Newton Poetry

Maybe I should have waited to download a chess game for my eMate.

Daring Fireball author John Gruber says the Newton’s “best chess game,” Joachim Bondo’s Deep Green, will be available for the iPhone.

“Deep Green is the one indie Newton app that I was most hoping would make the jump to the iPhone,” Gruber says.

Deep Green for the Newton is still available and is freeware, which is why I wish I would’ve waited to pick my chess game. But I can still give it a try.

It’s nice to see Newton apps making it over, after a spit and polish, to the iPhone. Catamount’s PocketMoney is the one Newton app that I’ve tried on my iPhone, and I use it everyday.

Learn more about the iPhone Deep Green here.

Whew – that was close. Got it done on deadline.

Now it’s official: I’m MobileMe-less.

Last week I successfully connected my Newton eMate 300 with my iBook G4 running OS X 10.4 Tiger using Escale. This week, my project was attempting to connect the eMate with my iBook G3 blueberry clamshell, running OS X 10.2 Jaguar, using NewTen, another Newton connect app.

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If first impressions are everything, then MobileMe never had a chance.

After I bought my iPhone 3G, I signed up for the trial MobileMe account. Back then, it was only a 60-day free trial, but Apple soon added 30 days onto that, and then 30 days onto that, after MobileMe’s launch arrived like a lead balloon.

The idea seemed swell enough: sync your Address Book, iCal, and Mail settings and entries with the ever-present Cloud, and your iPhone. But since July, I’ve run into more problems than solutions, and MobileMe has been a frustrating mess.

My free trial is up on Monday, Dec. 8. I’m going to cancel my account.

Looking back, I never really needed MobileMe to begin with. Because I plug my iPhone into my Mac almost every night, any new entries in either iCal or Address Book get synced each way – from the iPhone to my Mac, and from my Mac to my iPhone. I don’t need the “push” capabilities MobileMe claimed to offer because my syncing schedule was fast enough.

It’s too bad. Apple had a big uphill effort replacing the .Mac service. MobileMe seemed like a decent-enough resolution to everyone’s complaints against .Mac: not much storage, lackluster syncing, no star features that made it seem worth the $99 annual subscription. With it’s modern browser interface and over-the-air syncing, MobileMe looked great on paper. In practice, however, it failed to live up to my expectations.

Maybe it was a lack of habit, but I never found myself missing MobileMe when I wasn’t using it (which was often). If I used my iPhone and Mac for business, the cloud syncing might seem like a bigger deal. But I had a system down, and it worked just fine for me.

The one feature that did catch my eye was the photo sharing galleries. My friend’s wedding photographer put together a beautiful presentation (the subjects helped) using MobileMe’s slideshow capabilities. But again: I don’t really need it. Flickr works just fine as a photo-sharing environment for me. I can make slideshows with Flickr that look fine for my needs. I’m not a wedding photographer. I don’t need anything fancy.

Another thing that bothered me? The fact that iDisk iDisk Sync [thanks commenters!] takes up the 10 GB of space from my hard drive. Maybe I’m a rare case, but when I launch iDisk, it takes away whatever space is available away from my Mac’s “available” space. Why store things on a fragile cloud when my hard drive works just fine? I love the idea behind iDisk, but my iBook is cramped enough without taking that additional 10 GB away.

Apple’s solution? Don’t use iDisk Sync.

The launch didn’t help things. We all remember that, right? The big outage that first weekend. How it took weeks and weeks of Apple tinkering to get even basic services like e-mail up and running for all MobileMe users. For a while there, MobileMe seemed like a big embarrassing misshap for Apple – right up there with the big system outage for the iPhone 3G’s launch. That kind of thing can leave a bad taste in the mouth. I guess it’s never gone away for me.

Part of me is skeptical about this “cloud computing” stuff. I understand that Google seems to have it down, barring Gmail outages, and – lord bless them – Microsoft is working on their own cloud syncing projects. But Google apps like Gmail are hooked up to my Mail.app, which runs from my desktop, and I don’t often make appointments or add contacts through a web browser. That stuff lives on my Mac. I like that I can edit a contact’s information on my iPhone and the change gets logged in Address Book in OS X. There’s no extra log-in-to-the-web-service involved.

If I had several Macs strung out over several locations, with only my iPhone in common, the idea behind MobileMe could come in handy. Backing up my data to the cloud? Sure. Do it all the time. But easy and reliable syncage still seems to be a giant Work In Progress. I’m not yet impressed.

So thanks for the couple of free months, Apple, but I’m saying “no thanks” to MobileMe. Maybe some day I’ll find a use for it – one where I can justify renewing my subscription. Right now, though, I can’t see any good reason to keep MobileMe around. It’s either been a thorn in my side or a non-starter, and life’s too short for either of those.

