Newton Poetry

Blake Patterson at Byte Cellar:

Once the App Store went live, TouchArcade quickly became a large and active community for iOS gamers, and it’s done nothing but grow ever since. It’s wonderful to finally have the opportunity to make TouchArcade my entire professional focus and do the work that I so enjoy, having been an avid gamer my entire life.

Congratulations to Blake for heading up TouchArcade full time. It’s the best iOS gaming site out there, with reviews on everything, and Blake has a passion for this stuff.

I got to interview Blake back in the early days, as TouchArcade was getting off the ground. I give a lot of credit to him for helping me out in the early days of Newton Poetry; Blake gave me a lot of pointers to get things started, and I appreciate it very much.

Thomas Brand over at Egg Freckles:

Yesterday’s Mac trained users on how to navigate the filesystem, while modern operating system like Mac OS X discourage its use. The gap between the abstraction of user space, and system space is widening. As computers become more like appliances the underlying operating system is becoming harder to access.

The question – is this a good thing or not? – can largely be answered depending on what type of person you are.

Geeks have been talking about Apple products as appliances since the beginning. To Apple, it’s part of their philosophy: computers for the rest of us, whereby “rest of us” means “those of us who aren’t willing to dive into the nitty gritty.”

I feel Brand’s apprehension about operating systems, with the iOS devices and with the new version of OS X, moving away from the ability to navigate the file system. I’m a folder-and-text-file kind of guy, too. When I got my first OS 9 Mac, it was a joy to dig into the System Folder and poke around at what was in there. This is probably why people ask me to help them work out software and hardware problems at work and at home. My brain is comfortable in a file system environment.

But golly, I’m surely in the minority. And so is Brand. We navigate the file system because it brings us the joy of discovery. For most people, they recoil in horror.

“Where did that file go?”

Brand says OS X provides too many options to find that file:

On Mac OS X Apple has hidden the Hard Drive icon and replaced it with a pre established list of shortcuts that offers speed of access at the price of user confusion. Should I go to the Dock, or the Finder’s sidebar to launch my application or open my file? How about a Spotlight search? With so many possibilities it is no wonder Mac OS X users are often confused about where their files are located.

But maybe the problem is that, either way, you’re forcing them to think about a certain file in a certain place in a certain folder. Right now, OS X fails to make that file easy to find, no matter how many UI schemes Apple introduces. People don’t care about where the file is, because they aren’t interested in organization or structure. They just want to work.

This is what makes iOS devices so popular: you don’t think about where the file is, you think about which app you’re going to use. And with iOS, apps couldn’t be easier to find.

Maybe it’s about expectations. I didn’t expect to go anywhere near the file system when I bought my iPhone. But I bought a Mac expecting that tinkering is a part of its operation. As long as Mac OS X has it both ways, where you have dashboard-style navigation cues for regular folks and the geekiness of the file system for the rest of us, I won’t put up too much of a fight.

Just for fun, I posted a few new iPhone wallpapers that might interest Apple fans: four wrinkled-paper versions, like the Newton one above.

“I was there until Steve came back and it was clear he was going to kill the project. In some ways I am sad he did, but I can see why he needed to. Apple had to focus or there would be no Apple today. As it is, some of the technologies are around today (as are the engineers that created them). You can see it in the recognition of addresses and events, and in many other places.”

– Maurice Sharp, ex Newton DTS Engineer and Manager, via the Newtontalk list.

Naturally, my first post to Instagram had to be Newton-based.

More and more of the Newton-related web is disappearing, but Forrest Buffenmyer at Newton Phoenix is trying to keep some of it alive and well in the minds of MessagePad fans.

Buffenmyer added a links page to his Newton Phoenix site, sporting everything from software sites, the Newtontalk list, and even a pair of Newton bloggers (ahem). He’s attempting to post updates from his Newton, which he says is a work in progress.

Meanwhile, I invited Buffenmyer to scour my own Newton Links page for anything he could use.

“I drew the line (arbitrarily) at 2006 as a cutoff year,” Buffenmyer told us in the Newtontalk mailing list.

It’s important to save all these sites, as UNNA, Tony Kan, myself, and several others have attempted to do. There are still folks out there who want to tinker with the Newton. Let’s help them find all the good information they can find.

