Newton Poetry

I might be a little late here, with Christmas coming up, but if you’re still looking for the perfect gift for the Newton lover in your family, this might be it.

Here we have the Apple Newton plaque, custom designed by artist Cynthia Malaran that’s available for purchase (only $60!) at Shanalogic.com. Cynthia has all kinds of retro tech plaques (I like the Mac one) ready for the geek who has everything.

I’d venture to say Cynthia has crafted a mock-up of the MessagePad 2000. And I’m no art critic, but that stylus looks a little chubby, don’t you think?

You might not get it in time for this year’s holiday season, but there’s always next year.

[Via Geeksugar.com.]

Check that out: a field ranger with his holstered Newt, courtesy of Steventon Consulting.

Gregg on the Newtontalk list pointed out the picture, and it turns out Sonny Hung has a blue version by Covertec posted on his Flickr page. This is like Last Action Hero stuff: “Bring on the bad guys, my MessagePad is armored!”

There are still sites out there, like this one with pictures of “The Divider,” featuring Newton holsters (though some of those look more like Man Bags).

MessagePads are already tough. A holstered Newt? There’s no telling what warzones they have seen. How about you Newton users out there – what do you use to protect your green machine?

Of all the Newton connection utilities designed to sync your MessagePad or eMate with OS X, I looked forward to trying out the Newton Connection app the most.

NCX is an application designed by Simon Bell to mimic the original Newton Connection Utilities functionality in the pre-OS X days. As you can see from the home screen above, it offers tons of options for your Newton data, including backup, package installation, Newton Works import and export capabilities, and Mac keyboard functionality.

As with previous connection apps, you want to have a way to connect your Newton with your OS X Mac. NCX gives you the option of using Ethernet or serial-to-USB to connect. I opted for the serial option, using a Keyspan USA-28x serial-to-USB adapter. To get started, you need to download a Keyspan driver [Note: link updated] and restart your Mac.

Download NCX on Simon Bell’s page, and drop the NCX folder in your Applications folder on your Mac.

For this project, I’m using a Newton eMate 300 and an 800 Mhz iMac G4 running the latest install of OS X 10.4 Tiger.

More… »

Something to think about: if Apple were to come out with some sort of tablet, would you buy one?

Say you’re a Newton user, and this new iTablet comes with everything you’ve been dreaming of. Would you abandon your Newton?

Discuss in the comments section. It’s something I had to think about when I bought my iPhone 3G: would my Newton get much use when the Jesus Phone comes along (answer: it hasn’t)?

So what say you: would you buy an Apple tablet? What would you use it for?

Whew – that was close. Got it done on deadline.

Now it’s official: I’m MobileMe-less.

Found a cool blog, System Folder, that highlights a technology called Mac ‘n’ Touch – a precursor to the finger-controlled iPhone. Author Rick Mori dug through an 1993 copy of MacUser and found this Mac ‘n’ Touch technology, developed by MicroTouch, was an add-on to monitors that allowed users to interact with software without a keyboard or mouse.

Unlike the Newton, Mac ‘n’ Touch used a “capacitive sensor” that worked only with touch, not a stylus, much like today’s iPhone.

As you can imagine, this kind of innovation was aimed at the education market. Kids love to touch, right?

Read the rest of Rick’s post for more details. Touch-screen Mac rumors have been around for a while now, especially since the iPhone came out. It’s nice to see that a touch-controlled Mac isn’t such a new idea after all.

If first impressions are everything, then MobileMe never had a chance.

After I bought my iPhone 3G, I signed up for the trial MobileMe account. Back then, it was only a 60-day free trial, but Apple soon added 30 days onto that, and then 30 days onto that, after MobileMe’s launch arrived like a lead balloon.

The idea seemed swell enough: sync your Address Book, iCal, and Mail settings and entries with the ever-present Cloud, and your iPhone. But since July, I’ve run into more problems than solutions, and MobileMe has been a frustrating mess.

My free trial is up on Monday, Dec. 8. I’m going to cancel my account.

Looking back, I never really needed MobileMe to begin with. Because I plug my iPhone into my Mac almost every night, any new entries in either iCal or Address Book get synced each way – from the iPhone to my Mac, and from my Mac to my iPhone. I don’t need the “push” capabilities MobileMe claimed to offer because my syncing schedule was fast enough.

It’s too bad. Apple had a big uphill effort replacing the .Mac service. MobileMe seemed like a decent-enough resolution to everyone’s complaints against .Mac: not much storage, lackluster syncing, no star features that made it seem worth the $99 annual subscription. With it’s modern browser interface and over-the-air syncing, MobileMe looked great on paper. In practice, however, it failed to live up to my expectations.

Maybe it was a lack of habit, but I never found myself missing MobileMe when I wasn’t using it (which was often). If I used my iPhone and Mac for business, the cloud syncing might seem like a bigger deal. But I had a system down, and it worked just fine for me.

The one feature that did catch my eye was the photo sharing galleries. My friend’s wedding photographer put together a beautiful presentation (the subjects helped) using MobileMe’s slideshow capabilities. But again: I don’t really need it. Flickr works just fine as a photo-sharing environment for me. I can make slideshows with Flickr that look fine for my needs. I’m not a wedding photographer. I don’t need anything fancy.

Another thing that bothered me? The fact that iDisk iDisk Sync [thanks commenters!] takes up the 10 GB of space from my hard drive. Maybe I’m a rare case, but when I launch iDisk, it takes away whatever space is available away from my Mac’s “available” space. Why store things on a fragile cloud when my hard drive works just fine? I love the idea behind iDisk, but my iBook is cramped enough without taking that additional 10 GB away.

Apple’s solution? Don’t use iDisk Sync.

The launch didn’t help things. We all remember that, right? The big outage that first weekend. How it took weeks and weeks of Apple tinkering to get even basic services like e-mail up and running for all MobileMe users. For a while there, MobileMe seemed like a big embarrassing misshap for Apple – right up there with the big system outage for the iPhone 3G’s launch. That kind of thing can leave a bad taste in the mouth. I guess it’s never gone away for me.

Part of me is skeptical about this “cloud computing” stuff. I understand that Google seems to have it down, barring Gmail outages, and – lord bless them – Microsoft is working on their own cloud syncing projects. But Google apps like Gmail are hooked up to my Mail.app, which runs from my desktop, and I don’t often make appointments or add contacts through a web browser. That stuff lives on my Mac. I like that I can edit a contact’s information on my iPhone and the change gets logged in Address Book in OS X. There’s no extra log-in-to-the-web-service involved.

If I had several Macs strung out over several locations, with only my iPhone in common, the idea behind MobileMe could come in handy. Backing up my data to the cloud? Sure. Do it all the time. But easy and reliable syncage still seems to be a giant Work In Progress. I’m not yet impressed.

So thanks for the couple of free months, Apple, but I’m saying “no thanks” to MobileMe. Maybe some day I’ll find a use for it – one where I can justify renewing my subscription. Right now, though, I can’t see any good reason to keep MobileMe around. It’s either been a thorn in my side or a non-starter, and life’s too short for either of those.

Film director Jonas Cuaron still uses an iBook G4 as his main computer, and is fine with it.

Amen, brother. My iBook is still my “main” Mac, even if the iMac G4 gets more day-to-day use.

What’s your “everyday” Mac?

[Courtesy of The Guardian.]

Ahem.

Details on Monday!

You kids have fun with your early mornings and mad crowds and steep discounts. I’ll be celebrating Buy Nothing Day.

Celebrating, that is, unless Apple’s got something really cool lined up. And even then, I’ll shop from the comfort of my iMac.