Newton Poetry

The Cult of Mac pointed me to a cool t-shirt design with classic Macs (now that G3s can be considered “classic”). What’s neat is that I have all three Macs on the shirt.

It also got me thinking about my growing collection of Mac shirts. As soon as I saw the Exploded 128 shirt, I had to have it. And now I’m in a group with a bunch of other nerdy Mac hippies wearing some other guy’s shirt (here’s me with mine).

I used to have one of these beauties, but Cafe Press doesn’t seem to make shirts that fit me. They’re either too big or too small. Still, it was a fun shirt to wear in public.

Insanely Great Tees makes some classic Mac t-shirts, and I really thought about springing for one of FastMac’s anniversary shirts.

Like the white Apple sticker on my rear windshield, Apple shirts always make for great conversation. There’s something smug in proudly displaying your computing preference across your OS X-powered chest. And why not? Everyone thinks Mac users are arrogant anyway.

If you did it right, you could wear a different Apple shirt each day of the week.

The Angry Drunk puts it well:

The technopunditocracy insists on vomiting forth articles about how the iPhone 3G’s camera compares “unfavorably” with point-and-shoot cameras. But I ask you, where are the articles pointing out the lousy quality of the average point-and-shoot camera’s cell reception compared with the iPhone?

Amen, brother.

If you’re in the U.S., have a great Memorial Day weekend!

I finally updated the Newton Sites page by adding web sites I’ve found through referrals, NewtonTalk, Tony Kan’s My Apple Newton blog, random Google searches, and links provided by current Newton sites.

The eMate 300 popped up more often than not. I think it’s because, now that I have my own eMate, the proto-netbook was my focus for how-to articles and project ideas.

The Salon.com article I added is particularly good because it expresses what a lot of us Newton users feel: our platform died much too soon.

In adding the Geek Techniques wireless eMate breakdown, I also came across a problem – namely, how to categorize all these Newton posts efficiently and logically.

The idea behind my Newton Sites project was to archive many Newton sites that are no longer maintained, and to provide a resource for people who are looking for Newton how-tos and historical information. Now I’ve made it a point to Delicious-ize everything that I come across under the “Newton” tag, and leave the sorting for later.

The problem is, a lot of these web sites fall under multiple categories. I have an “Archive” section, but what happens when that archived page explains a Newton software product? Which do I put it under?

And really, “How-To” could be its own category since most of what I uncovered since the last time I tackled this project fell under that heading. Like some arcane classification czar, or a taxonomist of the Newton, the struggle is in fitting sites in certain silos.

That’s where ideas like tags come in real handy. At Delicious or Flickr, when something falls under multiple categories, you simply add all that apply. A blog post on installing an eMate battery tray could be labeled both “How-To” and “Blogs” under my classification system.

It’s enough to boggle the mind.

So for now, the categories will stay:

• Maintained: sites that are kept up-to-date
• Abandoned: sites that haven’t been touched in years, but still have good Newton info
• Software: repositories of Newton packages, drivers, and emulators
• Blogs: web logs that focus or feature the MessagePad
• Reviews: classic reviews of the various Newton models
• Articles: random reviews, how-tos, and discussions about the Newton platform
• Misc.: the catch-all category.

What we really need is a site or a resource, like the mirrors.unna.org project, that can either host or link to this site list. The problem, however, goes back to my original complaint, which is that many Newton-related links are 404. I found there were so many dead-end links that I got frustrated and built my own resource. That turned into Newton Sites. But maybe someday someone can collect all these great, historical sites and give them their day. My project is simply a hobby.

I’m all for suggestions, so if you find something missing or incorrect, please let me know. Also, there are people way smarter than me when it comes to organizing and classification – so here’s your chance to shine. You’ll get your reward in heaven.

Or, if we ever meet, a beer.

This modest project, combined with Ryan Vetter’s Newton Knowledge Wiki, Morgan Aldridge’s UNNA, and Grant Hutchinson maintaining the NewtonTalk list – along with all those folks still working to maintain and improve our beloved device – should ensure the Newton remains in the public mind for years to come.

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.

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.

Macworld has a four-part “How green is Apple?” series going, exploring the company’s e-waste practices and altruistic motivations.

Many environmental groups, like Greenpeace, say its hard to rate Apple effectively when they’re so damn secretive:

Yet Apple earned just 4.7 points out of a possible 10—dramatically lower than competitors Samsung and Nokia. That low score was largely due to Apple’s reluctance to open up more about the environmental impact of its overall corporate operations. “They could elevate their score quite easily with just a couple of fixes,” says Greenpeace’s Harrell. “They could do a greenhouse-gas inventory of their supply chain, which they probably have done. But they haven’t talked about it.”

As someone who deals with e-waste on a regular basis, I’ve had my own ethical struggle with Apple’s environmental practices. But it’s this kind of pressure, and pressure from their customers, that will ultimately make Apple more open about its “green” behavior.

[Via Macsurfer.]

A bit of fun today. It was only a matter of time before someone would parody the “Congrats, It’s a PC” ads by Microsoft.

Apple has already responded in their smug way, but this kind of thing is much better. I mean, not even the homeless guy will buy an HP.

I wonder how Blue Ray compatibility would help Homeless Frank’s cough?

“If Apple had sold even close to 30 million Newton OS devices in its first 18 months, Apple would not have been ‘beleaguered’, they would not have bought NeXT, and Steve Jobs never would have been brought back. Instead, IDG reported that Apple sold a grand total of only 60,000 Newton units in all of 1996, the Newton’s third year on the market. That’s about how many iPhone OS devices Apple sold per day — per day! — for the first 18 months after the iPhone went on sale.”

– John Gruber at Daring Fireball, on Apple’s too-intent focus on the Next Big Thing during the 1990s.

Couple of interesting things I found concerning the Newton eMate 300.

The first: a colored-eMate? From the picture above, it seems Apple (that’s former Apple CEO Gil Amelio and Frank Casanova there) had iMac-like color options slated for this particular Newton model.

Grant Hutchinson did some investigating on the multi-colored eMates, including asking Casanova where the prototypes came from, and turned up quite a few nuggets of good information.

An orange, red, or purple eMate would be a lot of fun to work with (much like my favorite Apple laptop, the clamshell iBook), but I’d love to get my hands on a clear-cased model.

The second concerns the rumored “bMate” – a business-model eMate for on-the-go writing pros. Says Pen Computing Magazine:

Journalists began snapping up eMates as the perfect portable writing tool. Even Steve Jobs liked the eMate. Apple reportedly began developing a “bMate” version for business people, featuring a better screen and a StrongARM processor. Anticipation was high for these new keyboard-equipped Newtons.

In hindsight, we can now see how the eMate’s design and ideal led to the creation of the original iBook. Salon.com quoted Apple as saying just that:

It’s also possible that Apple will release a version of the eMate based on the Macintosh operating system; the press release announcing the eMate’s demise promises that Apple “will be serving this market with Mac OS-based products beginning in 1999.”

And what do you know, the multi-colored “iMac to go” iBook G3 was released in 1999.