Berkeley Systems' GeoWorks was in many ways much nicer than Windows, ``run(ing) with a crispness Windows can only dream of on a 386'' (and was quite usable even on a lowly 8086).
Cenon - http://www.cenon.info/ --- interesting NeXT CAD/CAM program making the jump to opensource illustration. Runs on OPENSTEP, Linux (w/ GNUstep installed) and Mac OS X
Intaglio - http://www.purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/ --- Mac OS X native program able to make use of Apple Advanced Typography / ATSUI and other Mac OS X technologies. Commercial, but demo available.
There's apparently a graphing calculator in Mac OS X w/ does nifty things, and I'm surprised that Mathematica, MATLAB and METAPOST weren't mentioned (not really drawing programs, but if pstricks is gonna be included....)
William (who really wishes Macromedia had gone back to the Altsys Virtuoso code when it was time to move FreeHand to Mac OS X so that FH could've had decent typographic font access &c.)
I love pen computing, (see my website, or my posts to places like http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/active.asp ) and while I find a graphics tablet an indispensable tool for doing digital work, and really love doing quick sketches w/ tools like Ambient Design's ArtRage ( http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html ), I simply don't believe that work done in this fashion, even as a ``gicl\'e'' fine art print is going to have the same vitality and glittering appearance as work done by a master.
Microphotography (can't recall the specific magnifications and my book on this is at home) shows that a master's brushwork has the ink particles more evenly dispersed than that of a novice, and w/ practice one can get a far wider, and subtler gradation of colour than the 256 grey values PostScript will allow --- how does one do ``Po'mo'' techiniques where one paints a light area, allows it to dry and then paints in a darker value over it? The result is _quite_ different from immediately painting w/o waiting.
nokilli said: >The Steve Capps' Finder delivered with the original 128K >Mac *still* blows away today's Finder in terms of >elegance, responsiveness and overall usability. Moreover, >I see no difference between today's Finder and WIndows >Explorer, except for this odd example you give us which >really has nothing to do with anything. BTW, I've never >had the need for force-quit Windows Explorer. You really >want to call that a feature?
Are you not aware that on the Mac System as shipped on a 128KB Mac Folders were purely a visual organizational cue only expressed / made use of in the Finder, aren't you? When you used a File Open dialog one saw _everything_ that was on a give floppy (except the folders) in a flat listing. Given that, I think your claims are suspect; to iterate:
1st - by hiding the toolbar as a default one can get Finder windows in Mac OS X to behave pretty much like System 6 (which was pretty much like the much older System I see on my wife's SE when I haul out my _Through the Looking Glass_ game floppy, modulo things added since like list view, folders which are actually directories as opposed to visual aids &c.).
2nd - my wife's SE (same CPU speed as my 128KB Mac I bought in 1984) is quite a bit more sluggish than the G5 at work when working from a floppy --- perceived response is about the same from the HD).
3rd - Mac OS X affords a lot of really nice features I'm not finding equivalents for on the XP box at work:
- Miller column file browser (I suppose you could use http://www.winbrowser.com/ 'cept that last time i tried it it crashed, a lot)
- no convenient place for temporarily storing a folder one needs temporary access to --- currently at work I'm updating links to some art w/ munged filenames in an InDesign document --- I drag the current destination folder into the sidebar to drag files into, then I can click on the same folder in the sidebar in the file open dialog in ID to get there w/ a single click, when I'm done w/ that folder I drag it out of the Sidebar and it goes ``poof'' --- how does one do something like that in Windows w/ anywhere near the efficiency?
- the Dock affords one a single place to launch and switch applications --- why is it that in XP I click in one place to launch (the Start Menu) but use another area (the Task Bar) to switch --- in Mac OS X I click on the same icon either way.
Lots of other niceties in Mac OS X such as Services, pervasive.pdf imaging / display, memory management (there was a guy asking after loading apps from a RAM disk on an InDesign mailing list 'cause in Windows XP he couldn't keep large numbers of apps open for extended periods of time and wanted to be able to launch them more quickly than his RAID 0 array would allow), pervasive drag-drop &c.
William
(who really wishes Windows XP was well-suited enough to his working style to allow him to justify purchasing a Tablet PC)
Actually, Korean is sent in Morse code using SKATS, Standard Korean Transliteration System were the Hangul is matched by frequency of occurrence to a Latin character. That there are two Latin letters left over doesn't affect efficiency much.
