Newton Poetry

Couple of interesting things I found concerning the Newton eMate 300.

The first: a colored-eMate? From the picture above, it seems Apple (that’s former Apple CEO Gil Amelio and Frank Casanova there) had iMac-like color options slated for this particular Newton model.

Grant Hutchinson did some investigating on the multi-colored eMates, including asking Casanova where the prototypes came from, and turned up quite a few nuggets of good information.

An orange, red, or purple eMate would be a lot of fun to work with (much like my favorite Apple laptop, the clamshell iBook), but I’d love to get my hands on a clear-cased model.

The second concerns the rumored “bMate” – a business-model eMate for on-the-go writing pros. Says Pen Computing Magazine:

Journalists began snapping up eMates as the perfect portable writing tool. Even Steve Jobs liked the eMate. Apple reportedly began developing a “bMate” version for business people, featuring a better screen and a StrongARM processor. Anticipation was high for these new keyboard-equipped Newtons.

In hindsight, we can now see how the eMate’s design and ideal led to the creation of the original iBook. Salon.com quoted Apple as saying just that:

It’s also possible that Apple will release a version of the eMate based on the Macintosh operating system; the press release announcing the eMate’s demise promises that Apple “will be serving this market with Mac OS-based products beginning in 1999.”

And what do you know, the multi-colored “iMac to go” iBook G3 was released in 1999.

The Newton eMate 300 is a great machine. Small, portable, rugged – a sort of proto-netbook that lets you type on the go. And the battery life is great if you have a working, rechargeable battery with plenty of juice.

When my eMate came, I found out right away that the battery pack was probably the original. It held a charge for about three minutes. So while it’s handy to pop a few fresh AA batteries into a MessagePad and be back up and running, the eMate relies on its single battery pack. If it goes, you’re stuck with replacing it, building a new one from scratch, or keeping your eMate plugged in at all times.

I opted for the simplest solution: buy a new battery pack on eBay and installing it myself.

To start, I grabbed a new eMate battery pack from PowerBook Guy, a Torx wrench (I actually took my eMate into the hardware store to get the perfect-sized wrench), my eMate, and some starting instructions from Frank.

The first step is to flip your eMate over. See that half-circle hatch near the handle (above)? That’s what you’re taking off.

There are just two screws to remove on the cover, and they’re both at the top.

I left the screws in their slots as I lifted the cover off so I wouldn’t lose them. Now you see the good stuff: a few memory slots and the battery.

The battery pack isn’t bolted to the eMate; it simply rests in a little trench, with a wire attached to the circuit board.

This is the most delicate of the steps: pulling the battery connection cable away from the circuit board. Be careful, and use something (I used my fingernail) to wedge the connector away from the plug-in.

From here, pull the battery pack out of the eMate. The actually battery pack fits snugly inside the holster, but slides right out.

Here’s what the empty battery tray looks like inside the eMate. The soft pads keep the battery pack case from sliding around inside the Newton.

Slide your new battery back inside the protective casing, with the connection wire sticking out of the right-hand side.

Now carefully slide the connection wire into the circuit board until it snaps tight. A little push on the white part will be plenty.

Place the battery case inside the eMate, replace the cover, and tighten your screws. That’s all.

I plugged my eMate in and let it charge a whole day, and now it’s like I have a whole new eMate. A fully-charged battery pack should last you for days, even with heavy usage.

The battery pack cost me about $20 (plus shipping) on eBay. There are some DIY die-hards who are all about making their own battery pack, but the soldering made me nervous. Maybe someday I’ll give it a try. This solution, however, worked fine for me.

Now my eMate is truly portable because I don’t have to worry about keeping it plugged in at all times. Replacing the battery pack was a cinch, too, and took all of about five minutes.

Frank Gruendel has done it again. Last time, it was a dual-screen Newton. This time, he’s hot-wired a proto backlight into a Newton MessagePad 100 (or OMP).

Check out Frank’s Pda-Soft site for a fun photo tour of the project. It’s just a preview, but already Frank has started a buzz on the NewtonTalk list.

OMPs, and any MessagePad pre-MP130, lacked backlighting, making it hard to noodle with Newtons in dark or low-light conditions. It wasn’t until the MP130 that Apple got smart enough to include it.

But now? Sky’s the limit. Congrats, Frank!

“I think what I want is an instant-on Newton-like device in the Kindle form-factor but with a stylus and it only runs OneNote (but better than OneNote) and is also my iPhone. Or something like that. Yeah. That sounds about right…I imagine nobody has done it yet because the market demographic consists entirely of people who are legally insane.”

