I suppose there's even the possibility that they could then use the MS-Windows version of Photoshop as a bargaining chip to encourage Microsoft to continue the Mac version of MS-Office. True, the loss of all the Adobe products wouldn't kill MS-Windows, but it would definitely have an impact. And since Microsoft already makes money from the Mac version of MS-Office, it probably doesn't need too much encouragement to keep it going...
Re:PDAs Are Terrible, Where is Apple?
on
The Future of the PDA
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· Score: 3, Informative
If Apple were to release a new Newton (or whatever they decide to call it) that was nothing more than iCal and Address Book I would be happy. VERY happy.
With just those two features in mind one could argue that they already did, and it's called the iPod. It has both a calendar app and address book app that synchronize with iCal and Address Book on the Mac. My brother uses an iPod in exactly this fashion.
Mind you, I'm playing devil's advocate here. I don't think the iPod interface is well-suited for PDA type functions, and I'd much prefer something that learns from the Newton.
you wind up with 2 inferior things in one. A bulky, annoying phone, and a small-screened pda.
True enough. I've yet to see a smart phone that handles the same sorts of tasks a PDA can handle as well as a PDA. Most of the smart phones I've seen so far are comparable more to organizers more than true PDAs.
It's interesting that you mention using PDAs as book readers. I also found that I use their book reading capabilities a lot. I use them not for just traditional free e-books, though, but also free interactive fiction titles. Interactive fiction is a different sort of thing when you're no longer bound to a desktop to "interact" with it. Exploring twisty little passages that are all alike is perhaps inherently more interesting when you're in a real maze of twisty little passages that are all alike, like the waiting room in some large complex...
While I certainly don't claim to be an expert on such matters, even I can point out the obvious flaw in the study -- it's focus on radio waves. I only ever knew one character who wore foil hats, and he didn't even bother with them inside because they were made to defend against the "Orbital Mind Control Lasers" (OMCL) mounted on satellites. They aren't supposed to be providing an (obviously non-functional) Faraday cage around the head -- they're supposed to be blocking the "lasers" via their optical properties. There are supposedly far worse things in public buildings to watch out for that go far beyond the defense capabilities of a foil hat, so "wearing the foil" in a public building just makes you look silly without providing you with any real protection.
I can only assume that the lasers supposedly use a wavelength in the near ultraviolet, but I've never really dug into it... Now that I'm thinking about it a little though I suppose that the next time I run into this guy I'll definitely have to quiz him about some of the details on how the OMCLs are theoretically to work... He (believe it or not) has a solid technical background so the answer may be interesting.
Yep, I've used a few. The Newton 2X00 covers bend backward to work as a stand when in landscape mode. It works that way by design and was even advertised as so in some of the marketing stuff. It's not much different from the one on Origami.
The pre-2000 versions didn't work the same way (or at least they weren't stable when used in such a mode). My only gripe with the setup is that it didn't work well with a plugged in keyboard.
Er, moderators, how is a comparison of Oragami versus the Newton any more offtopic than a comparison of Origami versus the Nokia 770 in a discussion about Oragami?
You can almost say the same thing about it and the Newton. In many ways it's like a more expensive Newton with a very similar form-factor and even the built-in stand.
It has some plusses and minuses though.
On the plus side, it's color (the Newton is grayscale) with somewhat better resolution, and its wireless stuff is all built-in (the Newton has pretty much the same wireless capabilities but only via PCMCIA cards). It's probably got a faster processor (not clear at first blush from the specs) but I'm sure that difference will be absorbed by software.
On the minus side, the built-in stand doesn't double as a screen cover like it does on the Newton. It's heavier than the Newton. I'm guessing that with its color display its battery life will be nowhere near the battery life of the Newton. It's not clear from the specs, but unless they made some big changes its OS is unlikely to be as stylus-optimized as the Newton's, and since the stylus is its main form of input that's a big drawback.
This agrees with my own experiences with Comcast. I was testing VoIP through my own local company and for the first couple of weeks it worked great. However, in the past month or two things changed dramatically. Now VoIP calls are 100% guaranteed to disconnect during a conversation and are very choppy even when they work.
Running mtr shows lots a significant amount of packet loss though and lots of jitter; it may not be enough to affect e-mail or web browsing, but it's plenty enough to disrupt VoIP.