The only pdf-editor like things around are drawing programs --- although Enfocus Tailor.app would do pretty much as you wish for PostScript documents, but it's not that accessible given that you need a NeXT or a copy of OPENSTEP to use it. The most reliable way to edit a.pdf is to use the Adobe Acrobat plug-in Enfocus PitStop. Not cheap. Not word-processor like (editing more than a character or two is a study in tediousness).
Using drawing programs to open up arbitrary.pdfs can be workable, but isn't word-processor-like --- that said, I've done it in the past (one example, book done in a proprietary composition program (Miles 33 for the morbidly curious) which needed reprint corrections --- open up the relevant chapters in FreeHand 8, get _all_ of the pages and formatting (after a few minor tweaks) then re-assemble the text blocks which want editing). These days I'd probably use Cenon for this, http://www.cenon.info/ (not saying it's as good as FH8, but at least it's viable today on decent OSes and being opensource is more likely to improve than FreeHand since its purchase by Adobe)
As an alternative, opening up a.pdf and directly converting it to.rtf is a useful option and may be more workable for you --- Marcel Weiher's TextLightning.app for Mac OS X (shareware at http://www.metaobject.com/ ) is one of the best programs for this.
NeoOffice has been workable for me thus far. For a spreadsheet in Mac OS X I've been using Flexisheet from Material Arts (opensource Lotus Improv / Quantrix clone).
Just used it along w/ TextWrangler to convert a bunch of Quark XPress collect for output reports into a listing of photos by photographer for billing purposes at work --- about 2,000 graphics total --- if memory serves it only crashed twice, and in the course of working on it there was an update which fixed it so it properly encoded typographer's wuotes used in the captions.
Did you catch the recent bit on ``fixes'' in X-Ray Magazine where they showed a figure which was to show that script fonts would no longer be cut off and which purported to show ligatures? Guess what, no ligatures were present.
It's stuff like that which makes me chary of believing anything Quark says, or which the media says about Quark.
Okay, it was a workable, productive program once upon a time, but v5 and v6 have been just about disastrous, and all-too-many XTensions aren't being up-dated. Using Quark w/o XTensions suited to the needs of a specific project is like working w/ one hand tied behind your back.
Don Hosek did the first couple of issues of his magazine, _Serif_ using TeX a while back.
The nascent _Free Software Magazine_ is done using LaTeX.
That said, it's important to remember that the limiting factor in TeX usage is human ingenuity (and to a lesser extent available computer processing power --- though pages generate almost instantly for all but the most computationally intensive layouts these days, not like the _minutes_ or even hours it used to take)--- it's a Turing compleat programming language, so it can do anything once one figures out how to explain to TeX how to do it. DH often likened using TeX to playing Chess, requiring an awareness of what would be happening in the future. There has been some interesting work done on expanding this sort of thing though.
By contrast, the limitations of using Quark XPress and InDesign are available manpower/time and computer equipment. One can do anything, but not much can be automated ``merely'' using stylesheets and graphic placement rules. Numbering often is done by hand, (re)generating an index can be especially tedious, cross-references are primitive at best, and equations &c. require special proprietary plug-ins.
FWIW, people who're using InDesign are using TeX to a certain degree --- Adobe licensed URW's HZ hyphenation & justification algorithm which was based on TeX's. Turning things around, pdftex now affords many of Adobe InDesign's H&J features including hanging punctuation and character expansion.
While I agree Heinlein's _Starship Troopers_ should be front and center in any such discussion, todays high-tech battlefield may not be very appropriate for such given advancements in sensor gear and weaponry &c. A Barrett XM-109 25mm sniper rifle would probably wreck the day of a guy wearing a powered suit.
An interesting counter-example was Timothy Zahn's excellent book, _Blackcollar_ about a group of soldiers developed in lieu of using ``walking tanks''.
Interestingly Flash was originally FutureWave's FutureSplash Animator which was based on FutureWave's SmartSketch drawing program which was originally created for systems running Go Corp.'s PenPoint OS, but was ported to Windows and the Mac when Go and Eo (hardware manufacturer owned by AT&T) went belly up.
