Newton Poetry

Dan Knight at Low End Mac makes a bold statement:

With the G5 iMac, Apple got things just right. The optical drive and USB ports are right there with the monitor, and it’s a design we can expect Apple to stick with as long as there are desktop PCs.

As much as I love the iMac G4, I’m inclined to believe him: the G5 and beyond iMac design is one that’s built to last. Even today’s aluminum iMacs are basically the G5 fancied up.

The one thing I wouldn’t mind changing is the layout of the ports on the back. It is kind of a pain to reach around and pull USB dongles out. Maybe put them under the chin? Or on the side? I don’t know, but putting the ports on the back is clumsy.

But the G5 design is simplicity at its best. People talk about the iPad being a “window” into the Internet world; I feel the same way about my iMac. The screen, the Apple logo underneath – and that’s it.

Mike Grimm, darn near a neighbor to me over in Fowlerville, Mich., shared a collection of his own Apple portables – including an Newton eMate 300, several varieties of iBooks, and a PowerBook 190 (“Ready for PowerPac Upgrade“).

“Eventually there may be some of the vintage desktops, and maybe a couple of PDA shots,” Mike said over e-mail.

I don’t see the neon eMate styluses very often, but Mike shares a bright orange one in his eMate shots.

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.