Free Mac OS X utility to set correct file type and creator for Newton package files. By default, any file with “.pkg” extension is associated with Mac OS X native installer. Now simply drop files or folders to Packager to associate all Newton packages with an application of your choice.

Today’s release updates it to a Universal Binary and has a couple nice additions, including the following tip:

Note that Packager works with NCX (which i just discovered) too if you set “Newton Connection Utility” in preferences.

[Via NewtonTalk]

Paul Guyot to the NewtonTalk mailing list:

I’m pleased to announced that ATA Support can now be downloaded in a
free, unlocked version[…] The source code is also available.

Paul is a recently-retired master Newton developer and these ATA drivers are the last bit of software he had written which hadn’t been open sourced.

A deep bow to you, Paul.

After posting yesterday morning’s State of the Newton in 10 Years Ago Today, I asked my fellow NewtonTalk members if there was anything glaringly obvious that I had missed. It was pointed out that I had somehow completely missed all the hardware folks.

BT-001 Bluetooth Module

Let me begin a new-ish development.

Approximately twenty days ago I approached Jake Bordens regarding his cancelled BT-001 project to create an internal Bluetooth module for the MessagePad 2100. He had ceased further development due to issues with the antenna design only being able to sustain mediocre/poor signal ranges with the Newton’s case off and failing completely when reassembled.

He was very open to letting others use and improve his design and offered to open source it. So, on February 8th, he released the Eagle PCB files under an MIT license and they can be found on his BT-001 page.

I have yet to test these files and am not likely to be building any PCBs myself, but hopefully this will give other bright Newton hardware people a head start in completing a built-in Bluetooth module.

The Hardware Guys (and Gals)

As a segue from the BT-001, Adriano Angelilis sells Pico Card Bluetooth cards (of which I’ve purchased one) as well as his own custom hardware on his Notwen site. He has numerous creations, including: a USB charging cable, PlainTalk and Bluetooth audio adapters, an serial-powered LED light, an iPod connection cable, and a USB dongle ; all of which are still fabricated one at a time.

Although quite controversial amongst the NewtonTalk members due to his propensity to reverse engineer for initial designs and what some feel are exuberant prices, KnowledgeNavigator of Newton Sales is at least keeping the hardware modifications available, including: an internal serial module, replacement backlights, and speed boost implants. More recently he has been working on a USB Dock Prototype based on the FreeDock.

The guys aren’t the only ones having fun with hardware. Although Stephanie Maksylewich discontinued her Newton use in 2005, she had a number of hardware hacks including homebrew overclocking instructions for the MessagePad 2100 and eMate 300. Definitely not for the feint hearted.

How Many Words Again?

Others yet are helping to preserve the Newton not only with soldering iron in hand, but camera as well. Sonny Hung is one of those who’s flickr photosets include everything from the tools that [he uses] when repairing Newtons, to Newton-related brochures, posters & ads, and magazine covers, to clear case models, EVTs & DVTs, and even the final MessagePad 2000 blueprints.

There’s a lot more there than I can even list here, but you get the picture (pun fully intended): he’s a veritable Newton archeologist.

For an ever decreasing number of us, today is an important day: ten years ago Apple discontinued the Newton.

Deprecated

Officially, this was done, “to focus all of [their] software development resources on extending the Macintosh operating system.” Many Newton users feel this was part of Steve Jobs’ personal vendetta against John Sculley for firing him from Apple (after all, the Newton was Sculley’s baby).

However, few can claim that Jobs’ return to Apple and focus on the Mac & Mac OS (plus a few new developments) has done anything but good for the company and its product line. In fact,
Apple’s latest developments such as the iPhone & iPod touch have brought us significantly closer to a modern Newton-like¹ device.

State of the Newton

Five years ago Slashdot posted Five Years Later, Newton Still Going Strong, noting some of the projects keeping the Newton going strong, so let’s look at where the Newton is right now.

First, last year’s WWNC 2007 brought us quite a few new developments, including: open-sourcing of Einstein (the Newton OS 2.1 emulator), the release of DyneTK (open source Newton development tools), and the open-sourcing of Hiroshi Noguchi’s WaveLAN drivers. We also have Simon Bell’s NCX (Newton Connection for Mac OS X), Eckhart Köppen’s Blunt Bluetooth drivers (and work continues on Blunt 2) and various GTD tools.

It’s not all about software though. Frank Gründel of PDA Soft, who has provided much hardware troubleshooting and repair documentation, solved another increasingly common MessagePad 2×00 hardware failure issue back in April of 2006. Indiana Jones, Raiders of the lost Newton defect is his entertaining post to NewtonTalk describing his trials and tribulations.

While UNNA is currently in hibernation, it’s still alive. The NewtonTalk community is still quite active with new users occasionally joining after finding their beloved Newton in a drawer and discovering that it’s still functional preserved all their data.