A really flexible vector drawing and note-taking program is still one of the areas in which Microsoft's Tablet PC is way behind (PhatWare's PhatPad is the closest thing, and it's almost as good as Newton, but requires a 1.0 GHz CPU, something like 250 times more processing power than the OMP or MP 100). Typically people leave up the input panel or a soft keyboard or attach a numeric or other keypad/strip to get at shift, option and other modifier keys so essential to using drawing programs such as FreeHand and Illustrator.
Alias Sketchbook is quite nice for bitmap graphics work though, and Ambient Design's ArtRage is fabulous for the price (free). Sketchbook was even ported to the Mac after popular acclamation.
Another nifty program is the InftyEditor which converts written equations into LaTeX code (shades of the math symbol input option for Instant TeX for NeXTstep).
I'm still mystified as to why Macromedia didn't revive SmartSketch for the Tablet PC.
At least some of the early PowerBooks (in particular the PowerBook Duo series) w/ trackballs used synthetic rubies for the bearings which held the ball / tracked it for reading xy movement.
Go Corp. - they did the OS (PenPoint), a reference hardware design (based on an Intel 286 chip) and licensing.
NCR and IBM licensed the Intel version of the OS and released pen slate systems (NCR-3125 and 3130, IBM ThinkPad 701T, 703T).
AT&T bought Go's hardware division, named it EO and made two devices based on the ``hobbit'' chip.
Finally, Go folded, AT&T gave up, and Taiwan's Ministry of Technology bought all the rights and intellectual property --- I've always assumed to use as a stick to beat up MS over licensing.
GRiD preceeded the Newton w/ their GRiDPad, but it was a DOS-based system w/ a custom environment not much used save for vertical applications.
Zoomer was kind of interesting, being a PC running Geoworks w/ Graffiti --- HP's OmniGo 120 was way cool w/ a square screen and keyboard.
The old Poqet PC (a DOS machine w/ would fit in a (large) suit jacket pocket was way cool, and an early innovation as well.
The Cintiqs have the same digitizer technology as Intuos tablets --- Tablet PC systems use Wacom UD technology I think it is, so no tilt, rotation &c. They're also available in larger sizes than Tablet PCs, w/ higher resolution and have a wider viewing angle than most Tablets.
Also, when one replaces a Tablet PC to update the processor, one has to get an all new unit --- a Cintiq can be left on one's desk, and the CPU replaced.
There was a very interesting overview and cost-benefit analysis contrasting the twain at http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/ in the forums there a while back.
When I bought my first laptop, a GRiDCase III Plus, it was ten and a half pounds, and was a featherweight compared to the ~30lb. luggables then available (Compaq, Otrona, &c.)
Apple even had a carrying case for the 128K Mac when it first came out, which tradition is carried on in:
The thing I'm faintly surprised / disappointed at is that no one has mad a combination carrying case and battery pack for a Mac Mini _and_ Wacom Cintiq (LCD integrated w/ a graphics tablet) which would get one a Tablet Mac w/o waiting for Apple to build one.
I don't think they cover the ``ThinkPad'' name story in _StartUp_, (sloppy writing on my part, sorry) just that IBM was going to release the ThinkPad as a pen slate and how that got side-tracked. It's been a while since I read that though.
If a lower-resolution is acceptable, an older pen slate system such as a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 would fill the bill quite nicely (the OP failed to note a requirement for battery life which is the big failing of older devices).
http://www.linuxslate.org
Is one site w/ some useful information for such.
William (who really needs to dig out his Point 510 and get Linux on it)
The original concept for the ThinkPad was for a pen slate (hence the name, the inspiration came from leather notepads IBM used to give out to employees w/ ``Think!'' embossed on them). You can get the backstory on this in the book _ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue, building an IBM brand_ or in Jerry Kaplan's book _StartUp_.
Early models included the 701T, 703T and 730TE (slate models) and the 360PE (and a couple of other convertible models). At first they could run one's choice of Windows for Pen Computing (Win3.1 w/ HWR and some nifty pen-oriented apps) or PenPoint (but that was more expensive 'cause one had to pay the Microsoft ``tax'').
Re:relative age (was Re:If you love .net)
on
Modern Mac Development?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Cocoa, nee Rhapsody, nee Yellow Box, nee OPENSTEP is _not_ part of the ``Unix foundation'' of Mac OS X --- one can see what OS X's Unix has matured to in Darwin, and Cocoa ain't there (which brings up an interesting question of how nice an environment would Darwin and GNUstep be).
