“The Newton’s gone, but it looks like, at present, Apple has the most compelling PDA on the market. Go figure.”
– Blake Patterson at Byte Cellar. Blake is co-founder of the excellent iPhone gaming blog, Touch Arcade. Check out my interview with Blake, too.
Seth Godin on price in a recession:
Of course, people actually care more about value. They care about value more than they used to because they can’t afford to overpay, they don’t want to make a mistake with their money.
…The thing is, there’s another way to make the value go up. Increase what you give. Increase quality and quantity and the unmeasurable pieces that bring confidence and joy to an interaction.
When all of your competitors are busy increasing value by cutting prices, you can actually increase market share by increasing value and raising benefits.
I’d call iLife, superior build quality, and innovation values, wouldn’t you? And those “unmeasurable pieces” are what Apple specialize in.
In PC makers race to the bottom price-wise, they lose a lot of what makes owning a computer so special: the “confidence and joy” Godin mentions.
Mark Hoekstra describes how to get a Newton eMate 300 connected to a wireless network over at Geek Technique.
Why? “Well, impress your friends!” he says.
Hoekstra uses a WaveLAN Orinoco Silver network card, Newton Connection Utilities, a custom-made serial cable, a few package files, and a driver to get his eMate running on a wifi network. He takes plenty of pictures and goes into detail through the whole process.
Almost as cool? Using his Mac SE as a media center monitor. Hoekstra loses points for throwing Windows on that beautiful machine, however.
One of these days I’ll attempt the wireless eMate project. But for now, Hoekstra’s breakdown should give you a good head-start.
InfoWorld.com calls the Newton Tribe a “tech cult” in its “True believers: the biggest cults in tech” post.
Dave Caolo at The Unofficial Apple Weblog says there’s a membership cost into this cult:
Newton ownership is definitely not for everyone. it’s big and takes some doing to get it to cooperate with contemporary hardware and software. But for the faithful it’s a terrific piece of hardware.
InfoWorld calls Newton users the “most slavishly devoted tech cult of all,” and features other gadgets like Palm PDAs and Commodore 64s.
We’ll take that as a compliment.
When the news broke that Yahoo! was shutting down its free Geocities web-hosting service, Newton fans wondered: what about those MessagePad fan and software sites?
Tony Kan put out the call: save those web pages!
Morgan Aldridge offered to host any that could be saved on the United Newton Network Archives (UNNA) mirror site – and, one by one, the Newton community is doing just that.
Sites like Newtonium-62 and Newton Ressurection are all being saved from the Interweb trash heap. Without this effort, a lot of Newton history, stories, and knowledge would be lost forever.
A few of the sites I have up on my own Newton Sites page will have to be re-routed to the new, UNNA-hosted URL. But it’s so worth it.
If you find a Geocities Newton site out there, lost at sea, be sure to contact Morgan.
Splorp (Grant Hutchinson) shares his copy of Newton Spirits on Flickr:
According to mujitra, this is “the bible for Japanese newton owner.” Flipping through the book, you can understand why. Published by NTT in 1997, Newton Spirits is an illustrated how to guide, product history, technology platform reference, and overview of all things Newton — including software, hardware, screenshots, prototypes, and specifically the use of the Newton in Japan.
Japan’s Amazon.com has it available, though you have to wade through the Japenese to order your own.
Morgan at Makkintosshu grabbed his own copy recently. So jealous.
[Photo by Splorp, and used with permission under Creative Commons license.]
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?
Looks like Microsoft maybe trying to copy the iPhone.
Not that that’s every happened before, right? Microsoft copying Apple? What say you, Mr. Ballmer?
Next they’ll attempt to replicate some sort of “media pad” tablet device, or a smaller version of the Zune phone.
Have they no shame?
Mike Levins on his favorite programming language:
I used to say it was 1992-era Dylan. Dylan was a Lisp that Apple invented. I worked for several years on Apple’s Newton project. Newton was initially written mostly in Dylan, and I got to write a lot of OS code in Dylan. That was a time of high joy in my programming life.
It didn’t last, of course. The story of Newton’s abandonment of Dylan and its other adventures makes entertaining reading, but the short of it is that eventually I had to stop programming in Dylan.
Turns out Dylan is still around, but Levins has moved on to a Lisp dialect called Clojure.
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.