The Clock Is Ticking

While we’re still going strong at the moment, we all know that we’re a dying breed.

We’ve seen one of our most talented developers, Paul Guyot, step down from his Newton developments due to new employment and, well, he’s probably ready to move on by now.

We’ve also got this nagging feeling that 2010 may pose a problem for our Newtons. Avi Drissman provided a fix, Fix2010, back in 1998, but it’s still only had limited testing.

Facing Future

All in all, I’d say we’re not doing too badly for users a ten year old piece of hardware (and that’s only those of us that are using MessagePad 2100s, many people still use eMates, 2000s, and earlier models). So here’s looking forward to the next ten years!

[ Reminder via stevenf ]

Update: Some additions to this list, including a new announcement regarding the BT-001, can be found in my followup: State of the Newton Addendum.

¹ I say “Newton-like” because the handwriting recognition is such an important part of the Newton experience. Some of the base functionality is similar and the gesture functionality goes a long way, but the HWR is a big piece of the Newton puzzle.

Thomas Brand is at it again! This time he’s announced NewtonTips, a feed of Newton-related tips powered by Twitter. Complete with Mac OS X Dashboard Widget and all.

Now I have to admit, while I’m happy to see more Newton content flowing, I was quite surprised by its delivery: Twitter. I use it every day, I was on the fence about initially using it, and plenty of people use it as a news delivery medium, but I hadn’t thought of using it as your sole publishing platform. You essentially get free hosting & delivery of a few sentences worth of content via RSS and Twitter (so potentially web, AIM/Gmail instant messaging services, mobile SMS, and email).

More props to Thomas!

(And, yes, the title of this post is a bit of a shout-out to Dan Padilla’s now-silent Newton Dose blog.)

Thomas Brand has updated [his] Newton Blog to even further emulate the Newton OS 2.1 experience by applying the Apple Casual font to his Tweets section.

This is a twofold implementation so as to support as many browsers as possible, using sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) and CSS2’s @font-face (see A List Apart’s CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing for further details).

Many thanks to Thomas for implementing the latter after a brief chat via Twitter!

Nullriver’s always been quick to support upgrades to Connect360 whenever Microsoft releases an update to the Xbox 360 Dashboard, and this time is no exception. On Tuesday, they released the Fall 2007 Dashboard Update, yesterday I touched on my initial impressions of said update, and sometime thereafter Nullriver released Connect360 3.2.

Versions 3.2 is a small¹ update in that it simply adds support for streaming XVID/DIVX video (in AVI containers) to an Xbox 360 running the Fall 2007 Dashboard Update. I upgraded this morning and was immediately able to stream the GUIdebook Gallery’s archive of the Welcome to Newton video (which is XViD in an AVI container) to my Xbox 260.

I do now have a layout issue in the Connect360 preference pane, but it’s merely and annoyance and it’ll probably be fixed easily enough.

On a related note, I highly suggest those that want to play various media formats such as XViD/DIVX in QuickTime on Mac OS X go and grab a copy of Perian. ‘Nuff said!

Update: The “layout issue” I described above turns out to be a difference in the size of the System Preferences window in Leopard from Tiger. Nullriver is currently suggesting upgrading to Leopard to fix this annoyance.

¹ I say “small” only because with the Spring 2007 Dashboard Update, Microsoft managed to cause Connect360 to fail and so Nullriver had much more work cut out for them.

I frequently find myself whipping out my Newton MessagePad 2100, it’s mini-DIN-8-to-Interconnect dongle, and DB-9-to-mini-DIN-8 cable for quick administration of various routers, firewalls, and switches via their console ports using the excellent PT100 terminal emulation software. Last night I was faced with an interesting new hurdle while using this toolset to configure a new-to-me Intel Express 530T switch: how does one use keys that don’t exist on the Newton’s software keyboard—such as ctrl, esc, and the up/down arrows—without plugging in a Newton keyboard? Most of the devices I have dealt with have been strictly command line interfaces so I had not yet run into this issue.

I don’t currently own a Newton keyboard, but even if I did I would have been stuck needing to buy an internal serial port module such as the now-discontinued SER-001. That wouldn’t have been a quick solution. There might be some software that hacks the Newton OS’s software keyboard to add the additional keys, but how much time would I have spent trying to find it and probably failing?

However, the Newton’s built-in Dock¹ application offers a “Keyboard” mode wherein a desktop/laptop computer’s keyboard can be used to type on the Newton’s screen. I’ve got a Mac Color Classic that I could have set up to do this, but still would have required a that second serial port.