NeXT used to charge a _lot_ more for their Dev tools for a while (they started out as free, then were an optional install, then were ~$4,995 and now are free again). The price change tracks pretty closely whether or no the company expects to make money on hardware --- since it's not feasible for Microsoft to bundle Visual Studio w/ an IntelliExplorer mouse and expect it to be used, they don't.
``babbage'' had said: >On OSX, the platform -- not counting the Unix foundation -- is young
How can this be the case if it was possible for Andrew Stone of Stone Design to ``port'' Create.app from NeXTstep to Mac OS X merely by recompiling in Mac OS X?
Or are you saying that everything which Create.app makes use of was available for Unix starting back in 1989 and is a part of the ``Unix foundation''?
NeXTstep was _a_ Unix, but it included a lot of stuff which is only now becoming available for other systems, and Mac OS X has a much more mature implementation of these things (Cocoa, nee Rhapsody, nee Yellow Box, nee OPENSTEP) than anything else, an implementation which goes back to 1989 or so (if I were home I'd check the copyright date on Create.app on my NeXT Cube).
Slashdot Mirror
Where's one's sense of history and perspective?
Berkeley Systems' GeoWorks was in many ways much nicer than Windows, ``run(ing) with a crispness Windows can only dream of on a 386'' (and was quite usable even on a lowly 8086).
http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/geos.htm
VisiOn was tracking quite nicely as well, but was undone by MS FUD.
PenPoint was way cool as well.
and of course, while MS was busy w/ Windows 3.1, NeXT had NeXTStep.
William
Cenon - http://www.cenon.info/ --- interesting NeXT CAD/CAM program making the jump to opensource illustration. Runs on OPENSTEP, Linux (w/ GNUstep installed) and Mac OS X
Intaglio - http://www.purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/ --- Mac OS X native program able to make use of Apple Advanced Typography / ATSUI and other Mac OS X technologies. Commercial, but demo available.
There's apparently a graphing calculator in Mac OS X w/ does nifty things, and I'm surprised that Mathematica, MATLAB and METAPOST weren't mentioned (not really drawing programs, but if pstricks is gonna be included....)
For people running Windows:
EVE - http://www.goosee.com/goosee/index.shtml - small, free, symbols &c. available for it.
William
(who really wishes Macromedia had gone back to the Altsys Virtuoso code when it was time to move FreeHand to Mac OS X so that FH could've had decent typographic font access &c.)
I love pen computing, (see my website, or my posts to places like http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/active.asp ) and while I find a graphics tablet an indispensable tool for doing digital work, and really love doing quick sketches w/ tools like Ambient Design's ArtRage ( http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html ), I simply don't believe that work done in this fashion, even as a ``gicl\'e'' fine art print is going to have the same vitality and glittering appearance as work done by a master.
Microphotography (can't recall the specific magnifications and my book on this is at home) shows that a master's brushwork has the ink particles more evenly dispersed than that of a novice, and w/ practice one can get a far wider, and subtler gradation of colour than the 256 grey values PostScript will allow --- how does one do ``Po'mo'' techiniques where one paints a light area, allows it to dry and then paints in a darker value over it? The result is _quite_ different from immediately painting w/o waiting.
William
nokilli said:
.pdf imaging / display, memory management (there was a guy asking after loading apps from a RAM disk on an InDesign mailing list 'cause in Windows XP he couldn't keep large numbers of apps open for extended periods of time and wanted to be able to launch them more quickly than his RAID 0 array would allow), pervasive drag-drop &c.
>The Steve Capps' Finder delivered with the original 128K
>Mac *still* blows away today's Finder in terms of
>elegance, responsiveness and overall usability. Moreover,
>I see no difference between today's Finder and WIndows
>Explorer, except for this odd example you give us which
>really has nothing to do with anything. BTW, I've never
>had the need for force-quit Windows Explorer. You really
>want to call that a feature?
