPod or a cell phone from any manufacturer. Apple includes the shipping label for you, so it doesn’t cost a dime. Now that’s cool.

What seems to plague Apple, a founding member of the US EPA ENERGY STAR program, is its lack of bragging. The company is known to be tight-lipped, on everything from new product launches to goings-on at its corporate headquarters, and when the company does brag, it’s usually about usability breakthroughs and life-changing inventions. Here’s an example: did you know Apple has a partnership with its hometown, Cupertino, CA, to recycle electronics free of charge? It doesn’t even have to be an Apple product. They’ve been doing it since 2002.

Apple has used the same materials other computer makers use, but as the green tidal wave grew in strength, it quietly went about its business. Granted, pressure from the sustainability community has quickened Apple’s pace in phasing out harmful chemicals and implementing take-back programs, but my feeling is the company would have reached its public “greeniness” eventually. It would’ve had to: Al Gore is a board member, remember?

Now Steve Jobs makes a point to bring up Apple’s greening at every major public event. Never mind that they’ve been winning waste management awards as far back as eight years ago.

But any visitor to sites like Low End Mac, or even our own Newton community, knows that Macs have an incredibly long lifespan. People still use Mac SEs and Quadras for everyday use, seeing nothing wrong with running OS 8 and Netscape to do all their work. Browse eBay sometime and see what “obsolete” iMac G3s go for. Shucks, I’ve been craving an iMac G4 for a while now, and am still waiting for the price to come down low enough so I can snatch one.

Mac users hold onto their computers, or sell them so someone else can use them. Can you say that about a 1997-era Dell? Do you see kids lining up for 30,000 used HP laptops, priced at $48 a piece, like they do for iBooks?

I’ve experienced, first-hand, the type of recycling Apple users utilize: at a recent e-waste drive for my recycling group, a man dropped off an Apple IIc (which some folks still use as a gaming platform). Once I saw a Mac SE/30, and another time someone dropped a PowerBook 5300. In other words, it takes years for Apple users to finally say, “Okay, I’ve had this long enough, and don’t use it day-to-day. Time to recycle.” Is anyone going to recycle a used PowerBook G4? No. Never. It’s going on eBay, and it’s fetching several hundred dollars at auction’s end. Used iBook G4s still go for almost as much as a brand new MacBook.

Take Newton users. Here is a dead-and-gone, by Apple’s standards, product, and yet ten years after the last MessagePad came out the community is as big and as vibrant as ever. The iPhone has come and gone, and Newton users are still trading and swapping and modding their green-lit hearts out.

That’s how Apple fans recycle their computers. They either keep using them, give them away, or sell them. Or tinker. Or upgrade. Or…

That doesn’t mean Apple should slack in the recycling department. E-waste is a scary and growing problem, in this country and especially the third world, and Apple would be smart to keep its name out of that quagmire altogether. Apple has enough problems fending off criticism for its sweat-shop labor practices.

Dell teamed up with Goodwill to recycle old computers in my state (Michigan), and several others, which was a smart way to get its name out there in the fight against e-waste. Maybe Apple would want to do something similar: attach its name to a big program, and reap the PR benefits.

Maybe that’s what this whole board committee on sustainability is about. Apple sees the growing awareness for environmentalism, and – if the board is smart – wants to do the right thing by its mostly-liberal fanbase.

Because that’s the name of the game here. Apple, as a responsible and influential company
, should be doing the right thing. Recycling and environmentally-friendly products help in the quest.

But in quiet ways, Apple (and Apple fans) has been doing some of this right along.

“What the heck is this site all about, anyway?” you may ask yourself.

Others have. Misspelled words, an abandoned piece of hardware, and a green screen – what does it all add up to?

I got the idea for Newton Poetry after hearing the term used to describe the gibberish MessagePads spit out from time to time when the handwriting recognition software falls short of its ideal. Then I saw someone had written the entirety of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem into a Newton, and I though, “boy, there’s an idea.”

So let’s see how I do it. More… »

I took my first look at the “Most Popular Pages” feature on WordPress, and – to no surprise – a few poems were the most viewed posts here on Newton Poetry.