Fortunately, my Newton is fully equipped with a TCP/IP stack, WiFi drivers, a Melco/Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11GP 802.11b WiFi card, and the Dock TCP/IP extension for use with Simon Bell’s excellent NCX. By connecting my Newton to NCX on my MacBook Pro via WiFi I was able to simply click “Use keyboard²“ and start typing into PT100 which was running the terminal session to my new Express 530T switch.

Here you can see it all up and running on my livingroom floor during said configuration process:

While this was a quick and easy solution for me it’s really because I had already put all the work into getting it wireless. The Mac OS X side is easy (just download and run NCX), but it takes quite a bit more configuration to get the Newton side of things up and running. At this point, I’ll step aside and point those who might want to do this sort of thing in the direction of WikiWikiNewt’s Ethernet & WiFi pages as well as Mark Hoekstra’s excellent article on getting your eMate wireless (after all, he knows that the is an excellent terminal).

¹ Not to be mistaken with the button bar which looks like Mac OS X’s Dock.

² Currently it’s advised to click “Use Keyboard” from within NCX on Mac OS X as opposed to “Keyboard” in the Dock application on the Newton as you’ll get a connection error if you do the latter.

John Gruber has gone and posted a discourse on bringing copy & paste functionality to the iPhone. In response to his article, I’d like to describe what I feel another good, Newton-inspired solution would be.

I’ve unfortunately only played with the iPhone little more than a dozen times, but I know the gestures pretty well thanks to Apple’s effort to make it quite intuitive. I also use my Newton MessagePad 2100 all day, every day, and so I’ve got it’s myriad of gestures down well. First, a description of how copy & paste and text selection works on the Newton OS 2.1.

The Newton Way

To select text or items:

1. Tap-and-hold-for-two-seconds with the stylus to enter selection mode.
2. While in selection mode, you draw a thick (think well-worn sharpie) selection line through or around the item(s)/text you want to select.
3. When you lift the stylus it selects whatever item(s)/text you just struck-through/surrounded.

To cut selected text or items:

1. Tap-and-drag the selected item(s)/text to any edge of the screen.
2. A snippet of the text, image, or what-have-you will stay there, right where you left it, until you copy or paste it somewhere or you cut/copy something else.[1]

Copying works the same way as cutting except that one tap-tap-and-drags instead of merely tap-and-dragging.

Pasting is easy as:

1. Tap-and-drag the snippet of the selected item(s)/text to the point where you want them it (the caret will follow the tip of your stylus).

The Proposed iPhone Way

What I propose would allow copy and paste for what I’ll call “power users” because, let’s face it, the iPhone is designed for people to not need copy and paste (as John describes as the basis for his analogy to the arrow-keyless original Macintosh keyboard).

To select text:

1. Tap-and-hold-for-one-second to get the magnifying lens and place the caret (as is already implemented) and let go to make it stick.
2. Then tap-tap-and-hold-for-one-second to bring up the magnifying lens again, but this time to make your contiguous selection and then let go to make it stick.

To copy text:

1. Tap-tap-and-drag the selected text up to the status bar at the top of the screen (it’s always there).
2. Either a snippet of the text selected hovers up there (or maybe an icon, something like the text clipping icon, instead), until you copy or paste it somewhere or you copy something else.

To paste text:

1. Tap-tap-and-drag the text snippet (or text snippet icon) from the status bar area to where you want to place it. It should automatically go into the magnifying lens mode and paste it at the caret when you let go.

Now, what about cut? Well, honestly, I wouldn’t want to try to implement or make anyone use tap-tap-tap-and-drag or some nonsense like that, but the on-screen keyboard is always there when in a text editing application, so one could always hit delete/backspace. After all, the important functionalities are the copy and paste.

That main inspirations taken from the Newton OS is the tap-tap-and-drag as tap-and-drag is already used for all scrolling on the iPhone, as well as dragging the selection snippet to the status bar. The reason for the latter is that there is only one thing other than the home button (which is hardware) that exists on every screen and in the same place at all times: the status bar.

Tactile Memory Benefits

Now, this may seem hard to believe, but tap-tap-and-drag-to-the-status-bar really is a single gesture (as is tap-tap-and-drag-from-the-status-bar). The extra tap is essentially free because it’s at the same location as the initial tap and the drag finishes it off in one fluid motion. In fact you can probably just glide your finger right off the top of the screen and the iPhone would recognize that as you having dropped the selection on the status bar.

Even text selection is only two, albeit easy, gestures: tap-and-hold-for-one-second and tap-tap-and-hold-for-one second. Of course, the single second of holding doesn’t really count either because it’s up before the user really has to think about it and then they are immediately in the magnification lens mode.

Part of the reason to go with single gestures like this is the tactile memory benefits that you get from it. Having to click a copy/paste button on the keyboard (even on a window that pops up as suggested here) would pull the user out of the flow of their editing thought process and into more of a hunt-and-peck thought process. It would drastically interrupt their editing process at every single copy and paste.