Are you not aware that on the Mac System as shipped on a 128KB Mac Folders were purely a visual organizational cue only expressed / made use of in the Finder, aren't you? When you used a File Open dialog one saw _everything_ that was on a give floppy (except the folders) in a flat listing. Given that, I think your claims are suspect; to iterate:
1st - by hiding the toolbar as a default one can get Finder windows in Mac OS X to behave pretty much like System 6 (which was pretty much like the much older System I see on my wife's SE when I haul out my _Through the Looking Glass_ game floppy, modulo things added since like list view, folders which are actually directories as opposed to visual aids &c.).
2nd - my wife's SE (same CPU speed as my 128KB Mac I bought in 1984) is quite a bit more sluggish than the G5 at work when working from a floppy --- perceived response is about the same from the HD).
3rd - Mac OS X affords a lot of really nice features I'm not finding equivalents for on the XP box at work:
- Miller column file browser (I suppose you could use http://www.winbrowser.com/ 'cept that last time i tried it it crashed, a lot)
- no convenient place for temporarily storing a folder one needs temporary access to --- currently at work I'm updating links to some art w/ munged filenames in an InDesign document --- I drag the current destination folder into the sidebar to drag files into, then I can click on the same folder in the sidebar in the file open dialog in ID to get there w/ a single click, when I'm done w/ that folder I drag it out of the Sidebar and it goes ``poof'' --- how does one do something like that in Windows w/ anywhere near the efficiency?
- the Dock affords one a single place to launch and switch applications --- why is it that in XP I click in one place to launch (the Start Menu) but use another area (the Task Bar) to switch --- in Mac OS X I click on the same icon either way.
Lots of other niceties in Mac OS X such as Services, pervasive
William
(who really wishes Windows XP was well-suited enough to his working style to allow him to justify purchasing a Tablet PC)
Actually, Korean is sent in Morse code using SKATS, Standard Korean Transliteration System were the Hangul is matched by frequency of occurrence to a Latin character. That there are two Latin letters left over doesn't affect efficiency much.
William
The nicest LaTeX front-end is LyX, http://www.lyx.org/
.pdf is to use the Adobe Acrobat plug-in Enfocus PitStop. Not cheap. Not word-processor like (editing more than a character or two is a study in tediousness).
.pdfs can be workable, but isn't word-processor-like --- that said, I've done it in the past (one example, book done in a proprietary composition program (Miles 33 for the morbidly curious) which needed reprint corrections --- open up the relevant chapters in FreeHand 8, get _all_ of the pages and formatting (after a few minor tweaks) then re-assemble the text blocks which want editing). These days I'd probably use Cenon for this, http://www.cenon.info/ (not saying it's as good as FH8, but at least it's viable today on decent OSes and being opensource is more likely to improve than FreeHand since its purchase by Adobe)
.pdf and directly converting it to .rtf is a useful option and may be more workable for you --- Marcel Weiher's TextLightning.app for Mac OS X (shareware at http://www.metaobject.com/ ) is one of the best programs for this.
The only pdf-editor like things around are drawing programs --- although Enfocus Tailor.app would do pretty much as you wish for PostScript documents, but it's not that accessible given that you need a NeXT or a copy of OPENSTEP to use it. The most reliable way to edit a
Using drawing programs to open up arbitrary
As an alternative, opening up a
NeoOffice has been workable for me thus far. For a spreadsheet in Mac OS X I've been using Flexisheet from Material Arts (opensource Lotus Improv / Quantrix clone).
William
Yes, there were magazine articles discussing Claris licensing Informix WingZ to make Resolve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris
http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-058.html
William
It's not quite the same, but Flexisheet is available for Mac OS X:
http://www.materialarts.com/FlexiSheet/
w/ source even:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/flexisheet/
William
Just used it along w/ TextWrangler to convert a bunch of Quark XPress collect for output reports into a listing of photos by photographer for billing purposes at work --- about 2,000 graphics total --- if memory serves it only crashed twice, and in the course of working on it there was an update which fixed it so it properly encoded typographer's wuotes used in the captions.
William
Claris licensed Informix WingZ (probably the most ported graphical spreadsheet), and of course there's a spreadsheet in AppleWorks.
Like most NeXT users I'm hoping for something modelled on Lotus Improv --- properly done this will allow it to work as a database as well.
William
Did you catch the recent bit on ``fixes'' in X-Ray Magazine where they showed a figure which was to show that script fonts would no longer be cut off and which purported to show ligatures? Guess what, no ligatures were present.
It's stuff like that which makes me chary of believing anything Quark says, or which the media says about Quark.
