Newton Poetry

“I had enormous difficulty installing these patches until I read the advice to have as much space as possible on the eMate and the 2100 before trying it, after which it went like clockwork. After several weeks of frustration one feels such an idiot for having ignored that advice, but great relief when it is done. Thanks to everyone who made it possible.”

– Oliver Leaman, sharing his 2010 patch experiences with NewtonTalk. Learn more about the Newtpocalypse, and how it was avoided.

Take the iPhone form factor, marry it to the Newton’s stellar handwriting recognition, and you have the latest in PDA technology.

Well, kinda.

Above is a Notepod – a simple notepad shaped like an iPhone. For $18, you get three pocket-perfect notepads shipped from Australia. On the outside, you get a blank iPod Touch-like page, while the inside pages have grid-style paper for notes, doodles, or iPhone app ideas.

Maybe best of all, it recognizes your handwriting no matter how drunk you get – even if you don’t.

Or you can simply make your own with the Hipster PDA templates over at Active Voice. Whichever.

Via DIY Planner.

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.]

One possible outcome of the Apple tablet rumors.

I’d buy it.

[Via Joy of Tech.]

Foyer scrota and severe heavers ago our flashovers brought force on thy cosmetician a new notion conceives in lubricate and deducted to the prosecution that all men are crated quail.

From Clark Humphrey’s Misc Media, circa 1994. His Newton Poetry version of the Gettsyburg Address comes about a third of the way down while discussing Newton’s handwriting recognition.

“It may not be able to make an exact digital version of what you write on it,” Humphrey says, “but it can turn it into computer-assisted cut-up poetry!”

In fact, that’s how I started Newton Poetry – take a random piece of poetry, write it into my MP110, and type down whatever came out.

Yes, we know – everyone hated the iMac puck mouse/Newton/Mac TV/Pippin. There’s no more need to include it in a “Top # Apple Mistakes” list anymore.

For the past few years, for as long as I’ve been writing Newton Poetry, these “worst of” lists have cropped up from time to time. Most of them mention a similar combination of the above Apple “mistake” products. Chances are, each list will feature the same disliked Apple products as every other what-were-they-thinking list.

It’s a sham, and it’s annoying.

First, the whole “top 10” list is simply an easy way to be Dugg and Stumbled Upon. I should know – I’m guilty of it myself. The difference is that I didn’t have to browse through other sites, copy their content, and paste it into the site. Every blog and site these days has to have their own iteration of the “worst of” list. Sure, each post probably generates a bit of traffic and tons of comments. The result, however, is that the site ends up looking desperate and silly.

Second, these posts are unoriginal in the extreme. In fact, it’s easy to predict what products will be featured in any given list. Here’s a quick rundown of Apple products you should have never purchased, just off the top of my head:

1. Apple iMac hockey puck mouse
2. Some Apple Newton MessagePad or eMate
3. Apple/Bandai Pippin
4. Mac TV
5. Mac Portable
6. PowerMac G4 Cube
7. Apple III
8. Apple Lisa
9. Some random Performa or LC model
10. 20th Anniversary Mac

Funny that no one mentions the Apple Hi Fi or, as of yet, the Apple TV. Perhaps in a few years those products will be included, too.

Here’s the point: it’s as if, when tech blogs are pressed for fresh content, they generate some unoriginal, macabre list of Apple failures and run it as a “top 10” post. Voila – instant page views.

Us Apple fans, and especially us Newton fans, deserve better in-depth analysis than what we all ready know to be true. I hope that Apple fans see past such drivel, and skip the link on Macsurfer.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” our collective wisdom should tell these sites. “Get a goddamn life.”

No, Apple’s not perfect, and yes, we remember the devil-spawned puck mouse. Can we move on?

There for a while, I was reporting on every damned list that included the Newton. My knee-jerk reaction was outrage, of course, but after a while that outrage turned into a passive frustration. Now, it’s just annoying.

Because it keeps happening. Like clockwork.

Sure, we can argue all day about whether the Newton platform was a failure. And we could have some yucks over how clunky (yet beautiful) the Cube really was.

But we only need to have those conversations once or twice. Not every week.

Shame on the blogs that run these “worst of” posts, and shame, especially, to those high-traffic sites that have the resources and talent to generate perfectly good and suitably worthwhile content.

Don’t resort to everyone’s-doing-it posts like these. You ought to know better.

“To be useful as a PDA, the Newton should anyway be always close. It is instant on, and the Notepad is capturing notes indexed by time. As a recording device, the Newton is unbeatable, and it has some pretty obvious advantages over the index card method: Backups are possible, storage is almost infinite, you can carry the whole system with you all the time, and you can search and extract more easily.”

– Eckhart Köppen, from the NewtonTalk list.

“It is easy to cite examples where less capable products have superseded more capable products. My favorite example of that is PDAs. I still have three classic PDAs: HP200LX, Newton MessagePad 2100, and Psion Revo. All of these have been unavailable for a decade or more, yet in many ways each has features that have been unmatched in newer and ‘better’ products.”

– Michael Anderson at Gear Diary, on the “crapification” of products – or how we’re setting for “good enough.”

Indeed.

[Via John from NewtonTalk.]

“The Newton MessagePad 2100 is in my top 10 mobile devices of all time, and it ran on a 167 MHz ARM CPU and had about 1 MB of internal storage. There are aspects of it (particularly the Notepad) which remain unmatched in terms of usability.”

– Steven Frank, from stevenf.com, on the ideal mobile device.