File system corruption, that is.
I boned my camera’s memory card this morning and lost 60 photos that I’d taken, including one of our house that I was going to e-mail to my sister and one really cool one of Lake Ontario that I took this morning on the train. I could only recover four of the older photos on it. Argh!
Last night was quite the adventure in networking. I played Mario Kart: Double Dash in LAN mode, with my friend Jon who lives about 200km away in London, Ontario. No, we don’t have a cable that long – we used some very cool software called Warp Pipe.
Warp Pipe was easy enough to setup, however the performance was lacking. On my end most of the games stuttered quite a bit. I guess this is the price to pay for putting your packets on the bit bad ‘net instead of keeping them safe on the LAN. Still I thought that the performance would be better.
Well I was browsing the forums over at the Warp Pipe and it seems like the problem might have been Norton Antivirus on my computer… I guess I’ll just have to try again.
Because I have old hardware, I need weird networking devices.
Anyone got this stuff kicking around? Let me know.
The Newton community is attracting a lot of attention in the media again. Since the upcoming World-Wide Newton Conference has attracted ex-Newton engineers as well as enthusiasts, and former Apple CEO John Sculley is the honorary president of the Worldwide Newton Association, we’re getting press in places like Wired and Slashdot, and hopefully a few other publications too.
I didn’t really write about this yet, but two weeks ago we got two Apple eMate 300s. They were quite a steal so I couldn’t pass them up. The eMate makes a great little word processing machine, and is quite usable with the memory upgrade. Sandy’s came with one already installed and I got one for mine shortly thereafter. It’s still an eye-catcher, when I pull it out on the train to tap out my thoughts I get lots of looks and sometimes a few stares.
The Stanford Newton User Group held it’s 10th anniversary meeting the other day! Without a doubt they are the longest-running NUG. Hats off to SNUG!
photo by Adam Tow
I’ve just released InPath, a Newton driver for the InPath MW-400 serial barcode scanner. It’s a cool little scanner that was made especially for PDAs, and now it will act just like a keyboard with this driver. Thanks to Daniel Padilla for helping me out with this.
A Vintage Palmtop Holds Users in Thrall (GIF Image, 1326×906 pixels) – article about the Newton with my photo in it from the March 27, 2003 edition of the New York Times. Thanks to Al Muniz for mailing me a copy of that paper!
In addition, Al says that the article was also reprinted in some other large US newspapers – I can’t remember which ones. So far, a total of zero people have recognized me on the street 🙂
A Vintage Palmtop Holds Users in Thrall – Ahh, more Newton publicity! Bring it on! Apparently yes, they did publish my photo but I haven’t gotten to pick up the paper yet today as I’m feeling somewhat under the weather and stayed home.
State Of The Newton Address
by Victor Rehorst (who is the “king of NewtonTalk”, but doesn’t need to be worshipped) victoratnewtontalk.net – http://www.chuma.org/
Today marks the five year anniversary of the cancellation of the Newton. Around this time in 2001, I wasn’t sure if the Newton and its followers would last the year: Palm and Pocket PC were making strong showings at the expense of the smaller PDA players such as Psion. It seemed like Newton software development was at a total standstill, with a small handful of exceptions. NewtonTalk was losing subscribers because of mismanagement at the hands of IdeaCast.
Today, some key developers have joined those few and created applications that we only dreamed of: MP3 players, ATA support, desktop synchronization, and TCP/IP and IR connectivity, to name a few. NewtonTalk has grown by 60% since June 2001. The Newton still gets positive press coverage from publications such as Wired and MacAddict. There’s been an explosion of Newton-based Websites. People want to use their Newtons and seem willing to do so through any means necessary. I believe that we are in the midst of the Newton’s renaissance, five years after it all seemed like the end was nigh.
In my opinion, the Newton platform is as healthy as a five-year-old platform can get. Used hardware is plentiful, mostly because the large number of units that were in the vertical market are now being liquidated. This drove prices on 2×00 models down from $400 US to $150 and below. Suddenly, people could purchase a PDA for less than a Palm or Win CE machine, and it had a huge screen and great battery life! This coupled with some press coverage and much evangelism by the community actually caused the number of personal Newton users to increase as business users decreased.
This influx of users has fueled many important software developments as well. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some, but here’s a short list of new software developments for the Newton that have come about since 2001:
SimpleMail 4.3 with APOP/SMTP authentication, IMAP and vCard support
WaveLAN 802.11b wireless network card driver
Newtourage, information syncing with Entourage 2001/X
NewtSync, information sync system with extensible plug-ins
DIL Tester, first desktop connection app to support TCP/IP connections
MAD Max, native MP3 player (with iTunes plugin)
Waba VM, bringing a whole new programming language to the Newton
many updates to NPDS, the Newton’s very own open source web server
Nitro, a free TinyTP / IrCOMM implementation
NaPalm, the forthcoming (we hope) PalmOS emulator
the Desktop Connection Library
Many of these pieces of software wouldn’t exist without the growth of the community in the past two years.
The Newton seems to attract a certain niche of supporters: people who have found things in the platform that haven’t been duplicated anywhere else. The screen size, the feeling of writing on paper, the intuitive OS, the unique system architecture, the dual PC Card slots even! We are people for whom Palms and PocketPCs are either flashy or underpowered. The Newton is still serving as an actually usable handheld computer five years after the last system was sold.
I’m rambling on now, and I’m way too tired to be writing this right now. So let me say this: the Newton is alive and well. It’s pretty rare for a user community to actually grow after the cancellation of a product line, but here we are, growing and extending our Newtons, and gaining more and more dedicated users. We eep on writing software, finding and making hardware fixes, and dreaming up new things to do with our Newtons. It’s just great. Of course, you all know that already. But maybe today, you should find someone who doesn’t, and show them how useful the Newton could be for them. How after five years, the Newton is still the most intelligent handheld computer.
