Matt Howe, part-time Newton developer and full-time Santa look-alike, uses a combination of Google Maps, U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps, MS MapPoint, a dash of Google Earth, and Paint Shop Pro to make hiking and driving maps for his Newton.
Howe gives the nitty-gritty on his Santa Matt’s Ramblings blog, including how to use GPSMap Lite and the Newton Toolkit to make his maps digestible to his MessagePad.
Howe even developed his own app that translates latitude and longitude into decimal degrees.
The instructions are great if you’re a hard-core Newton user with a knack for tinkering and creating your own maps. Howe’s instructions lend a bit of DIY cred to the whole process. These days I’ve become spoiled with the iPhone 3G in my pocket.
Here’s Apple co-founder (and dancer extraordinaire) Steve Wozniak demonstrating software called Quickscript, a handwriting recognition package based on MyScript. His tool? One of those fancy Modbooks.
Woz praises the Newton MessagePad several times during the video.
Here at Newton Poetry, there is One Supreme Operating system, and therefore most posts relate to the Newton interacting with the Mac environment.
I realize, however, that there are other operating systems out there. And, while I’m not a user, I respect that Newton fans can be Windows and Linux users. With Windows, there are tons of tips and how-tos on how to make connections and upload packages and whatnot. Sadly, we don’t hear as much from the Linux side.
Let’s put our operating system differences aside and help Newton users be better Newton users, shall we?
To start, I found the Newton and Linux mini-HOWTO, a site filled with questions and answers (like “How to upload a Newton package to Linux” and “Which Linux software is available”).
Some of the info seems to be dated. For instance, the author talks about Windows-emulating WINE to be a project slated in the future tense. Plus a few of the links are dead. But the basics are all there.
To get connected, there’s Newtonlink. There are a few more Linux applications for the Newton over at TuxMobil.
Then again, you can always replace Linux on your PDA with the Newton OS. I’m just sayin’.
Any Linux users out there that have successfully paired their Ubuntu with a MessagePad or eMate? Let me know in the comments.
After installing a new battery pack in my Newton eMate 300, I wondered about the pack’s abilities: how long did it take to charge? How could I find its exact charge capacity? How long would it take to discharge?
NewtTest is an all-in-one information source for any Newton ever created, from the OMP to the MessagePad 2100. As Frank says:
NewtTest will only show tests that make sense on the particular machine it is running on (you won’t, for example, find the backlight test on an OMP). Hence it will look different on different Newton models.
Once you install NewtTest on your Newton, you have access to tons of great tidbits of data. From the most detailed, like the above screenshot under “System Info,” to a “Backlight” feature that simply lets you turn your backlight-capable Newton on or off.
For my own use, the “Battery” section showed my eMate’s capacity, temperature, and voltage. It also recognized the type of battery pack I installed as an Apple NiMH rechargeable pack. Gruendel’s attention to detail here is impressive, and much-appreciated.
Another benefit is the “Clock” feature. If you’ve ever had to reset your Newton’s clock (on OS 1.x models) or calendar date (on any Newton), you know how frustrating it is.
NewtTest makes it simple by letting you pick the year first (above) and then worry about the date. Since my eMate was constantly running out of juice, I spent a lot of wasted time resetting the date by scrolling through the months and years (usually starting with 1997). NewtTest’s “Clock” feature becomes a big time saver.
Other “Test Types” in NewtTest, like testing the sounds on your Newton (cuckoo!) and calibrating the digitizer, are so helpful I wonder how I’ve lived without them.
For instance, my eMate’s screen shows a few faded or missing pixels on the right-hand side of the screen. With NewtTest’s “LCD Display” test, I can show a fully black screen, or a series of horizontal lines. It turns out that my eMate has a vertical line of faded pixels running the entire length of the screen. That’s not good news, but it’s worth knowing.
Gruendel has developed a few other applications for the Newton, but NewtTest is so practical that no MessagePad or eMate user should be without it.
Eckhart Köppen has come through once again for the Newton community with a patch for the 2010 bug.
Köppen released Patch 71J059, a patch for the bug that had Newton users dreading New Year’s Eve (this year and next). This incredible piece of DIY engineering helps extend the life of our MessagePads. And the download-and-install procedure is very simple and straightforward.