I somewhat agree with you, but in addition to the points already made by others above, in all fairness you have to remember a few things:
The more people voting, the more chances there are for something to go wrong.
The greater the population density around a voting center, the busier the workers and the more likely per voter that something will go wrong.
The population of the entire country of Canada is quite a bit (approximately four million) less than the population of just the state of California. New York City's population alone is over a quarter of Canada's population, and it's crammed into a relatively tiny space.
I think there's some truth to the parent post. A single PDA that merged the best features of both the Newton and the Palm could be really slick. While I'll assume that most people reading this are pretty familiar with the Palm and what it has to offer, I recognize that the Newton may be a bit more of a mystery. I blogged a bit about what the Newton has to offer in 2006 elsewhere and won't repeat it all here.
I'm personally hoping that maybe some of its innovative user interface ideas get carried over into other projects. Obviously Apple's current Ink tablet handwriting recognition system is a direct port from the Newton. Less obviously perhaps is that its Dock removal animation is, too.
I think you came to the right place if you're looking for people who can code sites using AJaX / Web 2.0 / XHTML / CSS / JavaScript / Java / PHP / Python / XML / RDF / RSS / iCalendar / etc.
I suspect that pretty much everyone else who reads/. (myself included) can do this for you. Honestly you're going to get bombarded with choices, and the toughest thing for you will be to figure out which ones are even worthy of a second look. As someone who sometimes competes in this arena, I can say from my standpoint that you're at a big disadvantage if you don't understand the tech yourself, as it'll be really hard to tell good work from bad work -- something like graphics design anyone can judge -- something like web programming is a different thing entirely. Get familiar with the W3C validation tools for XHTML / CSS / RDF / etc. and tinker around with multiple browsers. When you're looking at prospective designers' portfolios, run them through the validation tools and check them with multiple browsers.
This isn't too surprising. Don't forget that they outright dropped FrameMaker for Mac.
This was after they claimed that the market for it had shrunk. This was after they had released a non OS X native version about a year after the release of OS X. How many Mac users do you think were waiting for the OS X native version to upgrade?
I think the only chance of us seeing a true OS X version of FrameMaker is if some other company out there comes out with something that's actually competitive with it...
Yup. Check out the "Night Hag Syndrome", too. I've never actually experienced it myself, but I've met people who have. The tricks the mind can play on one during sleep paralysis are pretty amazing.
AFAIR they are "blink and you'll miss it" appearances. I recall watching a scene from one of the movies (although I now forget which) just because a fellow SFB player told me that he had read somewhere that they had put a Kzinti in it as a nod to the animated series, and because of the link with SFB.
Remember though the Kzinti of SFB aren't 100% the Kzin of Niven; they're based on them but they did have some changes along the way (probably in part due to legal issues, and in part due to the regular changing of details as a message gets passed from one person to the next). You have to compare against the Kzinti pictures in the various SFB materials, not the pictures of Niven's Kzin. The Kzinti in the movies are based on the ones in the cartoon series and SFB, not the ones in Niven's books.
The Kzinti were in the Star Trek cartoon series. They also made cameos in some of the movies that were based on the original series (although they were never referred to by name in the movies, and I forget which movies offhand -- I believe they appeared in two of them, though). They also served to explain why Klingon ships were described in Trek literature as being heavily outfitted with drone defenses when the Federation et al weren't described as using drones -- the solution was to make the Kzinti ships heavily armed with drones.
Keep in mind I'm saying this as a Dr. Who fan who used to play SFB -- I'm sure a Trek fan could provide more (and better) details.
I've always personally said that the two big parties differ only in which portions of the Constitution they choose to ignore. For some fun examples, try talking about the independence of Church and State to a staunch Republican or the right to bear arms to a staunch Democrat...
There's been an ongoing discussion about this same topic over at Macintouch.
Personally I'm a fan of the Zope / CMF series of content management systems; the built-in CMF is quite powerful and flexible (and actually fairly efficient -- don't be fooled by the slowness of some CMSs built on top).
There are many such systems. There are some in private use (like Boston.com and Saugus.net. There are also some commercial options (like Icoya). Most though are free and open source, like Plone, Infrae Silva, and Nuxeo CPS. Each has its own focus and tends to do certain things better than the others. Each has its own special plug-ins and extensions, but since they all utilize the same underlying base framework, it's usually a doable thing (although typically not trivial) to port a product from one to another.