– Steven Frank, from his blog stevenf, on a dream machine/wiki that holds everything he knows.

How about that? An April Fool’s giveaway that’s not a joke.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog is giving away a Newton MessagePad 130:

If you want to join the chorus of Newton owners, here’s a unique opportunity: win a mostly-functional (delivered as-is) MessagePad 130 that has been sitting in a box in Mike Rose’s office for years now. The left side of the screen is wonky, but other than that it seems to be in working condition. Along with the MP130, you’ll get a leather Newton case, a Fodor’s 1994 Travel Guide card, a copy of the MessagePad 2000 manual, and a bonus: a copy of the 1996 World Wide Web Yellow Pages.

You have until Sunday, April 5 to enter to win.

Sadly, YouTube took the sound away from this Newton tribute video promoting WWNC 2009.

You can view a Quicktime version with sound on the WWNC page.

Did you notice Mr. Ballmer’s picture on there, at the end? It comes from my post about FSB a while back.

Everytime I see an “i” prefixing some word, I can’t help but think of how Apple created a naming convention that, to this day, continues to attract marketers and product designers. What began as the iMac turned into iMovie, iTunes, iPod, and eventually products ranging from that other iPhone to the iTrip and iToilet.

Now, with the iPhone, the “i” prefix continues to spread – this time to games and applications on the (get this) iTouch platform. We now have games like iDracula and apps like iBird Explorer Plus. It even extends to Mac apps like iStat Menus.

Apple is good at this kind of thing. If you think about it, Apple’s naming conventions go back as far as the “FirstNext” names for apps, like HyperCard and MacWrite, where the words are smooshed together with the second word retaining its capitalization. This naming convention has stuck all these years.

Like the ubiquitous “i” prefix, Newton product and app developers had their own prefix to work with: Newt. Just about everything that works with the Newton begins with “Newt” as a prefix.

There’s Newtris, the Tetris clone, or NewtTacToe. The web browser Newt’s Cape (say it fast for a variation of Netscape). Newtendo lets you emulate the Nintendo. Newtways let you connect peripherals. Stick “Newt” on the front of anything and you have a product for the Newton.

The prefix makes naming a product or application easy for the Newton. Take a bit of glue, glob it on the back of “Newt,” and attach it to whatever relates to the thing you want to promote. It’s easy because it doesn’t take much imagination or forethought. Like the “i,” you can throw it on anything and have a familiar-sounding yet brand-new product.

Some Newton developers used the “Newt” prefix in witty ways. Newt’s Cape is one of my favorites. Newtendo rolls of the tongue well.

But some are downright lazy. NewtGrocery? Really?

Thankfully, the “Newt” naming style didn’t last as long as the “i” prefix one has. We’re about 11 years and counting with that one, ever since Apple released the original iMac.

Maybe we could combine the two. iNewtToDo, anyone?

Riccardo Mori over at System Folder:

When your main system is capable of keeping multiple applications open, it’s easy to be distracted by incoming emails and updated RSS feeds. Not to mention the temptation to search the Web by following the spur of the moment — when that happens, the best case scenario is that I find myself two hours later digesting a lot of information I found following link after link, yet without doing anything really productive.

His solution? Write on a Mac Color Classic, or a Newton eMate 300 when away from home, to cut down on distractions.

“No browsers, no emails, no distractions: just me, my ideas, and the word processor,” Mori says.

It’s a brilliant (and, in a recession, cost-effective) solution to a problem a lot of us face every day. Why be productive when there’s another blog post to read? I’m working on my own, similar setup with my eMate 300.

Nice to see that Mori is getting something done on perfectly capable hardware.

There are a few iPhone apps available that attempt to mimick Newton features, such as an updated PocketMoney and a few sketching applications.

The one that recently got my attention was WritePad by Phatware. WritePad is a free download, and offers the one Newton feature that the iPhone has been lacking so far: handwriting recognition (HWR). WritePad also offers cut and paste, a feature iPhone and iPod Touch users won’t experience until the 3.0 release this summer.

But how does it work?

Before we get into that, it’s worth noting that WritePad is a trial application. Phatware wants to test HWR on the touchscreen and is looking for feedback from WritePad users. That feedback will help develop the PhatNotes app. Hence the free download. Phatware also uses WritePad’s HWR engine to power other iPhone apps, like WritePad Events and WritePad Notes.