While the patch is for MP2100s only, Köppen says, “German and eMate versions are still in the making.”
Earlier this year, many Newton users were affected when a previous 2010 solution went haywire. Since then, Köppen has been working on a solution to both the 2010Fix problem and the 2010 Newton bug.
The 2010 bug only affected Newton OS 2.1 devices, meaning MP100-120 users are safe.
Newton users sang the praises of Köppen’s Patch 71J059 after making the announcement. Köppen is careful to point out, however, that installing the patch is not a risk-free project:
NOTE: THIS PATCH IS PROVIDED WITHOUT WARRANTY. DUE TO THE COMPLEX NATURE OF SYSTEM PATCHES, FAILURE TO INSTALL PROPERLY MAY RENDER THE NEWTON UNUSABLE, RECOVERY REQUIRES A TEMPORARY ROM BOARD SWAP, AND WILL RESULT IN THE LOSS OF ALL DATA ON THE NEWTON!
But this means that the year 2010 can come and go, and Newton users can still carry their MessagePads with pride (and without resorting to a clumsy solution, like setting the Newton’s date and time to some year in the past).
The project speaks to the resilience of the Newton community (err, cult). With no help from Apple, but tons of help from Newton users, Köppen and others have shown what a dedicated group of hard-core enthusiasts can do.
Steven Frank, at his stevenf.com blog, has been thinking about what could possible replace the desktop metaphor that XEROX and Apple helped to pioneer.
Besides the desktop paradigm, Frank describes the pros and cons of other computing models – like the Newton’s soup-based data model and the iPhone’s multi-touch platform.
The Newton’s model had benefits, Frank says, but crumbled under the weight of OS-to-OS translations:
The Newton’s object store was an engineering marvel that fell apart as soon as you needed to exchange data with the outside world. You couldn’t just take a text file and send it over to your Newton because the Newton didn’t understand the concept of “file”. Your text first had to go through a conversion (via Newton Connection Utility) into an object format that some Newton application (in this case, probably Notes) could handle. Then you’d have the reverse problem going the other way.
Because desktop apps and Newton apps would never offer exactly the same feature set, inevitably these conversions result in loss of some information. Nitty-gritty things like precise formatting, metadata, and so on are the first things out the window when you need to convert data between two formats. It leaves you with a “lowest common denominator” form of information exchange that’s more frustrating than just being able to send files around. But in order to “just send files around”, you’d have to jettison all your radical (and useful) innovations and go back to square one: the good old hierarchical file system.
It’s a heckuva read, even if Frank offers no clear solution to what will come (web apps? Spotlight?) after the desktop metaphor has outlived its usefulness.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball has mentioned this before, but what I like about the Newton OS is that everything is automatically saved for you. When you scribble out a new note, you never have to press a “save” button. The only action you take with a note, after you’ve finished it, is to move it into some sort of organizational file system. But that’s optional. If you don’t want to move it, you don’t have to; you can shut off your Newton and the note stays right where you left it.
It’s like the Notes app on the iPhone, or the Stickies app on the Mac. Everything is automatically saved to some arcane folder deep in the Mac Library system.
What do you think? What’s the best possible platform to inherit the desktop’s dominance in computing?
Just a head’s-up: I’m looking for more web sites to add to my Newton Sites page.
Last October, I posted the page after collecting Newton-related web pages over the year. It was a lot of work, but way worth it. My fear was that a lot of these sites would be lost or forgotten, meaning we’d lose a lot of the history and how-to of the Newton platform.
Since then, however, I’ve been collecting more sites to add to the page – including a few more blogs, instruction sites, and old MessagePad and eMate reviews.
That’s where you come in. Browse through the page, and let me know if I’m missing something.
Eckhart Köppen, the whiz behind the Y2010 Diagnostic tool, has come up with a simple four-step process to get rid of the problematic Fix2010 packge:
1. Install the Y2010 Diagnostic Tool
2. Launch the tool and Tap “Clear Alarms” – note, you will lose all alarms in Dates and need to set them again!
3. Delete the Fix2010 patch package
4. Reboot the Newton
Now Köppen is looking for volunteers with MessagePad 2100s to help him work on a solution to the 2010 bug. His patch testing is a four-step process, as well. If you have a spare MP2100, and you want to help contribute to the Y2010 fix, contact Köppen to help with his testing.