The capabilities of Zope's built-in CMF are also good enough that it's not at all unreasonable to fashion one's own CMS on top of it if none of the existing products seem to suit one's own particular needs.
The spam problem is certainly not solved simply because there is a reduced amount of spam in users' inboxes (and even that doesn't appear to be true).
ISPs still have to pay for the bandwidth wasted on spam. ISPs still have to pay for the work required to tweak filters and otherwise maintain anti-spam solutions. Who do you suppose ends up paying for this? Obviously the end customer. I'd hazard a guess that a significant fraction of what people pay their ISPs ultimately gets spent on spam bandwidth and implementing anti-spam measures.
Maybe for the time being (while waiting for the redesign) non-trivial meta comments could be obviously labeled as such in the subject. There are many ways to do so, but if perhaps just one particular way got popular (and I submit my own suggestion in the subject of this very comment) it'd be a little easier for the useful meta comments to make their way to the ears of the editors and a little easier to skip over for those who really don't care.
Everyone keeps saying that the Newton could do things that no other PDA can. Could we get some examples?
Well, off the top of my head, picture a single hand-held platform that offers a free development environment with a choice of a few relatively modern (in at least two cases, solidly object-oriented; I'm not familiar enough with the other available languages to comment on them though) programming languages; support for direct wired ethernet; support for Bluetooth; support for 802.11b (and I think these days 802.11g); various techy sorts of apps like Telnet in addition to the more typical hand-held fare like address books, notepads, spreadsheets, and e-mail (and it actually has the best such client I've seen on a hand-held device); a word processor good enough that people have actually used it to write novels; a keyboard option that can actually be used for touch-typing but which is still portable; a decent graphing calculator; a full graphical web browser; a basic AI interface that can turn commands like "call Darren" into a sequence that'll actually dial your brother's telephone number, placing in all the appropriate prefixes / area codes / etc. for your current location; a free-form text-edit system that works (the early versions were rough -- the MP2000 & 2100 were both solid); a fast RISC processor that still gets excellent battery life; a grayscale display with enough resolution to be useful; Unicode support; it goes on. All of the regular add-ons for hand-helds like astronomy software, interactive fiction software, etc. are also available for the Newton.
That's just a quick list. Sure, you can get lots of these things in other packages, but you can't get them all in one package except on a Newton.
If you were to ask me on a different day I'd probably come up with a completely different list... and I'm sure other Newton users will come up with additional items that I overlooked at the moment.
The big thing is the convenience of this combination with a rock-solid multi-tasking OS in a portable form-factor. It's a little hard to explain to someone who's never used such a thing. All the same reasons that people are buying and using tablets today support the Newton, although the Newton tends to be smaller and lighter than most tablets, and never crashes...
There were lots of new Newton-related technology at the show. It's a pity it's not covered anywhere.
One little thing I worked on was a Newton book reader extension for Firefox that can read Newton books from within Firefox on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, WinXP, etc. It's now in its second public version.
The reason that people still work with Newtons is simple -- Newtons still do things that nothing else on the market seem capable of doing. There are some really good, solid ideas in that OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose there's even the possibility that they could then use the MS-Windows version of Photoshop as a bargaining chip to encourage Microsoft to continue the Mac version of MS-Office. True, the loss of all the Adobe products wouldn't kill MS-Windows, but it would definitely have an impact. And since Microsoft already makes money from the Mac version of MS-Office, it probably doesn't need too much encouragement to keep it going...
With just those two features in mind one could argue that they already did, and it's called the iPod. It has both a calendar app and address book app that synchronize with iCal and Address Book on the Mac. My brother uses an iPod in exactly this fashion.
Mind you, I'm playing devil's advocate here. I don't think the iPod interface is well-suited for PDA type functions, and I'd much prefer something that learns from the Newton.
True enough. I've yet to see a smart phone that handles the same sorts of tasks a PDA can handle as well as a PDA. Most of the smart phones I've seen so far are comparable more to organizers more than true PDAs.
