Newton Poetry

“The coming of an Apple tablet has been rumored since the death of the Newton. Talk to anyone versed in Apple lore, and they’ll tell you one’s just around the corner. Not only that, they’ll probably tell you what it’ll be like.

…But it’s important to remember that for every true rumor out there, there are five false ones and, most importantly, three things that no one’s even imagined.”

– The Macalope on the spread of rumors about a device no one has even seen yet, and how rumor-spreaders have been wrong (way wrong) before.

Just created a gallery over at Flickr in honor of my favorite Macintosh, the iMac G4.

Enjoy. I sure did.

[Image courtesy of Splorp: http://www.flickr.com/photos/splorp/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 He gets thumbnail-of-my-gallery honors.]

A great find from the Apple marketing archives, showing the target market for the eMate: education.

The video may have been produced before the eMate name was finalized, because you never heard it called an eMate through the whole thing. One teacher keeps calling it “the machine,” but no one comes out and says it’s a Newton product.

“It’s definitely ageless,” one of the teacher says.

Ruggedness, flexibility, tons of uses, usability – these were the eMate’s strengths, especially as it was carried around by fifth graders. Apple had that in mind, at least, when they put together the commercial.

Well I’ll be.

The secret is, you have to have a jailbroken iPhone and a few connectors (details at the namedfork.net source page), but man – look at that thing in action.

Lots of luck to anyone who tries it.

[Via Thomas Brand.]

Greg Pak at Pakbuzz was a dedicated AlphaSmart Dana user. It’s portability, small form factor, and battery life made the Dana his go-to writing machine.

But then Pak grabbed a Newton eMate off eBay, for comparison’s sake, and has declared it the “greatest lo-tech writing machine on the planet!” The exclamation point means he’s serious.

In comparing the AlphaSmart Dana, AlphaSmart Neo (above), and the eMate, Pak found they had a lot of similarities:

Both the Dana and the eMate were designed with the educational market in mind. Both are solid state computers with no moving parts and incredibly sturdy plastic bodies. Both run on software originally designed for pocket organizers and feature a stylus rather than a mouse. Both have black and white screens with green backlights. Both use their own barebones but functional word processors that can export and import rtf files. Both turn on instantly and automatically save everything that you type. And both run for days on a full charge.

The difference is in the eMate’s syncing capabilities (thanks to the newest batch of Mac-to-Newton sync software), security, data safety, and geekiness.

The Dana and Neo win in terms of speed, weight, and long-term viability, since they’re still in production.

The fact that the AlphaSmart products both sync with USB out of the box make them attractive. Pak’s issues with document syncing seem like a killer, though. I love the ability to drop a NewtonWorks document onto my Mac desktop as a rich text document and be done with it.

Battery life on both AlphaSmart products, however, seems killer.

Talk about a view.

And yeah, the stuff outside the window’s nice, too.

I like how the iMacs are floating, with the stands taken off and the main screen held up by a swivel bracket. There are some more detailed shots at the Contemporist, where this came from.

[Via badbanana.]

Here’s a novel concept: use what you’ve got until you can’t use it anymore.

For Newton users, the concept isn’t new or novel. We do it every time we see our green screens glow.

But the good folks at Last Year’s Model are spreading the good word that new isn’t always better. The “need” to upgrade to the newest and shiniest (and I’m as guilty as anyone) isn’t always the best policy, especially when what you’ve got works just fine.

I’ve loved the idea behind Last Year’s Model since I stumbled on my iMac G3 at a recycling event. The best Macs (ahem) are often the ones that are quote-unquote obsolete.

And hey, there’s a whole group of productive, sane, intelligent human beings who use a last-decade’s-model PDA. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

There’s not a lot of oomph behind Last Year’s Model. It’s really a place to share stories and spread the word, with Facebook and Myspace groups along with a Twitter hashtag. The site doesn’t ask you to share videos or spam your friends’ inboxes. The aim is to simply raise awareness that, say, your eMate is just fine banging out the latest novel project you’re working on.

Is this the new, rumored Apple tablet? Or an old patent filing from the MessagePad days of yore?

The Next Web’s Boris says it’s an old Newton patent resurfacing, and that the rumored Apple tablet will not have stylus-based input. Little clues, like how the patent isn’t about a tablet but the stylus recognition system itself, and how weirdly familiar that bottom row of buttons looks, seem to say Boris is right.

These new patent pictures were released into an online hornets nest, with everyone waiting for news on this long-rumored iSlate thingy. Any clues, no matter how old or mundane, turn into a tea-leaves-reading session. Thing is, Apple applies for wacky patents all the time.

We’ve seen other patent pictures floating around the Web for years now. None of us know if this new, still-unseen Super Newton is anything like what we’ve seen before.

What do you think? Is this a new tablet, or an old MessagePad?

[Via Tai Shimizu and NewtonTalk.]

“We had some little design victories, like the eMate or the 20th Anniversary Mac. But they were never mainstream products. It was incredibly frustrating.”

– Apple lead designer Jonathan Ive, on the unoriginal design of Apple products during the ’90s.

[Via System Folder.]

Newton users may wonder, with the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, whether their MessagePads and eMates would still play nice with the new operating system. You get a new Mac (as I did) with the latest install, and you might worry – is it going to work?

I’m here to report: everything works fine.

I started by download the Keyspan USA-28x driver to my new iMac for the serial-to-USB adapter. Things got weird when Snow Leopard recognized the Keyspan adapter as some sort of dial-up device (above). This wasn’t the case, obviously, but I pressed on just to see if it would work.

I went with Simon Bell’s excellent Newton Connection for Mac OS X (NCX) for the software connection, using a Newton eMate 300.

Since I’m working through the serial connection via USB, I select “serial” in the Newton’s Dock app and – whala. NCX and the Keyspan adapter give me a connection on Snow Leopard.

First, I wanted to try the new screen shot function on NCX – something that was only possible before in a few roundabout ways, like with Newton Toolkit.

In NCX, head to File > Screen Shot, then press the little camera (above) and wait a few seconds.

And bam, you get a little window pop-up with a screen shot of your Newton. Pretty handy.

Next, I tried doing what every Newton user does at some point: install a package file. In this case, I picked a periodic table app from UNNA.

This worked exactly as before.

So everything, from the screen shots to the keyboard function – which, for me, worked faster than on previous Macs – works great with OS X 10.6.

The real test, and the one I’ve had issues with on my eMate since forever, is syncing Address Book and iCal names and dates to the Newton. I’ve had no luck at all so far, besides a few to-do items syncing from iCal to the Newton’s Dates app, and I don’t guess it’ll get much better on Snow Leopard. I tried using NewtSync (above), but had no luck syncing anything.

The important message to take away is that, with software like NCX, it’s possible to connect your Newton, install packages, and do a few other tasks no matter which version of Mac OS X you’re using.

This may not always be the case. There could be some future OS X release that cripples any potential Newton-to-Mac connection. I would think it’d be in the areas of data syncing or unavailable drivers for serial adapters. But the newer MessagePads and eMates allow for Bluetooth compatibility, which shows no sign of going away.