It’s basically a word processing program that lets you make and edit text files on your iPhone. The app includes a lengthy tutorial on how to use WritePad’s myriad features, like Auto Correct and user-defined dictionaries. There’s a lot to read and digest.

To start with, the logistics of “handwriting” on Apple’s new touchscreens are difficult. With only a few square inches to work with, and a thicker-than-a-stylus finger, your results will definitely vary. Accuracy is limited by the size of your scribbling, the size of your fingertip, and your handwriting style. And unlike the Newton, the iPhone’s relatively small screen size limits the length of your scribbles. WritePad employs a unique solution to the small screen size: you can overlap your letters in individual words. But is that even practical?

iTouch Tips give a great demonstration of the many features, like gestures and HWR options, and I’d recommend reading their post before digging in with WritePad’s options.

Without messing with the options or the tutorials, I went ahead and gave WritePad a test drive. Here are a few examples.

Given short, one-word scribbles, WritePad does a fair-enough job. I made a conscious effort to write neatly and cleanly on my iPhone, and WritePad’s HWR did the job just fine.

Given groups of complicated words, however, WritePad starts to fall apart. It reminds me of Newton 1.x’s brand of HWR: effective at times, but not nearly as good as 2.x.

I made several attempts at writing “Egg Freckles” in WritePad, and none of the translations came up accurate. In fact, the text got more garbled the more I tried.

WritePad does offer a “learn your handwriting” option, where possible words pop up to match your own scribbles. And supposedly, after a while, WritePad will learn your handwriting style. So part of it is patience, and part of it is giving the system time to adapt.

The only problem is, your words-per-minute speed will be miserable using WritePad’s HWR. With the keyboard, it logically gets better. Maybe an iPhone stylus would improve things, but I imagine few iPhone users will bother with a stylus.

It’s too bad that WritePad’s HWR is limited to in-app use. I imagine developers could find some use for system-wide HWR using WritePad’s method, but HWR is probably one of those “background” features that Apple doesn’t allow.

The other feature WritePad offers is copy/cut/paste, and this is done fairly well.

Here I write “Paste” using WritePad’s HWR (again, it does well at translating simple words).

WritePad translates the word (above). To copy the text, tap twice and drag across the word to highlight it.

WritePad offers cut, copy, and paste buttons at the bottom of the screen. To cut my “Paste” word, I just tap on the little scissors icon. To paste, simple tap on the clipboard icon, and WritePad pastes the word as many times as you tap. Clean and easy.

With the buttons, WritePad’s style of copy and paste differs both from the Newton and the upcoming iPhone 3.0 way of doing things. I can’t say if it’s better or worse because you can only copy and paste within the app. When you’re in WritePad, the copy and paste buttons are an automatic part of the UI. They work as advertised.

I had hoped that WritePad could act as a Newton-like Notepad application for the iPhone. Since you can open and save text files within WritePad, you can accumulate a hefty amount of notes. The Newton Notepad offered easy ways to organize your notes, however, which is something WritePad lacks. With WritePad, you have a list of text files with no apparent folder or file system to organize your notes.

If you want an easy way to edit and write text files on your iPhone, WritePad is a fine enough word processor – assuming you use the keyboard. But any hope for using HWR in an iPhone app effectively, especially one that replicates the Newton, is dashed when you start to write longer-form words or sentences on the smaller iPhone screen. WritePad’s HWR doesn’t seem practical enough for extended use.

A WritePad app on a larger-form iPod Touch or tablet, however? The possibilities of Newton-like performance start to grow. And to be fair, WritePad is a simple testing application that provides Phatware with enough user testing to implement WritePad’s HWR engine into a new, improved suite of apps.

So we’ll see how it works out. In the meantime, WritePad offers a bit of Newton-like functionality with the HWR, and a preview of cut/copy/paste that we’ll see later this summer. And hey – it’s free, which helps.

Hats off to Ryan Vetter for getting the Newton Knowledge Wiki up and running, now with a new, easier-to-remember URL: newtonknowledge.info.

The list of how-to articles is growing. If you have some arcane, esoteric knowledge about the Newton platform, post a wiki article and help keep Newton knowledge alive.

Also, Newton Poetry reader Matej Horvat converted nine articles from the wiki into an eBook for the Newton. He says he’ll update the list every month or so to stay on top of updated wiki articles.

Long, long after we’re all dead, maybe all this information will get passed down to future Newton users who have to worry about some apocalyptic 3010 bug that keeps crashing their MesssagePad. Until then, contribute and help grow this great new online encyclopedia.