Newton Poetry

“To be useful as a PDA, the Newton should anyway be always close. It is instant on, and the Notepad is capturing notes indexed by time. As a recording device, the Newton is unbeatable, and it has some pretty obvious advantages over the index card method: Backups are possible, storage is almost infinite, you can carry the whole system with you all the time, and you can search and extract more easily.”

– Eckhart Köppen, from the NewtonTalk list.

My first Mac, the iBook G4, in a stylish attic work environment.

[Via Desire to Inspire, via Ffffound!]

“It is easy to cite examples where less capable products have superseded more capable products. My favorite example of that is PDAs. I still have three classic PDAs: HP200LX, Newton MessagePad 2100, and Psion Revo. All of these have been unavailable for a decade or more, yet in many ways each has features that have been unmatched in newer and ‘better’ products.”

– Michael Anderson at Gear Diary, on the “crapification” of products – or how we’re setting for “good enough.”

Interesting: Michael Tchao, a member of the ol’ Apple Newton MessagePad team, is coming back to Apple.

Tchao was responsible for selling the crazy idea of a handheld computing device to then-Apple president John Sculley.

Says The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

If you wanted to start doing a bit of speculating, it’s interesting to note that Tchao was part of the team that was responsible for Apple’s first tablet computer.

Funny how a Newton no longer qualifies as a PDA. With all the rumors, everyone wants to call it a “tablet.”

“If you look at the some of the work done in the early to mid-eighties you can see the limitation. We finally got a 512k machine, the Mac Plus, which is how Design Quarterly was done. We used MacVision, which was a little beige box that hooked up to a video camera and ported right into the Mac. You could scan over an image and it was tiled out. We kept moving the camera, scanning and repeating.”

– April Greiman, designer, in an interview on idsgn.org.

Perhaps the quality wasn’t all there, but Greiman’s interview shows that even the lowest end of the low end Macs were capable of design work. Great two-part interview.

Indeed.

[Via John from NewtonTalk.]

According to PC World and some great commentors at my original iTunes 9 mini player post:

As of iTunes 9.0.1, the pre-iTunes 9 behavior has returned–clicking the green button switches to the miniature player mode. (Option-clicking the green button now maximizes the window.)

This, friends, is victory.

Hit “Software Update” in your Apple menu, or download iTunes 9.0.1 (with restored mini player functionality!) over at Apple.com.

The original idea behind the One Used Mac Per Child was to take classic Macintoshes and give them to underpriveleged kids who could use a computer.

Recently, though, I’ve learned the idea can apply to anyone who needs a capable computer to get things done: word processing, e-mail, basic Internet surfing.

I was finally able to put my idea into practice with Mirza, my new Pakistani neighbor. Mirza moved to Michigan from Karachi, Pakistan to pursue a career in physical therapy. He earned a work visa with our local hospital and is spending two years in America learning the trade.

Mirza left a wife and three kids back in Pakistan. He tries to talk to them every day, but the phone bill is getting expensive. E-mail is much cheaper. But first, he needs a computer and an Internet connection.

He asked me to go “laktop” shopping with him. He balked when I told him the price of a decent laptop, so I remembered that I have a very useful PowerMac G4 sitting around my apartment looking for something to do.

Finding a modest high-speed connection in our area is easy. Connecting the Mac to the Internet will be simple. But now I’ve learned that Mirza has virtually no experience with computers. He doesn’t know how to type, or how to navigate the Web, and doesn’t even have an e-mail address.

At least now he has a used Mac to get him by. For his simple needs, the PowerMac – running OS X 10.3 with a bit of TextEdit and Firefox – will suit him just fine. A combination printer/scanner, to scan family photos and print driving directions (once he gets his driver’s license), is all that’s missing.

For everything else, the PowerMac is perfect. Sure, it’s an older Mac lacking the latest and greatest web browser and software package. It’s not the quietest machine anymore. And the giant CRT Apple Studio Display cramps his small apartment. But since he won’t be doing any video transcoding any time soon, the 400 MHz, 768 MB RAM machine will carry his workload with nary a sputter. After he buys an DSL connection, he’ll be up and running in no time.

In fact, he won’t know any different, and I saved him from being soured on computers with some cheap Windows Vista laptop.

I was just glad to have an extra, useable Mac hanging around for Mirza to use. In the end, I saved him several hundred dollars (at minimum) and handed him the best operating system of its time. If he wants an different computer, then I’ll take him “laktop” shopping.

Teaching Mirza to type? That’s another project entirely.

“The Newton MessagePad 2100 is in my top 10 mobile devices of all time, and it ran on a 167 MHz ARM CPU and had about 1 MB of internal storage. There are aspects of it (particularly the Notepad) which remain unmatched in terms of usability.”

– Steven Frank, from stevenf.com, on the ideal mobile device.

See Apple’s support article.

It was modified September 15, 2009 – the same day my giant discussion on the broken-ness of the iTunes 9 mini player and OS X’s zoom button inconsistencies appeared.

Coincidence? Enough people bitching about it? Who knows. But Apple must’ve realized that some iTunes users were unhappy about the mini player change – enough so that they wrote the shortest support article I’ve ever seen at support.apple.com.