This is all just my take on it, but it seems pretty natural to me.

Update: Fitt’s Law says that my suggested copy operation (although not the select & paste operations) will be faster because the selected text will likely be a somewhat larger target and the destination for the gesture (i.e. the top of the screen) is a damn easy target to hit.

Of course, the selection and paste operations require more concentration and work on the user’s part as placing the caret at it’s target location is trying to hit a very specific and small target. However, Apple’s made it a little easier by providing the magnification lens feature and it’s something that takes a lot more thought from the user anyway: “Where do I want to start my selection?”, “Where do I want to end my selection?”, “Where do I want to paste this text in?” All those require enough thought that most users wouldn’t worry as much about the speed of the operation as they will the content.

The action of putting the data into and taking it out of the clipboard is the action that needs to be, and is, most optimized.

¹ There are, of course, utilities that will turn on multiple clipboards, but that’s beside the point.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sliming down the “stuff” in my life recently—for years, actually—and after having included some photos in the The Items We Carry flickr pool I decided I should start with the crap in my pockets.

I carry a wallet, keys, a pager for work, my cell phone, and my Newton MessagePad 2100 at all times and the most important things are really my Newton (which usually has atleast one PCMCIA slot free), my keys, and my IDs & credit card. I had remembered seeing a fake PCMCIA card years ago and was finally able to craft the correct google search terms to track it down: the Stash Card.

With such a product I could easily toss a few bucks and two keys (house & car) into it and carry just my Newton. I’d still have to figure something out for my IDs, but that wouldn’t be too bad. Since it was just under $8 (including shipping), I figured it was a worth a shot.

It came in on Monday and I immediately removed it from the packaging, opened it to see how much storage space it has (not much, but that’s what I was assuming), and then inserted it into the free PCMCIA slot in my Newton once it was closed tightly. However, upon trying to eject it, I discovered that it was completely stuck. I’m well aware that the Newtons were designed with very slim tolerances, but this was just too tight for even that to be the case.

So, after loosening the rear housing of my Newton I was able to safely extract the Stash Card with the assistance of a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Oddly, the Stash Card has two nubs/protrusions on either side that appear to be designed to cause friction to hold the card into a PCMCIA slot. I believe I could shave them off and it might help, but it’d still be too tight a fit.

My MacBook Pro has Express/34 slots not PCMCIA/CardBus slots, so I can’t test it there, but it does looks like it would fit better in a laptop (especially one with motorized eject mechanisms) than in the Newton, but I definitely would not suggest anyone buy the Stash Card for use in any Newton.

If anyone wants my Stash Card, you can have it for $6 (including shipping within the 48 contiguous States) and give it a try in a laptop.

I was not fortunate enough to make it to this year’s WWNC in Tokyo, Japan, but the announcements to the NewtonTalk mailing list this morning blew me away. The entire Newton community will benefit greatly from the work that everyone put into their projects this year, so those of us unable to make the trek to Japan need not have worried that they’d miss out at all!

So, on with the announcements:

Open Einstein

I knew that Paul Guyot had been working on Einstein lately, but I had no idea what he had up his sleeves!

Today he announced that the Einstein source code has been released under the GNU GPL and the project will be known as Open Einstein henceforth. Slides of his presentantion and the Mac OS X binaries of Open Einstein are immediately available.

New features in this release include:

In particular, an important investment was made by rewriting the emulator part (the JIT module) to support PC-independent rewriting and decrease the memory footprint, which was the first step towards machine-specific recompilation. In other words, while the speed has not spectacularly increased, the heavy work done these past weeks allowed me to design a new experimental module where NewtonOS instructions are executed natively on ARM PDAs.

He also notes that:

Within two days, Matthias Melcher and I got a working Cygwin/X11 port running on Tablet PCs (this was on Saturday) and a working Cygwin/Native GUI (with FLTK) port running the next day. The Cygwin/X11 patches have been committed to the subversion repository (this might be a little bit tricky for I do not have any box to check the compilation works fine), and I believe that Matthias will be able to produce a version compiled with Visual C++ soon.

So those of you running Windows will likely have native Open Einstein binaries in the not too distant future.

DyneTK

I have also been peeking at Matthias Melcher’s DyneTK cross-platform, open-source replacement for the original NTK in the hopes of using it and Einstein to do a little Newton development on Mac OS X. He put on a presentation regarding DyneTK and also announced his excitement at the prospects that this year’s other announcements bring to the table with a call for Newton developers to dig out their old projects:

The WWNC was very exciting! NewtonScript, the abandon child, all of a sudden starts to live a second life! I call for all former Newton developers to find their old NTK project files on that old 1GB hard-disk or 40MB IOMega cartridge and bring them online, either via Unna, your own page, or EMail them to me and I will create a section on Robowerk.com

He also noted in a separate announcement that the latest Mac OS X binaries of DyneTK were made available this morning and other platforms’ will follow, “within an hour.”