There are tons of people, myself included, who look for specific poems, analysis of poems, and collections of certain authors’ poems, and sometimes those searches land them here. Which is cool, but sometimes I wonder if the jabberwocky they’re presented makes any sense to them.

After all, my Newton 110 misspells words all the time. One commenter even asked me what the hell was going on, and when was I going to learn how to write correctly. He never took the time to see what this site was all about – namely, putting poems into the Newton and blogging what the MessagePad spits out. Put in “my heart breaks” and the Newton might read it as “my fart burps.” It’s one of the fun hobbies someone can play with on the Newton.

But part of this site has also turned into a “how-to” lesson for new Newton users like myself. As I discover tools, or try out new abilities, I like to share them. Just in case someone comes along (as someone recently did, on this 68k MLA forum posting) that is totally green to the Newton, I’d like Newton Poetry to be a handshake and a “welcome home.”

Take faxing. I tried it out, and it was super easy. Someone could definitely discover how to do it themselves (if Apple’s good at anything, its an intuitive interface). But should they do a quick Google or blog search on faxing with a Newton, I would hope Newton Poetry would pop up and help them out.

And like any Apple fan, I’m always interested in the wider world of Macintosh, iPods, iPhones, Apple history, and trends on where my favorite company is heading. No Newton is an island, and so from time to time Newton Poetry will touch on things that I find interesting. Like the iPod Shuffle announcement, or the decision over whether or not to wait and buy an iPhone.

The Newton community is still a sizeable group, and there are die-hards out there that keep the faith and keep the platform going. They’re very accepting of newbies (thankfully), mostly because they’re so proud of the product they champion, and they freely part with best practices on how to get the most out of the MessagePad. That means I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and figure all this stuff out on my own.

DIY culture, however, says that you gain enjoyment out of the process and the end product, and few consumer electronics have inspired as much modding as the Newton. It was never intended to be a Twitter client – because it came out before Twitter was ever even thought of, natch – but I’ll be darned if someone didn’t figure out a way to make it work. That’s what makes the community so fun.

So there we go. Newton Poetry will highlight Newton Poetry, as always, but will also touch on how-to tips, Newton history, other Apple products (especially the portable varieties), and low-end tech culture in general. Call it a mission statement – whatever. I love poetry and literature, I love Apple products old and new, and I love playing around with my Newton.

If that’s not inspiration enough for a blog, I don’t know what is.

Welcome to Newton Poetry.

A good point about what makes the MessagePad so accessible, from the newtontalk.net mailing list:

A sudden nasty angle to any revival of the Newton came to my mind as I was thinking about how incredibly fortunate we are. The Newton that we know and love has survived the cruel rejection by its parent, Apple, because its construction is such that it’s relatively straightforward to dismantle and otherwise tinker with it. Even if such hardware tinkering isn’t to all our tastes, it’s doable for enough of us that all of us can benefit, and the results are a thriving user base a decade after Apple stopped supporting it, and a machine that’s stable even if it’s no longer cutting edge.

This is a good time to stop and thank all the Newtonians who comprise that hard-core of hardware (and software) fixers, modders and hackers, who help us all fight off Newton-entropy. I hope some day I get a chance to buy all you guys a drink — though perhaps I’ll need to do that a little at a time.

Christian, the smart guy who came up with all this, said a modern-day Newton would be a Mac Mini-style PDA: closed, non-upgradeable, and therefore less fun.

Smart stuff, and I think that’s what makes the Newton so fun to tinker with – namely, you can tinker with it!

Check out the NewtonTalk archives here.

Check it out – courtesy of Thomas Brand, the same guy who does the amazing “My Newton Blog” (which I’ve heaped praise on before).

A neat daily “Newton Fact” twit-thingy.

This is hilarious. This guy got his iPhone all right – complete with handwriting recognition, calculator, and monochrome battery-saving mode. What a hoot.

And there it is – the second coming of Newton, thanks to YouTube and someone’s slick animation skills.

I have to admit, the dock-like scrolling along the side is pretty cool. It’s like functional Cover Flow on the iPod Touch, but pragmatic, with some AppleTV/Front Row built in.

This was made by user ElysiumMedia07, who did a wonderful job putting the “Wow” in a Windows Vista parody ad.

Fun stuff!