App Storm has a bunch of nice-looking Mac work setups. The little shelf with the Macbook Pro is genius.
This one made me think of how stale the 30″ Cinema Display, with the plain aluminum frame, looks these days. It makes me think of OS X 10.4 Tiger. The new displays scream Snow Leopard.
[Via Minimal Mac.]
Happy Newton Launch Day, from Thomas Brand.
“Verizon has reached a powerful point in their marketing: for Verizon customers curious about the iPhone, Droid is close enough. Close enough is powerful, and Apple is rapidly losing ground to it.”
– Marco Arment on a possible Verizon iPhone. His theory is that Apple will continue to lose ground to Verizon’s Droid if it doesn’t release a CDMA iPhone. As long as you can walk into a phone store that isn’t AT&T and pick up an Android smart phone, often for free, Marco’s right – it’ll be good enough.
Funny how one little driver can set your plans back.
Here I was, all ready to begin the week-long experiment using nothing but classic Macs and Newtons, when I discover that I lost my Entrega serial-to-USB dongle’s driver disc. The CD came in a little white envelope and was next to a bunch of other RAM sticks, adapters, Firewire cords, and software CDs. Now it’s gone.
A search through the Internet yielding absolutely squat, and the Newtontalk list didn’t offer any suggestions. The closest I came was one of those sleazy driver sites that makes you wade through stupid ads to get to what you need. When the driver download came up, it still wasn’t what I needed.
Apparently, Entrega was bought out by Xircom, who was in turn bought out by Intel. Intel posts a bunch of downloads for the old Entrega/Xircom adapters, but only an old manual for the one I needed (model U1-D8). The driver is nowhere to be found.
The Entrega adapter was a marvelous piece of technology, helping me to connect to my iMac G3 and becoming my go-to gadget for all things Newton. Even though it’s a USB adapter, it needs a driver to operate correctly. And the usual Keyspan adapters don’t work on my pre-OS X Macs.
My hope in this system 7 experiment was to have my PowerMac G3 run as the hub of the whole operation, syncing my Newton, doing most of the heavy lifting, and connecting with the outside world. It’s true that I could simply connect my Newtons with my iMac G3, but I’d rather have just two Macs running during the experiment: the PowerMac, and the LC 520.
So everything’s on hold for now, until either that Entrega disc shows up (after a fifth or sixth sweep of my apartment) or I give up and go with the iMac for everyday tasks.
Thomas Brand has created a Newton MessagePad color palette – an creative mix of hexidecimal codes, early ’90s shades of green, and blog design.
Thomas used the palette for Egg Freckles, his awesomely-designed Newton blog, based on Grant Hutchinson’s Batmobile Newton prototype.
I always think of the Newton in olive-toned colors – but my own MP110 is flaking along the edges, exposing a brighter green under that grippy surface layer.
Matt Pearce, the guy behind Matt’s Macintosh, takes a look back at the revolutionary iMac G4 design.
I like that his YouTube videos are both well-made and show an appreciation for all the old Mac and Apple hardware. He’s got a lot of great new and older stuff to show off.
Matt also took my retro Apple.com idea and ran with it, mocking up five designs ranging from the original Apple, complete with the old Newton-under-a-tree icon, to the QuickTake camera.
How fun: a site dedicated (more or less) to classic Mac graphics.
The Vintage Mac Museum is in Japanese, but for us English speakers it’s still navigable. The author, Motohiko Narita, posts photos of projects, too, which are a hoot (check out that vertically-aligned monitor for the Mac IIci!).
Lots of fun to poke around, and a great resource for classic Mac graphics.
[Via vintage Daring Fireball.]
Looks like I have a few things to do tomorrow.
My podcasting pal David and I have hit the 10 episode mark over at The hello Show. If you’ve stuck with us this long, there’s no turning back now.
Our listeners must be like cranked-up “Lost” fans who have a backup generator for the DVD player – you know, just in case. Only replace “DVD player” with “iPod” and you have the typical profile of a The hello Show fan.
David and I, we’re not experts on much of anything. David has strong opinions, while I tend to waffle, but the magic is made in the middle: UK keyboards, an inane obsession with the iMac G4, and cross-pond currency conversions.
Coming soon, though, we have some real fun planned. Guests, where we throw some third sap in the middle of our lion’s den, should make things interesting.
Follow the show on Twitter, rate us on iTunes, and let us know what you think.
Maybe there’s some chicanery surrounding Apple’s HTML5 showcase being “Safari only,” but Grant Hutchinson has proved one thing – the thing is still usable with the Newton MessagePad 2100’s ancient browsers.
His Flickr set, HTML5 vs. Newton, shows that the HTML5 examples render even on the Newton’s modest Courier and Newt’s Cape browsers.
Says Splorp:
Keep in mind that both browsers were developed prior to the existence of HTML5. While neither piece of software supports the advanced interaction or layout effects afforded by JavaScript and CSS3, the clean HTML5 markup is completely accessible.
That’s called gracefully degraded content.
There are no actual VR demos or typography playgrounds, of course, since the Newton is stuck in mostly a text-only, sliders-free environment. But still. The page they sit on looks just fine, with standard links and formatting.
As Darcy Norman says, web standards ensure a smooth transition from old to new:
Standards, especially ones that support graceful degradation of presentation by devices at runtime, ensure we have access to our content long after it’s built, on devices we didn’t have in mind when we built it.
If Grant were to try to view any of the content I built years ago using Director/Shockwave, or any of 47 terabytes of content built in Flash, the poor little Newton would have barfed violently.
And we don’t want to see any barfing Newtons now, do we?
The day may come when HTML is no longer supported by anything. But then there will always be the classic hobbyists, who ensure that everything gets backed up to something and that there’s a spare Mac around to read those old files.
[Photo courtesy of Splorp at Flickr under the Creative Common License, and link help via Newtontalk on Twitter.]