WaveLAN Drivers

I’ve not figured out if this is actually related to WWNC or not, but Matthias also noted that Hiroshi Noguchi has released the source code to his Newton WaveLAN drivers!

This is huge news as he closed the registration to this driver (which was the sole support for WiFi cards in the Newton) back in December of 2005. I was fortunate enough to have registered it before that date, but others have been stuck without the ability to use WEP-encrypted networks as that functionality required registration after 30 days.

However, that should all change now and hopefully new features and bug fixes will be introduced by others.

I, and many others, tried contacting him on numerous occasions in the hopes of getting him to re-open registration, let us purchase the source code, or get him to open the source code. I’m ecstatic that he did the latter!

Summary

Paul also provided a summary of the developments from WWNC 2007, as follows:

Japanese hardware specialist Ken Shimoda (Shimoken) demonstrated various hardware repair including an explanation of the jaggies problem and a fix using a special cleaning pen. German developer Matthias Melcher demonstrated the latest version of DyneTK, an open source and cross-platform NTK (Newton Toolkit) replacement. Except for a bug that was quickly fixed during the coneference and the ability to cope with projects involving native code, I believe this is almost feature-complete and extremely good news.

On day Two, Japanese developer Makoto Nukui (GNUE) described what he calls the Newton DNA that lives in several project. But the biggest news was his demonstration of a cross-platform graphical toolkit (like Qt) that allow one to build NewtonScript-based applications running on MacOS X, GTK, Hildon (Nokia Internet Tablets) and of course the Newton.

Check out the conference programme to see the order of events. Paul commented that additional links to the slides and videos will likely be posted there soon.

Other Developments

Of course, this year has also seen great developments such as Simon Bell’s NCX (which I’ve mentioned before) which provides much improved desktop connectivity for Mac OS X.

Eckhart Köppen hasn’t been just sitting around either. He released Flashpoint, a task & project organization application for those who try to follow the Getting Things Done methodologies. As of late he’s also been attempting to get C++ compiling for Newton working correctly, but has been unsuccessful so far. Atleast he’s still attacking this major issue.

Here’s looking forward to another year of Newton developments!

Update: Paul mentioned he had forgotten the following in his summary (see above) of day two:

[T]he Conference Chair, Hiroyuki Saiki (Sai) presented how he is posting drawings made on his Newton on his website: http://26inch.net/

We also had several workshops where Newton users were able to exchange information and techniques. The Japanese community gathered there actually discovered Simon Bell’s NCX!

And also pointed us in the direction of the first photos from WWNC 2007

Today’s the day everybody’s been waiting for! Yup, we’re little more that twelve hours away from the release of Apple’s new iPhone! Some are queueing up for them already, some will be ordering online, and others yet are prepping to rejoice over the impending flop.

I highly doubt the iPhone will be a flop. Yes, I love Apple’s products (a lot) and, honestly, I’ve been loving them more and more recently, even with the occasional intentional limitations that Apple builds in so that they “just work” (which the iPhone seems will have many). The more things “just work” the easier my life is and the iPhone looks to be one of those things that “just works”.

Oh, and yes, I’ve been reading all the articles, all the FAQs, and watching all the videos (these ones as well), and generally drooling over the iPhone. It looks beautiful, functional, and, most importantly, extremely intuitive.

I want one! Hell, everyone I know wants one.

I Live in the Boonies

Unfortunately, while everyone else is trying to get out of their cell phone contracts so they can get an iPhone, I can’t get one. At all. Trust me, I’ve tried to figure out a reasonable way.

You see, I live in the beautiful state of Vermont and while AT&T, which has an exclusive on the iPhone, covers most of our state, they only do so by partnering with existing in-state GSM carriers (e.g. Unicel). If you go to their Coverage Viewer and enter “VT” for the state (no other address data required), you’ll see what I mean.

Then zoom out a little and look at the surrounding states. Hmm, we’ve probably got a better coverage percentage than Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania¹, in general, but they’ve all got that deep-orange color in them (meaning they have a true AT&T network). We don’t.

That’s okay, I can always go buy it out-of-state and just “move” back home and keep using it, right? Well, unfortunately, as a couple of my coworkers have found out, they cancel your contract after a few months because you’re always roaming. Oh, right, “mov[ing] to the boonies” was one of the ways to try to get out of your contract for just that reason.

But I don’t want to get out of my contract, I want to keep it and use the iPhone. But, it wouldn’t be so bad if I lost my contract right? I mean I could still use iPhone as the coolest iPod ever and an awesome portable browser, right? Oh right, that was in David Pogue’s FAQ:

Do I need an AT&T account? Yes. The iPhone won’t work at all without a two-year AT&T voice-plus-Internet plan (and no, you can’t use it as just an iPod, no matter how tempting the bigger screen and longer battery life is).

