Newton Poetry

No one attracts news like Apple. Man.

As reader Joseph said, I kind of asked for this one, didn’t I?

The new iTunes 10 icon is nice. It fits with the rest of the circular, glowing orbs that Apple trots out these days. It’s simple and clean, and has the old-school Aqua look to it.

And as Steve said during the keynote, the CD era is about to be eclipsed by everything digital. With version 10, now is the time for a change.

“I don’t need a phone. What I need is a mobile communications device that can also manage my contact, calendar, and run some useful apps. That’s how I started down my path of indispensable electronic do-dads with the Apple MessagePad 130, aka the Newton 130.”

- Joe Levi at Pocketnow.com.

“What? No ‘Magic Stylus’ for my Newton? Lame.”

- Grant Hutchinson, from Twitter, on the new Magic Trackpad. I’m excited about this, just because the trackpad on MacBook Pros are outstanding. The Magic Trackpad takes the Magic Mouse idea and flattens it, and that leaves all kinds of openings for new input methods on the Mac. We can’t touch our iMac screens yet, but this comes darn close.

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.]

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.]

Picture this: Jurassic Park, Smashing Pumpkins, and the Newton MessagePad were all released on the same year, 1993.

Which, for me, makes 1993 the nigh-perfect year. Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favorite movies (I saw it in the theaters three times), and Siamese Dream is the greatest rock record of the ’90s and on constant rotation in my iTunes collection.

The Newton? Well, it just goes without saying that it was a big release for Apple.

Plus The X-Files hit the Fox airwaves, Bill Clinton became President of the United States, André the Giant died, and I was twelve years old. All this random trivia brought to us by Stuff.tv. They assembled a “what happened that year” collection, and boy – 1993 was a very good year.

“Even with July 11 behind the company, the focus is still on mobile devices, not the Macintosh. The Mac is why I went to work for Apple, but sadly, it is not where Apple is putting their time and money.”

- Stephen M. Hackett, over at Forkbomber, on why he quit as an Apple retail Lead Mac Genius. His thoughts on the switch to “gadgets” and the hectic repair schedule are fascinating.

Weird – they’re just now reaching two million?

Oh wait. It’s a copy-editing mistake (check the URL).

As I get ready for Seven Days of System 7 (or, more accurately, OS 8), my focus is on loading my PowerMac G3 with software that I might need over the week. Apps like a good, sturdy browser, an image editor, and a music player are all important.

For music, I have a few options – all apps that, as the classic Mac OS period ended, paved the way for iTunes’s dominance. These are apps like SoundJam, iTunes predecessor, and Audion from Panic. I grabbed the final copy of Audion, but wondered if OS 8 could handle an early copy of iTunes.

In a roundabout way, it can. Apparently, the original version 1.0 and 1.1 are both able to run on Mac OS 8.6, with help from a certain patch. Load the patch, install iTunes 1.0 or 1.1, and enjoy the wonderfulness of Apple’s first version of its now-dominant music app.

Except when it comes to legacy software, patches, and theoretically-incompatible operating systems, failure is always an option.

First, the patch. Developed by Loizos Pavlides and last updated in 2001, the patch requires that the iTunes.smi file, the patch installer, and the iTunes installer all reside on the same slab of hard drive space. In my case (and from what I could gather), the best place was the Documents folder.

If you try simply installing iTunes on the Mac’s hard drive, it will proceed as normal. You just won’t be able to open the app.

There it sits on your hard drive, useless and almost foreign with that classic icon. Instead of today’s well-known double eighth note, the iTunes icon used to sport three eighth notes, all different colors.

The patch and the two iTunes files now sitting side by side in the spatial Finder, running the patch is a no-frills affair. Pick your copy of iTunes, select everything you want to install (above), and away it goes.

Except that if you pick the “CD Authoring” options, you get this weird warning about incompatibility and USB devices. I had enough trouble finding a USB patch for Mac OS 8, so I opted not to include the CD authoring support. For one, it’s probably the longest non-gibberish warning dialog I’ve ever seen. And two, what a hassle.

If this means I live without iTunes’s CD ripping abilities, I’ll live. There’s always a CD player (so ’90s!) handy.

After the patch does its thing, you now have another version of iTunes sitting in the iTunes folder, with a “for Mac OS 8″ title. This is the one to use if your Mac is running OS 8, right?

Wrong. At least in my case. Each time I try to run iTunes for Mac OS 8, it crashes.

The dreaded Error Code 3. Digging into the Classic Mac OS error code database, error 3 means “illegal instruction error,” and running iTunes in Mac OS 8 is definitely illegal. Like, PRAM-zapper-proof illegal.

Though Macwizard says it’s “very common,” the solution isn’t. I came up empty-handed after a bit of digging into the possible solution to the problem. And no matter how many times I reset the PowerMac, iTunes never opens without crashing.

One solution is to simply upgrade the G3 to OS 9, but as I’ve said before, I like the idea of having a Macintosh for every version of the Mac OS.

Reading more of the comments from the patch only added to the confusion – and frustration – seeing that other users were experience hit-or-miss installations of iTunes on OS 8. So for now my attempts to get the thing going are stalled.