Newton Poetry

“Forever Green, May Your Newton Glow,” by TahoeSunsets

My podcast co-consipirator, David Kendal, finally posted a good image of himself for the world to see. A brave thing, especially in the hands of someone rotten like me.

It struck me, looking at David’s photo, how much he looks like my guitar hero, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.

Let’s see what you think:

What do you say? David think he’s more of a Leonardo di Caprio than (the also-British, and insanely-talented) Mr. Gilmour.

We discussed this, and other fascinating topics, on our latest show. Tune in for David’s suggestion as to who I look like.

David also kicked off a The hello Show secret meeting place, if you have any thoughts or photos to share.

Thanks, as always, for listening.

Hilarious. Someone who saw my 1983 Apple.com mockup made the spoof as an actual, working web site.

As of now, the links all say “Coming Soon!” But man, wouldn’t it be cool to work out all the Apple Lisa or BASIC copy for a functioning (albeit fake) retro Apple.com?

Jim Abeles posted a few photos of the prototype (and highly elusive) orange eMate 300.

According to Abeles, who is chief executive officer at Pre1 Software,

This came from a GUI designer for the eMate who said it was shown to developers at the 1996 MacWorld. Apparently it was the first time Apple used “stereo lithography” to prototype a product. Jonathan Ives saw it in use in Amsterdam and was inspired to try it. Three pieces were made; the top, bottom and pen.

Apple was toying around with other eMate colors – and business-grade models. It could be that the translucent plastic and candy coating inspired the iMac and iBook G3 varieties.

He’s got a bunch of other great classic Apple hardware shots, with some more Newton prototypes like the Lizzy, at his Flickr gallery. I remember him getting some buzz for his prototype iPhone pics a while back.

[Via Morgan Aldridge.]

From Ken Fager on his Flickr account, drawn with an MP2100.

Steve Jobs descended to the base of Mt. Yerba Buena and unveiled the tablet to the gathered unwashed masses…

Today’s the big day, eh?

[Via @kenfagerdotcom.]

One of the prototype “Batmobile” Newtons. See the full version here.

The pic got some Gizmodo love yesterday.

And Splorp's Twitter.]

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.]

Grant Hutchinson has put together a fresh batch of great Newton photography at his Flickr gallery, Beautiful Newton, including the above shot courtesy of oxymoronik.

There are some fantastic shots in Splorp’s gallery, including an eMate-in-the-wild shot, and a submission from Sonny Hung’s Frozen Newton collection. Besides the eMate shot, my favorite has to be this simple MessagePad close-up.

[Via splorp.]

What you’re looking at is the high crest of some Mac appreciation wave that is only now breaking.

I posted my Apple.com, circa 1983 picture on June 29 – three days after sharing it on Flickr. Since then, the image has been shared on numerous blogs (including one of my daily reads), and has spread around the world. It’s been an honor to see how this little project took off.

To give you an idea, Newton Poetry typically earns anywhere from 300-700 hits on an average day. For those days that I publish something to Macsurfer, that number can reach into 1,000 or so. But that’s only happened a few times.

Hitting 3,600 hits in a day, however, is unheard of for this blog. It’s madness. And it’s humbling.

The funny thing is, I had a feeling it was coming. Something told me that drafting a snapshot of Apple’s make-believe 1983 web site, something I hadn’t seen anyone tackle before, would be something people could enjoy. But 43,000 views and 30 comments on Flickr (and counting) tells me it reached those Mac fans, like myself, that love the retro kitsch stuff.

Here I thought the first day’s traffic, that little spike you see on the left, was big news. Then things creeped down back to normal, when Cult of Mac wrote about it and – BOOM – off it went. My biggest source of traffic has come from some German web sharing service Swedish blog network that I’ve never heard of. Amazing.

Looking at it almost a month later, there’s some things that I would change about the mockup. For one, someone pointed out that I had the wrong Apple II at the bottom. I’d like to mess with the kerning a bit on the headlines.

Also, some have suggested that I should have used Apple’s old serif font (what would become a modified version of Garamond) for the typeface. But I hate that typeface, and I wanted to keep things simple and more modern. Besides, the picture was thrown together on a Thursday night, the product of an idea and some Google Image searching, and is by no means an accurate representation. It only shows what one could do with Apple’s iconic web site design.

Most of all, my little project has shown the power of the share-able web. After I posted the mockup and Twittered it, the thing spread immediately to blogs and re-Tweets, and started generating unheard-of levels of traffic to this site.

So thanks to everyone who chimed in, shared the picture, and visited this site. I hope some of you will stick around, because I do love me some classic Macintosh, and Newton, and am willing to do more of this kind of thing.

I have a Newton launch day version of Apple.com swimming in my head as I type.

Courtesy of maczydeco on Flickr, and used with permission under Creative Commons.