Now, he doesn’t specifically say what happens when your contract expires (forcibly or naturally), but trying and finding out doesn’t exactly seem to fall in the “reasonable” category for me.

Ooh, but I could just get a Unicel contract & phone (as much as their pricing sucks) and pop the SIM card into my iPhone, right? Actually, I didn’t even think that one would work, and it won’t. Sure, eventually someone may figure out a way to unlock the iPhone, but it’s risky, the setup isn’t going to be smooth, I’ll lose visual voicemail, probably the EDGE support (as slow as it may be), and it’s going to cost me a lot more to set up and use. Nope, that doesn’t qualify as “reasonable” at all.

Uh oh, this doesn’t bode well for me, nor the rest of Vermont’s residents. Well that’s definitely disappointing, and Don agrees, as well².

I guess I’ll just have to wait until AT&T comes to Vermont. Hopefully it’ll be a shorter wait than that of our friends to the North or those over in Europe.

Always Look On the Bright Side of Life

However, today’s a day I’ve been looking forward to for the release of another Steve Jobs-related (in a way) masterpiece anyway! Pixar’s Ratatouille is opening today!

Honestly, I would have had a hard time deciding which to wait in line for… an iPhone or Ratatouille, Ratatouille or an iPhone. You can bet I’ll be in line for Ratatouille at the Palace 9 tonight!

However, all is not lost, the truth is I wasn’t quite ready to try to give up my Newton MessagePad anyway. I would have missed having my financial software, to-do lists, and notes with me wherever I go. Of course, I could find web-based alternatives to most of these functions, such as Remember the Milk, stikkit, or the iPhone-intended OneTrip. I’d also have missed being able to use my cell phone to get online with my MacBook Pro in a jam, that also won’t be a feature of the iPhone.

However, not having to cary my pager, my cell phone, my MacBook Pro, and my Newton around with my all the time would have been nice on my back. And yes, I’d still have been able to access servers in an emergency thanks to the iPhone’s VPN support and a dedicated server running AjaxTerm, but I’ll live. C’est la vie.

¹ Granted, they’re all much larger states and said coverage map is a poor estimation.

² Although the article states that Vermont is the only state without any AT&T coverage, I have a feeling that Montana and the Dakotas may be in the same boat.

Earlier this week, Simon Bell announced the version 1.1 release of his Newton Connection for Mac OS X app on the NewtonTalk mailing list.

Honestly, I haven’t gotten a chance to test it yet, but I have upgraded. Among the fixes in this release are, as Simon says, “Works Import/Export and a host of other fixes too numerous to mention.”

One important update that’s not listed in his initial announcement email, but is mentioned in various replies and in the included ReadMe.pdf file, is that NCX is now a standalone application. This means that all the required frameworks (including his custom Newton framework, mentioned briefly in my previous coverage of NCX) are now contained within the application itself¹ and so NCX can be installed to, or run from, any location.

As a Mac OS X admin, I find this a great bonus as it now can be easily installed in ~/Applications instead of /Applications and so not requiring administrator account to install.

Versions 1.1 is still missing the sync features, which is probably the most requested feature these days, but as the application already fills such a much needed hole in the Mac OS X/Newton world he deserves accolades all around.

As I’ve mentioned before, he’s done an excellent job being true to the original Newton Connection utility’s form and function but still making it feel like a Mac OS X application.

¹ Hopefully my offering the link to Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzch’s excellent Embedded Cocoa Frameworks screencast was helpful in this area. Anyone else looking to do this kind of thing should really check it out.

On Monday, Victor Rehorst, list-dad for the NewtonTalk mailing list and founder of the United Network of Newton Archives announced that Grant Hutchinson would be taking over the roll of list-dad, ”... very very soon.” While he was at it, Victor stated that “Someone needs to take unna.org, now.”

After a few minutes, when the shock that Victor would be leaving his long-held posts had turned into an understanding that, after all, he’s been doing this for quite a long time and no longer actively uses his Newtons¹, I also came to the realization that I was highly interested in taking over UNNA personally. I took half the day to consider my other personal projects, time, resources, etc., and found myself thinking, “This needs to be done, and if I’m going to do it I need to act fast.” So I bit the bullet and notified Victor of my interest.

After a few days of discussions with other interested parties as well as me, he made his decision and handed the keys over to me. Forty-eight hours later and vermont.unna.org site is up and running on my Xserve, I’m considering where the main site will permanently reside, and am planning to fully migrate the DNS over sometime today. So, it’s official.

