Posts tagged “hypercard”.

Poor Man’s Newton: MessagePad emulator on your Classic Mac

February 2nd, 2009

poormannotes

Apple’s HyperCard stack-based programming tool continues to astound me. This time, it’s the Poor Man’s Newton – a HyperCard stack that lets you muck around with Newton-like features on your Classic Mac desktop.

Download a copy off UNNA, open up the stack, and bam – a fun Newton OS emulator that uses HyperCard buttons, input fields, and drawing tools.

poormandates

While it lacks the handwriting recognition of the real Newton OS, Poor Man’s Newton does let you store contacts and scribbles, and search your PMN database. Says the creator, Joseph Guy Cicinelli:

Poor Man’s Newton is a HyperCard stack that contains address and telephone information and generally behaves like Apple’s new Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), the Newton MessagePad. If you are like me and you can’t afford to buy one of these high tech tools, here is your chance to own a virtual one that can used on your Macintosh.

At the time, cost was a real issue. These days you can find a quality working Newton for $30-$100 on eBay. But Poor Man’s Newton? That’s free.

You don’t get the full MessagePad experience. PMN’s “Dates” functionality only shows a calendar – you can’t save appointments or reminders. If it did, Poor Man’s Newton could serve as a stripped-down version of Claris Organizer (also available at UNNA, for Mac OS 9 and older).

poormanabout

Poor Man’s Newton offers a few other functionality items: unit conversions, a telephone number dialer, and plenty of printing and sorting options to keep a well-organized contacts list.

The HyperCard stack itself dates to a few years after the OMP was release (above), but it holds up remarkably well after all these years. It sweeps away everything else on your Mac desktop, acting as a distraction-free, Einstein-like app for those without a Newton ROM or a bunch of free time.

Super fun to play with if you have access to a Classic environment, Poor Man’s Newton is very small (at 1 MB) and very affordable (free!) – and you don’t need a version of HyperCard to run it.

Apple history for the rest of us

January 8th, 2009

appleriseandfall

For history buffs, Apple is a natural attraction for how modern technology companies evolve, behave, and operate. Since its founding, Apple has attracted pirate programmers and designers, a dedicated fan following, and tons of media attention. In just 30 years, the company has ridden a roller coaster of success and near-death – multiple times – has today lives on as a super-successful electronics company.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Mac, and as Wired’s Steven Levy puts it, Apple will look forward instead of back.

Which is just as well. While doing research on some design work for my day job, in the design archives of AIGA, I stumbled upon Jeff Goodell’s Rolling Stone article, “The Rise and Fall of Apple, Inc” (part two is here). Goodell writes in 1996:

The story of Apple’s decline is a morality tale for the Information Age. It is not, as one might expect, a story about how quickly the technology moves, or about how unforgiving and brutal business has become in Silicon Valley. In fact, Apple had many, many chances to save itself. But it didn’t. It was the company of the future that failed to see what was right in front of its nose. And while Apple will no doubt reinvent itself in the years to come, the central idea that animated the company for so long – that Apple is a revolutionary force, that it could change the world – is dead.

Not any more, it’s not. But there is a weird feeling of dread and uncertainty, not unlike what a lot of people are feeling about the economy, or about Steve Jobs’s succession plan, and a lot of it stems from what we don’t know about Apple. What’s the “next big thing?” What effect will the economy have on Mac, iPod, and iPhone sales?

“There is no happy ending here,” Goodell writes. At the time, it must have seen certain. But soon after Rolling Stone published that article, Steve Jobs returned, and things turned around. Taking the long view, Apple has been in far worse situations (coincidentally, mostly when Jobs was absent).

One thing hasn’t changed, with or without Jobs. The theme struck me, after I watched an interview with Bill Atkinson during the launch of Apple’s HyperCard “erector set” programming application, was that Apple truly puts the power to create in peoples’ hands. As in “for the rest of us.”

Think about it. HyperCard was designed as a application builder for non-hackers. As Atkinson put it in the interview:

A whole new body of people who have creative ideas, but aren’t programmers, will be able to express their ideas – or their expertise in a certain subject.

The original Macintosh was designed to be intuitive. Its design and interface has functioned as the standard since 1984. VisiCalc, on the Apple II, gave people the power to create spreadsheets. Apps like Garage Band and iMovie and iWeb give users a simple way to be creative (actual talent helps, of course). PageMaker was the app that launched an industry, and my very profession. iTunes and iPods give us the ability to manage and enjoy our music library like never before. It’s music, or design, or information, or programming “for the rest of us.”

Even the Newton was a product ahead of its time, giving business professionals and regular folks the ability to manage their day-to-day data in a simple and intuitive way.

As a history buff, I like reading about Apple’s early successes and tribulations. It shows a company constantly growing, constantly in flux, and – for the most part – learning from its mistakes. The common thread that runs through Apple’s story is a company setting out to make machines and applications that make our lives easier.

I almost typed “better” there, but I don’t think that’s true: if we didn’t have the iPod, we may not miss it.

But simple. Easy. More intuitive. Even fun. That’s what Apple has given us the past 30 years. The success of the Mac is a testament to that ideal.

So while Steve Jobs and Apple in general may not celebrate the Macintosh’s birthday this month, us Mac fans can in our own way. We do, everyday, when we wake our iMac up from sleep, or scroll through our music library on our iPhone, and live our lives a little easier.

NewtCard: HyperCard for the Newton

June 4th, 2008

A greener HyperCard

Leander Kahney’s profile on Bill Atkinson, the original designer of Apple’s super-cool program HyperCard, has some folks feeling nostalgic for easy programming and cards arranged in stacks.

Which is cool. Stories about companies keeping inventory and invoicing duties on HyperCard – still to this day – remind us that old-school Apple is still usable and practical.

But how about for the Newton? Well, there’s NewtCard.

For $99, NewtCard

lets you put text, drawings, pictures and sound into a stack of smart cards. Add buttons to navigate, fields to collect data and scripts to bring your project alive with the tap of a pen. NewtCard is a Hypercard-like environment for Newton devices.

This according to NS Basic’s FAQ.

I’ve only played around with HyperCard on my Mac SE, but it seems HyperCard was an earlier version of HTML forms. In fact, Atkinson laments that his hyper-creation didn’t involve networking, or else it could’ve become the first (hyper)Web.

“Support is definitely limited,” George Henne of NS Basic says. “Still making NewtCard available makes absolutely no sense commercially, but it’s one of our favorite products of all time.”

A hundred bucks seems like a steep price for something to play around with on your Newt, but what the hey – HyperCard still has paying fans. Why not for MessagePad users?

Even better? NS Basic is offering a package deal: NewtCard AND NS Basic/CE for $99.95. Order it here.

“Please understand that it’s been years since we looked at the code,” Henne told the Newtontalk list. “We’ll do the best we can to help with support, but our memories are limited.”