Newton Poetry

“The question is not ‘why do you want something that old?’ but rather: Why would I want anything newer? This computer serves my purposes perfectly well. It would be nice to be able to run Mac OS X Leopard and run all the latest software, but for somebody like me whose heaviest task is editing a photo taken with a point-and-shoot camera, I’ve found that this computer is quite powerful enough.”

– David Kendal, my podcasting buddy, with a good pre-emptive piece that nicely accompanies my rant from the other day.

Of course they’d use Macs in such a sleek working environment.

[Via ISO50 Blog.]

Apple finally introduced the iPad tablet computer last Wednesday, confirming rumors that have been circulating since before I started Newton Poetry a few years ago. From then to now, I’ve read article after article and rumor after rumor – everything from claiming this new device was the second coming of the Newton to a giant iPod Touch.

Sometimes keeping track of everything was exhausting. Even more than the iPhone, the mythical Apple tablet kept rumor sites in business for years. Then, when so many confirmations gelled together, most Apple fans knew what was coming when Steve Jobs hit the stage on January 27 in San Francisco.

Many, many tech writers invested in a lot of detective work to flesh out this device, and I think a lot of credit goes to them for softening the holy-crap blow that this device would’ve otherwise caused us to have. The iPad’s introduction was nothing like the iPhone introduction because we had all seen and heard it before. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Nothing remarkable, nothing earth-shattering – just steady progress, and tiny chips brushed away from the mobile sculture Apple is crafting.

This project, the giant move to mobile computing Apple has been working on since the day of the original PowerBook and Newton MessagePad, has essentially come to fruition in the form of the iPad. Jobs mentioned (and reports back him up) that Apple is primarily a mobile device company. It’s the powerful combination of a touch-based interface, a world-conquering application platform, and – most of all – the opportunity that is still to come.

That’s the key. I think the earth-shattering part will come in the form of something we haven’t even seen yet. We might even have trouble knowing it when we see it.

For some, the iPad doesn’t seem like much now. But just wait, says Steven Fry in a much-linked post:

In the future, when [the iPad] has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

All ready, I’m seeing fantastic ideas about what the iPad can become, given some time.

The iPad, like the original Macintosh, ships with basic task-oriented software titles, like iWork, that make it a capable machine. With the Mac, the explosion in innovation came when desktop publishers realized what a powerful machine they had sitting on their desks. With the iPad, a similar spark will happen.

The tech echo chamber is resounding this notion that the computer-as-appliance has finally arrived. The iPad is the computer your grandma can use without calling you for tech support every week. The details have been abstracted away – and use whatever car metaphor makes you comfortable here.

And that’s probably true. But something tells me the future is brighter than grandma. The iPad will gain mutant electro-superpowers after the proverbial lightning strikes.

Storms a-brewin’.

When I bought my first iPod, the first 30 GB video version, podcasts were immediately appealing to me. It was like a talk show I could listen to any time I wanted on any subject I wanted. Over the years, I’ve developed a collection of favorites.

Which is why it’s pretty neat that Newton Poetry reader David Kendal asked me to do a podcast of our own.

So we did one. And it’s out there. We call it The hello Show.

It’s about all the stuff we’re into: Newtons, Macs, the Apple world that we tend to spend an inordinate time thinking about. Probably just like you.

We have a super-simple setup. GarageBand (and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Audacity) plus iChat plus an FTP account – with some of David’s web wizardry – is all we need. So far. We’re definitely learning as we go.

Anyway. Give it a try, if you like. We know there’s plenty out there to listen to, and we’d be honored if you spent an hour or so with us. Shucks, we’d love to have you on The hello Show. If you’d like to be a guest, please contact us and we’ll set something up. It’ll be fun.

Oh. And why “The hello Show?” After a lapse in brainstorming, David sprung the idea of the “hello” text that was featured in the original Macintosh and the iMac advertising. A great idea.

From Riccardo Mori’s System Folder:

Over the years [Claudio] gave me a few of the Macs in my collection, such as the Macintosh SE FDHD and the Apple IIGS. He was my vintage hardware ‘pusher’, and I used to ask him for help when something didn’t work (and I regularly paid for his expertise, although he — being the utterly honest guy he was — never charged me the prices other Apple repair shops used to charge at the time), and every now and then I helped him put order in his crammed, messy (in a beautiful sort of way) laboratory; he called me when he meant to clean it up a bit, and gave me a lot of interesting pieces. When I was looking for a PowerBook 100, he gave me three dismantled units and told me: Here you have all the pieces to build one functional PowerBook 100.

That’s great: Mac fandom as DIY repair, probably the best way to learn how to be a Macintosh devotee.

Mori’s Mac 128k photos are great, but so is his story of the Mac repair friend that showed him how they worked, and how to piece them together.

Mac users who have Apple Wizards as friends (as I do – thanks Curtis!) are the luckiest, because they have someone to share their joy with.

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.]

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.

Here’s a call out to all my classic Mac using friends.

From what I’ve read here and here, it’s not looking good. All the updates Apple threw into OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and with the abandonment of PowerPC Macs, things like networking with OS 8 and 9 Macs and AppleTalk have been put out to pasture.

I was trying to network my PowerMac G3, running Mac OS 8.6, to my new Snow-Leopard-powered iMac over my Airport hub. No luck, despite some handy how-tos here and here.

After a half day spent trying to figure this out, and a bunch of forum list reading, I’ve just about given up. I thought it would be a fun rainy-day project for those with new and old Macs, especially for you, the people, who have OS 9/8 Macs still sitting around collecting dust.

Any suggestions, drop me an e-mail.

“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.