A little Christmas present for you: Grant Hutchinson has created a Newton-ized desktop wallpaper for your computer over at Simple Desktops.
Splorp has posted a few other simple desktops on the site, too – be sure to look for them.
Thanks Grant!
“Sometimes I wonder just how “Newton” I could go. Clear off my desk and leave only an eMate and Color StyleWriter 2200? Would love it.”
It’s rough writing about the Newton. There are only a few things that pop up, here and there, that are considered “news” in the MessagePad community. Like fans of the Amiga or Commodore, Newton users try to relive the glory days and make their devices applicable to modern times.
Though with the Newton, it’s fun. It’s such a sweet platform.
As far as I knew, there was only me and Tony Kan out there blogging at least semi-regularly about the Newton. But sometimes other sites pop up on the radar.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog often posts news and updates on happenings in the Newton community – more than the regular, echo-chamber type posts that appear every where else.
Every once in a while, something random will pop up. Like High Caffeine Content, a blog from Irish iPhone developer Steven Troughton-Smith, creator of Lights Off and Chalk, an upcoming Twitter client.
There’s also Johs Burker and his Blog of Musings. Burker works in education and uses his MP2100 and eMate for real life stuff, like calculating gas mileage and computing on the road. His post on getting RemoteCam working on his eMate is amazing.
As for blogs that look like Newtons, you can’t beat Thomas Brand’s excellent Egg Freckles blog. It really speaks for itself.
The Newton platform attracts die-hards, hobbyists, and everyone in between. It’s nice to see some of those folks writing about their experiences. As more new technologies are released, leave it to the MessagePad user to figure out a way to make it work with Apple’s PDA.
If you’re a Newton blogger, or you know of someone who is, let me know.
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.
We’ve seen this kind of thing before from the chaps at CNet’s UK edition: a battle of the handhelds, this time featuring the Newton MessagePad and the iPhone.
The duel features arguments over design, screen quality, applications, reliability, connectivity, and “special powers.”
Rory, the dude who sided with Samsung in the last smackdown, chooses to battle with the Newton this time around, and sticks it to the iPhone with the Newton’s app selection:
The Newton, a device older than Jamie Lee Curtis, has both copy and paste, a global search function and the ability to multitask. When it first emerged, the iPhone had none of these things and not even the iPhone 3GS — the daddy of all iPhones — can properly handle more than one application at a time.
I won’t ruin the ending for you, but it’ll probably come as a (contrived) surprise.
I did my own head-to-head battle quite a while ago, but what I missed out on was the fun boxing graphics. Now I know.
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.
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.
“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.]
Get this. An attempt to sync my Address Book contacts and my iCal dates with the eMate. I’m using NewtSync with a Serial-to-USB adapter over USB on my iMac G4. And everything’s going fine (above).
Then this. What gives?
The process never finishes before this error message pops up. My eMate, though, has a lot of the information from iCal loaded from the sync, including repeating appointments. Address Book contact info, however, never makes it over to the eMate.
I’ve had issues syncing my eMate with anything on OS X. Guess I’ll keep trying.
“Efforts by Palm, Microsoft, and Symbian to encourage the development of third party software for their mobile platforms, much like Apple’s early 90s attempt to market the original Newton MessagePad, largely just copied the desktop PC software model of letting developers ship retail boxes of software on their own. The result was less successful than the PC desktop, with generally poor quality and often unfinished software titles available at only relatively high prices.”
– Prince McLean at RoughlyDrafted Magazine.
The early days of the Newton featured this boxed-software model, but as the Internet came of age Newton users could find apps online. Now sites like UNNA.org (and sometimes eBay) are the only places to find available apps for the Newton.
These days, if you want something for your MessagePad or eMate, you’ve got to hunt for it.