Browsing through Apple’s new Mac App Store, a thought hit me:

If you’re a non-techie person (define that however you like), systems like app stores allow you to try out software that, without the store, you might not have known about. In other words, the applications that aren’t allowed on the Mac App Store don’t appeal to people who only find apps on the App Store. If you don’t know about Onyx, or have any idea what it does, would it appeal to you even if it was in the App Store?

That’s why I think some of the pro-style apps, and their developers, will be fine making a living in a world where the Mac App Store exists. Those developers’ products cater to a different audience. So maybe those apps that rely on root access in OS X, like backup applications, cater to those of us who know how important it is to backup and make sure to do it on a regular occasion. For everyone else, there’s Time Machine.

And as long as Apple allows Mac users to use applications outside of the App Store, the platform will still appeal to UNIX geeks and users like me, who use and appreciate more of the pro-level apps.

Also, what do you do about software developers who still sell their applications in boxes in a retail environment? These titles, on physical media like CDs and DVDs, are obviously outside the reach of the App Store. So the App Store can’t be the only place to try and use Mac software. Otherwise, you’re excluding all these retail titles.

Personally, I like have my applications in some sort of physical form. It made me feel better, for instance, to purchase Bento at the Apple Store, bring home the DVD, pop it into my iMac, and install it. I could have purchased the application online and downloaded it that way, but there’s something reassuring about having a backup copy – you know, just in case.

Which is why I’m conflicted about an application like Apple’s pro photo editor, Aperture. Purchase it at an Apple retail store and you pay almost $200, but you get a nice box and DVD. Purchase it on the Mac App Store and get it for better than half the price ($80), but it’s a download-only install. It’s hard to argue with the dramatically discounted price on the App Store, unless you’re like me and you value holding the app in hand.

The benefits of having it as part of the App Store, however, are obvious: automatic updates, lower price, no physical media to lose or damage. And the good news is that Apple still allows free 30-day trials of Aperture 3 – something the Mac App Store doesn’t allow for its titles.

For Apple, having a title like Aperture available on the Mac App Store helps it become more discoverable. As I write this, Aperture is in several of the “top” lists on the App Store, which means Macs users can find it on the App Store homepage, which means more users are more likely to buy it. This approach might be working, because Aperture ranks as the top-grossing App Store title. That could be because of its relative high price tag compared with the rest of the Mac App Store titles.

Searchability, discoverability – if only the App Store had try-ability, it would be perfect.

I wonder where we, in the Newton community, would be if it weren’t for sites like UNNA, where all the available Newton software that ever existed is in one convenient spot. Imagine if we had to hunt all around to find that one app that we want to try. It used to be that way, with some Newton apps sold retail style, in boxes on store shelves, while other titles were available only as online downloads.

Today, however, Newton sites are disappearing. Thank goodness for one, centralized hub like UNNA.

What would’ve happened if the Newton, back in the day, had it’s own app store? If we could have accessed Toolkit and DataRescue from one central location, and have the ability to try out apps for fun (something, admittedly, Apple’s own App Store doesn’t even allow)? It’s a fun thought experiment.

There are repositories like this for classic Mac software as well. I browse the Macintosh Garden on a regular basis for fun, pre-OS X apps. We should hope that someone is doing this for OS X apps as well.

I think the whole idea of a well-run, successful app store will be one of Apple’s great legacies. You could extend that to stores in general, based on how well the company runs its retail and iTunes stores. Making things easy to buy, and easy to try (like iMacs at the mall, or song previews on iTunes) is a win-win for the customer and for Apple.

“Maybe the most comfortable and ultimately successful technological advances are the ones that have an umbilical cord back to what came before.”

– Dave Pell at Tweetage Wasteland. What’s so great about the Newton is that it both mimics and advances the notebook metaphor.

Thomas Brand on Twitter: “Visit @EggFreckles 404 page. You won’t be sorry, but my traffic will surely look confusing.”

Just lovely. That joke never gets old.

Also, I adore how Mr. Brand makes those graphics for his blog.

Things will slow down around here, thanks to the holidays.

That, and I’ve found a new toy to play with.

From all of us at Newton Poetry: Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year everyone.