Okay, it was a workable, productive program once upon a time, but v5 and v6 have been just about disastrous, and all-too-many XTensions aren't being up-dated. Using Quark w/o XTensions suited to the needs of a specific project is like working w/ one hand tied behind your back.
William
It's been done.
Don Hosek did the first couple of issues of his magazine, _Serif_ using TeX a while back.
The nascent _Free Software Magazine_ is done using LaTeX.
That said, it's important to remember that the limiting factor in TeX usage is human ingenuity (and to a lesser extent available computer processing power --- though pages generate almost instantly for all but the most computationally intensive layouts these days, not like the _minutes_ or even hours it used to take)--- it's a Turing compleat programming language, so it can do anything once one figures out how to explain to TeX how to do it. DH often likened using TeX to playing Chess, requiring an awareness of what would be happening in the future. There has been some interesting work done on expanding this sort of thing though.
By contrast, the limitations of using Quark XPress and InDesign are available manpower/time and computer equipment. One can do anything, but not much can be automated ``merely'' using stylesheets and graphic placement rules. Numbering often is done by hand, (re)generating an index can be especially tedious, cross-references are primitive at best, and equations &c. require special proprietary plug-ins.
FWIW, people who're using InDesign are using TeX to a certain degree --- Adobe licensed URW's HZ hyphenation & justification algorithm which was based on TeX's. Turning things around, pdftex now affords many of Adobe InDesign's H&J features including hanging punctuation and character expansion.
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase
affords some interesting examples of what TeX can do.
William
While I agree Heinlein's _Starship Troopers_ should be front and center in any such discussion, todays high-tech battlefield may not be very appropriate for such given advancements in sensor gear and weaponry &c. A Barrett XM-109 25mm sniper rifle would probably wreck the day of a guy wearing a powered suit.
An interesting counter-example was Timothy Zahn's excellent book, _Blackcollar_ about a group of soldiers developed in lieu of using ``walking tanks''.
William
``It's amazing people can fit so much prejudice into such little minds.''
William
Interestingly Flash was originally FutureWave's FutureSplash Animator which was based on FutureWave's SmartSketch drawing program which was originally created for systems running Go Corp.'s PenPoint OS, but was ported to Windows and the Mac when Go and Eo (hardware manufacturer owned by AT&T) went belly up.
A really flexible vector drawing and note-taking program is still one of the areas in which Microsoft's Tablet PC is way behind (PhatWare's PhatPad is the closest thing, and it's almost as good as Newton, but requires a 1.0 GHz CPU, something like 250 times more processing power than the OMP or MP 100). Typically people leave up the input panel or a soft keyboard or attach a numeric or other keypad/strip to get at shift, option and other modifier keys so essential to using drawing programs such as FreeHand and Illustrator.
Alias Sketchbook is quite nice for bitmap graphics work though, and Ambient Design's ArtRage is fabulous for the price (free). Sketchbook was even ported to the Mac after popular acclamation.
Another nifty program is the InftyEditor which converts written equations into LaTeX code (shades of the math symbol input option for Instant TeX for NeXTstep).
I'm still mystified as to why Macromedia didn't revive SmartSketch for the Tablet PC.
William
At least some of the early PowerBooks (in particular the PowerBook Duo series) w/ trackballs used synthetic rubies for the bearings which held the ball / tracked it for reading xy movement.
William
Lessee, it was:
Go Corp. - they did the OS (PenPoint), a reference hardware design (based on an Intel 286 chip) and licensing.
NCR and IBM licensed the Intel version of the OS and released pen slate systems (NCR-3125 and 3130, IBM ThinkPad 701T, 703T).
AT&T bought Go's hardware division, named it EO and made two devices based on the ``hobbit'' chip.
Finally, Go folded, AT&T gave up, and Taiwan's Ministry of Technology bought all the rights and intellectual property --- I've always assumed to use as a stick to beat up MS over licensing.
GRiD preceeded the Newton w/ their GRiDPad, but it was a DOS-based system w/ a custom environment not much used save for vertical applications.
Zoomer was kind of interesting, being a PC running Geoworks w/ Graffiti --- HP's OmniGo 120 was way cool w/ a square screen and keyboard.
The old Poqet PC (a DOS machine w/ would fit in a (large) suit jacket pocket was way cool, and an early innovation as well.