Of course, all this has come during some busy times at Small Dog and when I should really be paying my taxes, but it’s more than a worthy task. I still have mirrors.unna.org to get up and running, but I’ll easily beat the hard deadline of April 2nd once I get ahold of the data-set.

After that? I’ve got plans, but it’s too soon to even think about them. In the meantime, please be gentle with UNNA during the transition period.

In closing, I’m sure everyone will join me in thanking Victor for all his hard work and support over the past years. To quote Maurice in Waking Ned Devine: “You’ll be missed. You’ve done well.”

¹ He’s a PepperPad kind of guy now.

Update: Wow, I’m really kicking myself right now!
The following is a rough post that I wrote on January 7th, but held of posting for a little spit and polish. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to clean it up last night (I was planning to do it somewhat Chandan-style and actually provide a little description of the technology behind it, including comparisons between iChat & Starfire). Well, with Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iPhone — which, honestly, I was extremely skeptical about — you can really see why I should really have just made it live. Doh!

For the past week, every time a coworker has asked what I’m hoping for most at MacWorld, they always look down at my hand with the Newton MessagePad 2100 in it and just chuckle and say, “Oh, a Mac tablet!” Well, duh! Er, I mean, naturally.

However, when OWC’s ModBook was brought up on NewtonTalk I couldn’t help but think, “Flop.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still requesting that my coworkers take some pictures of it while they’re at MacWorld next week, but I have to agree completely with Steven Frank — Well, almost completely, I might be the only person in the world that wants a Mac tablet more than him — that there really just isn’t a big enough Market for one and surely running Mac OS X with some tweaks to make it function better for pen input is not the right solution. Especially when it’s not even Apple implementing it. Nothing against OWC and Axiotron — in fact, I wish them the best in this endeavor and a hope it’s a great product — but this seems like a fairly risky business venture for them to try to undertake, esp. considering the cost of repackaging MacBooks (they’re not exactly cheap, even for bulk orders) and the consumer is left to hope that: 1) OWC/Axiotron can make additions to Mac OS X to allow better control using only a Wacom tablet, and 2) that they can keep up with Apple’s changes.

There’s a reason I still use my Newton every day and have not switched to a Palm or just carrying my MacBook Pro around with me everywhere: the Newton OS. There’s a reason that Paul Guyot has put so much work into bringing it to other hardware platforms with his Einstein Newton emulator: the Newton OS. Starting to see a pattern here? A PDA/tablet computer just isn’t useful if you try to “strip-down” a desktop computer OS in an attempt to shoehorn it into such a device. Apple’s Newton team and Palm’s teams did excellent work designing the OS to go along with their devices and work for the type of usage such a device gets.

As much as I love Mac OS X, I do have to completely agree with Steven Frank on this one:

Here is a handy trick you can apply to any rumor to determine its validity: Does the rumor contain the phrase “stripped-down version of Mac OS X”? If so, the rumor is almost certainly false.

Even Mac OS X would not easily be “stripped-down” to work on an embedded device or a PDA/tablet. The User Interface has been heavily optimized for desktop use. Sure, one could easily get a slimmed down version of Darwin running on the hardware, but that says nothing about the windowing & UI layers that Apple has built-up ontop of it.

I don’t think that a real tablet computer will have a large enough potential user base to be a profitable product until multi-touch displays are available in a tablet-size device so that on-screen keyboards are a viable option when large amounts of text input are required.

I’d guess that a Mac (or other) tablet would really have to be a device not too much thicker than the base of a MacBook or MacBook Pro (not including the display), a multi-touch sensitive display (which, incidentally, must also have a very wide vertical viewing angle), and a modernized OS similar to the Newton OS. This is a significant amount of development for a product category that would likely have a much smaller user base than even a single laptop model.

Simon Bell, developer of some excellent Newton software such as Mail V, has released a pre-beta of his previously-unannounced Newton Connection for Mac OS X software (or “NCX”, for short). It’s basically the Mac OS X functional (and visual, although modernized) equivalent of Apple’s Newton Connection Utilities which ran on Mac OS 9.x and earlier.

It appears that it’s built on the Desktop Connection Library (now hosted on SourceForge), but I’m sure Simon has included plenty of extra glue and shims, esp. considering he’s planning on using Mac OS X’s built-in Sync Services.

From my initial testing using my Newton MessagePad 2100, Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11GP WiFi card, and my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo), it seems to be slightly more stable than DCL & Escale, but some of the instability may be due to the fact that neither NCX or DCL/Escale is Universal yet.

What works:

• Installing a package from the MacBook Pro
• Using the MacBook Pro as a keyboard

What doesn’t work:

• Synchronization (I didn’t bother testing it, since Simon says)
• Backup (It fails every time I try¹, but some have gotten it to work)

What’s untested:

• Restore²
• Import³
• Export³

I’ve had constant problems with my connection being lost between the Dock app on the Newton and Escale and not being able to get Escale to respond for long periods of time (15 minutes or more) after relaunching it, often having to resort to a reboot (my guess is the socket was being kept open even after the crash). I have not seen this problem with NCX, so I’m very happy about that.