Saw this rumor (a few times, actually) over at Webmonkey: a Cocoa OS X Finder may be on its way, starting with Snow Leopard.

But wait. Isn’t the Finder an all-OS X beast?

That got me wondering what, exactly, is the difference between the Cocoa and Carbon development environments. I’m not programmer, so I needed a low-brow explanation.

Just before Apple launched OS X, Macworld had this article describing the basic differences between the two. I like to reference the original Mac OS X introduction video, by Mr. steve Jobs, as a primer, too. He goes into detail about the different levels (kernel, Carbon/Cocoa, OpenGL, etc.), which helps.

My basic understanding: Carbon is for applications that need to reference the old, OS 9 way of doing things while operating in OS X. Cocoa is an all-OS X environment, and lets developers use stuff like Core Audio and Core Animation.

Even at Apple, the two platforms have their place. Mail is a Cocoa app. iTunes is a Carbon app – a hold-over from OS 9. PhotoShop, as it stands now, is a Carbon application. Again, in terms of development, it’s an OS 8/9 relic. But that may be changing. Adobe has already produced a Cocoa-based app in Lightroom, so hope springs eternal.

Now, 32 bit versus 64 bit? That’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax.

Matt Howe, a Newton programmer I interviewed a few months back, has updated his Holidays package for 2009

You download the .pkg file at his site, sync it to your Newton, and your calendar will have U.S. and 10 other countries’ holiday dates for next year. I added it to my eMate and it works great – just open it up, select whichever country or set of holidays you want to addd, and presto, it’s done.

“All it does is insert the entries. Once done you can delete the pkg,” Matt says. “It does not remove the entries, nor check to see if they already exist. It is very simplistic, just a quick way to add holidays.”

You can download other fun Newton software projects from “Papa Duck’s” homepage.

Owning an iPhone and a Newton, it’s always fun to poke around at other mobile operation systems when I get the chance. The other day, I put my stylus on a Palm for the first time, and got to play around with it for a bit.

Gizmodo puts all the major smartphone OSes – RIM’s Blackberry, Apple’s iPhone, Windows Mobile, for instance – against each other in a run down of features, pros, and cons.

The only classic mobile OS in the bunch is the “basically dead” Palm OS in the Centro, which is sad, considering (a) the Palm OS looks so dated with the other systems and (b) Palm succeeded where the Newton did not in a lot of ways. Now it’s a dying system.

When iPhone developer Steve Sprang needed interface ideas for his new painting app, he looked to a platform he knew well – the Newton.

Sprang got hold of an MP2000 in college and created the Newton freeware app, Lathe, as a simple 3D modeler. Today, he’s working on Brushes – a “natural-media style painter” that, taking a look at the screenshots, looks like a beautiful, detailed app for the iPhone (examples of Brushes-created artwork can be seen at iArtMobile).

Sprang, a former software engineer at Apple, used the Newton’s undo/redo buttons (above) in his Brushes app as a nod to his former platform. Since he left Apple, Sprang has welcomed his new role as an independent iPhone app creator.

“Developing for the iPhone has been a good experience so far,” Sprang says. “I think it’s been a great move for me, and I hope to be able to do it long term — more projects are in the pipeline!”

Brushes is available at the iPhone App Store for $4.99.

Turns out, the end is nigh.

For Newton users, the year 2010 poses a serious problem. It’s put simply by NewtonTalk’s tweet, but Marisa from the list says it like this:

The problem is that the Newton stores numbers as 30-bits instead of 32, and in 2010 the number of seconds since the “epoch” of 1901 or whatever date it is runs out of bits to keep track of the date.

Newton users have reported everything from date screw-ups to total crashes when they try to set their date to 2010 and get anything done.

Remember Y2K? This is Newt2K+10.

Avi Dressman developed a fix, which he describes in detail here, and you can find the package patch on UNNA (though Avi warns of the patch’s Alpha development stage – so be warned) [Update: Don’t download Dressman’s patch. It helped lead to the 2010Fix bug in January 2009].

Some who have tried setting their Newton to 2010 have had it crash everything from a MP110 (with OS 1.x) to the 2×00 series, but the bug mostly effects OS 2.x Newtons. So for gosh sakes, don’t try it at home.

But if you plan on using your Newt in 2010, by all means download the patch and prevent Newtpocalypse.

[Update 2: Eckhart Köppen, with help from the Newton community, developed a patch that fixes the 2010 bug. Use this instead of Dressman’s patch.]

Just read through Scott McCloud’s excellent comic about Google’s new web browser, Chrome (maybe you’ve heard about it?).

On page 25, Google gives props to the original iMac (above), circa 1998, and how it was an original “internet device” from the old HTML days. But what’s up with the dancing moon?

I haven’t tried Chrome out yet, because they haven’t released a Mac version, but it’s got me curious – and it has received glowing reviews from a lot of the sources I’ve read. Have you tried it?