William
The Cintiqs have the same digitizer technology as Intuos tablets --- Tablet PC systems use Wacom UD technology I think it is, so no tilt, rotation &c. They're also available in larger sizes than Tablet PCs, w/ higher resolution and have a wider viewing angle than most Tablets.
Also, when one replaces a Tablet PC to update the processor, one has to get an all new unit --- a Cintiq can be left on one's desk, and the CPU replaced.
There was a very interesting overview and cost-benefit analysis contrasting the twain at http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/ in the forums there a while back.
William
When I bought my first laptop, a GRiDCase III Plus, it was ten and a half pounds, and was a featherweight compared to the ~30lb. luggables then available (Compaq, Otrona, &c.)
G GERBLK/
e en=PROD&Product_Code=TB0351
Apple even had a carrying case for the 128K Mac when it first came out, which tradition is carried on in:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/LTA%20Projects/ILU
And there's even one for the Mac Mini:
http://www.tombihn.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Scr
The thing I'm faintly surprised / disappointed at is that no one has mad a combination carrying case and battery pack for a Mac Mini _and_ Wacom Cintiq (LCD integrated w/ a graphics tablet) which would get one a Tablet Mac w/o waiting for Apple to build one.
William
I don't think they cover the ``ThinkPad'' name story in _StartUp_, (sloppy writing on my part, sorry) just that IBM was going to release the ThinkPad as a pen slate and how that got side-tracked. It's been a while since I read that though.
William
Excellent point (hi-res displays are expensive).
If a lower-resolution is acceptable, an older pen slate system such as a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 would fill the bill quite nicely (the OP failed to note a requirement for battery life which is the big failing of older devices).
http://www.linuxslate.org
Is one site w/ some useful information for such.
William
(who really needs to dig out his Point 510 and get Linux on it)
Actually, it goes back to before OS/2.
The original concept for the ThinkPad was for a pen slate (hence the name, the inspiration came from leather notepads IBM used to give out to employees w/ ``Think!'' embossed on them). You can get the backstory on this in the book _ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue, building an IBM brand_ or in Jerry Kaplan's book _StartUp_.
Early models included the 701T, 703T and 730TE (slate models) and the 360PE (and a couple of other convertible models). At first they could run one's choice of Windows for Pen Computing (Win3.1 w/ HWR and some nifty pen-oriented apps) or PenPoint (but that was more expensive 'cause one had to pay the Microsoft ``tax'').
William
It's a bit overblown which is unfortunate and typical. There's a lot of good information elsewhere in this discussion though.
e op le/asaf_degani.html
e .h tml
That said, there are good documents noting the importance of design in making vital information available.
Dr. Asaf Degani did some really interesting research for NASA which was made publicly available:
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/story.php?id=129&sec=3
http://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/IHpersonnel/p
I've had them up for a while now on a web page listing free typography texts:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/books-free-typ
William
Cocoa, nee Rhapsody, nee Yellow Box, nee OPENSTEP is _not_ part of the ``Unix foundation'' of Mac OS X --- one can see what OS X's Unix has matured to in Darwin, and Cocoa ain't there (which brings up an interesting question of how nice an environment would Darwin and GNUstep be).
NeXT used to charge a _lot_ more for their Dev tools for a while (they started out as free, then were an optional install, then were ~$4,995 and now are free again). The price change tracks pretty closely whether or no the company expects to make money on hardware --- since it's not feasible for Microsoft to bundle Visual Studio w/ an IntelliExplorer mouse and expect it to be used, they don't.
William
``babbage'' had said:
>On OSX, the platform -- not counting the Unix foundation -- is young
How can this be the case if it was possible for Andrew Stone of Stone Design to ``port'' Create.app from NeXTstep to Mac OS X merely by recompiling in Mac OS X?
Or are you saying that everything which Create.app makes use of was available for Unix starting back in 1989 and is a part of the ``Unix foundation''?
NeXTstep was _a_ Unix, but it included a lot of stuff which is only now becoming available for other systems, and Mac OS X has a much more mature implementation of these things (Cocoa, nee Rhapsody, nee Yellow Box, nee OPENSTEP) than anything else, an implementation which goes back to 1989 or so (if I were home I'd check the copyright date on Create.app on my NeXT Cube).
William