The interface is beautiful—an excellent job modernizing the Desktop Connection Utilities icons and interface—and functions better than Escale.

It has now already replaced Escale on my system and I can’t wait to see the future updates.

Update: A fellow NewtonTalk-er provided the solution to my issues getting the backup functionality to work: although the “Documents” folder is selected as the default backup location, you need to select a destination (or reselect “Documents”) for it to function. After doing so I was able to initiate and complete a full backup from NCX, but it still seems to fail when trying to initiate the backup from the Newton.

Update #2: Simon e-mailed me, as well as the list, to inform us that he did not, in fact, use the DCL. He wrote his own custom libraries to do this, so mad props to him! I was definitely wrong on that guess.

¹ Of course, I was attempting to back up all packages, so it may have been conflicting with NIE or Hiroshi’s WaveLAN Drivers. I really need to do some additional testing. Update: I’ve gotten backups to work when initiated from NCX.

² Obviously, since I couldn’t do a backup I’m not really able to test the restore functionality. This is my day-to-day Newton, so I’m not about to test the restore functionality on it yet anyway.

³ I just haven’t had time to do this yet, partly because it’s a lower priority as I currently use BlueTooth (with a Pico card & Blunt) to transfer files between my Newton and MacBook Pro.

J. Tyler Nichols recently discussed his plans to develop a Newton Press (the not-entirely-stable-or-exactly-adhering-to-standards application used to create books for the Newton OS) replacement on the NewtonTalk mailing list. Today he’s announced that the web site is live, so Newton X Press has officially been announced to the world.

He’s also got a screenshot up, and it appears he’s making quite a bit of progress.

This is one application that I’d really like to keep my MessagePad 2100 in use.

Update: Updated the URL as the site has moved.

Thanks to a post by Giulio on the NewtonTalk mailing list, my Newton MessagePad 2100 with Blunt and a Pico Card is entirely stable. Transferring notes from the Newton to my MacBook Pro has been extremely fast and very reliable (although you can only send one note at a time).

The solution: Freeze SysPatch 0.6b.

Either I, or somebody else on the list, will investigate to see if it’s any of SysPatch’s particular features that causes the restarts or if the package is just incompatible.

Happiness. :D

I don’t receive packages from overseas very often, so I’m not as good at estimating shipping times as well as Adriano obviously is… my Pico Card arrived today. I don’t think the timing could have been any better! (Is it odd that the first thing that comes to mind to say is, “Happy, happy, joy, joy!”? Ren & Stimpy has stained my generation.)

Following the BlueTooth setup instructions over at WikiWikiNewt, at Adriano’s suggestion (plus it’s just a really good resource for most things Newton), I was quickly on my way to having BlueTooth configured on my Newton. However, before I do my quick explanation of how it went, let me just say these two things: this is the buggiest thing I’ve ever tried to do with my Newton MessagePad 2100; and Escale (part of DCL) works just fine on the Intel Macs (this tested it on my MacBook Pro).

After downloading and installing¹ Blunt and the prerequisite packages, I started trying to configure it. Configuration is pretty straightforward, but I experienced a few crashes here and there (some to my not paying attention to which was the English and which was the German package, but others related to trying to “Get Services”). I’m not talking hard freezes, I’m talking spontaneous reboots.

Discovering, pairing, getting services, and sending files via BlueTooth OBEX is all pretty straight forward both on the Newton OS side and the Mac OS X side, but my success rate is about 0.75 notes sent per reboot. Basically, I can send one to two notes before my Newton reboots during one BlueTooth process or another. Unfortunately, the reason that the ratio is less than one at this point is that it often needs me to “Get Services” again, which has about a 50-50 chance of a reboot. :\

Buggiest thing I’ve ever done on my Newton? Yes, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful. The notes I’ve been able to transfer are ones I’ve been unable to transfer via Mail V (too large?) or even sync with nSync. With that in mind, I’d definitely say this has been successful.

Also worth noting, I may try to keep my Newton’s internal storage clean (and I do have about 720K free, even with all my packages), but I don’t know how free my heap is, nor how fragmented my internal storage is (it’s been a long time since I did a backup, brain wipe, and restore). It’s likely that I need to do a little more spring cleanup on my Newton or freeze some packages at startup to make BlueTooth more reliable.

Ignoring that fact for now, Eckhart has been working on Blunt 2 for quite some time (see his blog), so hopefully he’ll have an update out sometime this year. Blunt 2 is a complete redesign and should prove to be immensely more stable than its predecessor, so I have high hopes for it when it