It's interesting that you mention using PDAs as book readers. I also found that I use their book reading capabilities a lot. I use them not for just traditional free e-books, though, but also free interactive fiction titles. Interactive fiction is a different sort of thing when you're no longer bound to a desktop to "interact" with it. Exploring twisty little passages that are all alike is perhaps inherently more interesting when you're in a real maze of twisty little passages that are all alike, like the waiting room in some large complex...
I've also written an article or two over the years and agree that there's a lot to be learned from the Newton MessagePad.
I wouldn't personally want OS X on it, though; a PDA-optimized OS like Newton makes more sense for the platform.
Recent developments in roll-out keyboards, projection keyboards, etc. would also be most welcome.
Don't forget that there are not just libraries of book metadata online, there are libraries of complete books:
While these libraries are by no means as extensive as something like Amazon, it's nice having the full text of the books themselves.
While I certainly don't claim to be an expert on such matters, even I can point out the obvious flaw in the study -- it's focus on radio waves. I only ever knew one character who wore foil hats, and he didn't even bother with them inside because they were made to defend against the "Orbital Mind Control Lasers" (OMCL) mounted on satellites. They aren't supposed to be providing an (obviously non-functional) Faraday cage around the head -- they're supposed to be blocking the "lasers" via their optical properties. There are supposedly far worse things in public buildings to watch out for that go far beyond the defense capabilities of a foil hat, so "wearing the foil" in a public building just makes you look silly without providing you with any real protection.
I can only assume that the lasers supposedly use a wavelength in the near ultraviolet, but I've never really dug into it... Now that I'm thinking about it a little though I suppose that the next time I run into this guy I'll definitely have to quiz him about some of the details on how the OMCLs are theoretically to work... He (believe it or not) has a solid technical background so the answer may be interesting.
Yep, I've used a few. The Newton 2X00 covers bend backward to work as a stand when in landscape mode. It works that way by design and was even advertised as so in some of the marketing stuff. It's not much different from the one on Origami.
The pre-2000 versions didn't work the same way (or at least they weren't stable when used in such a mode). My only gripe with the setup is that it didn't work well with a plugged in keyboard.
Er, moderators, how is a comparison of Oragami versus the Newton any more offtopic than a comparison of Origami versus the Nokia 770 in a discussion about Oragami?
You can almost say the same thing about it and the Newton. In many ways it's like a more expensive Newton with a very similar form-factor and even the built-in stand.
It has some plusses and minuses though.
On the plus side, it's color (the Newton is grayscale) with somewhat better resolution, and its wireless stuff is all built-in (the Newton has pretty much the same wireless capabilities but only via PCMCIA cards). It's probably got a faster processor (not clear at first blush from the specs) but I'm sure that difference will be absorbed by software.
On the minus side, the built-in stand doesn't double as a screen cover like it does on the Newton. It's heavier than the Newton. I'm guessing that with its color display its battery life will be nowhere near the battery life of the Newton. It's not clear from the specs, but unless they made some big changes its OS is unlikely to be as stylus-optimized as the Newton's, and since the stylus is its main form of input that's a big drawback.
This agrees with my own experiences with Comcast. I was testing VoIP through my own local company and for the first couple of weeks it worked great. However, in the past month or two things changed dramatically. Now VoIP calls are 100% guaranteed to disconnect during a conversation and are very choppy even when they work.
Running mtr shows lots a significant amount of packet loss though and lots of jitter; it may not be enough to affect e-mail or web browsing, but it's plenty enough to disrupt VoIP.
I somewhat agree with you, but in addition to the points already made by others above, in all fairness you have to remember a few things:
I think there's some truth to the parent post. A single PDA that merged the best features of both the Newton and the Palm could be really slick. While I'll assume that most people reading this are pretty familiar with the Palm and what it has to offer, I recognize that the Newton may be a bit more of a mystery. I blogged a bit about what the Newton has to offer in 2006 elsewhere and won't repeat it all here.
The Newton has actually been mentioned on various news sites a lot lately, due largely in part to the recent Worldwide Newton Conference but also because of recent advances like the Einstein project and the Newton book reader for Firefox.
I'm personally hoping that maybe some of its innovative user interface ideas get carried over into other projects. Obviously Apple's current Ink tablet handwriting recognition system is a direct port from the Newton. Less obviously perhaps is that its Dock removal animation is, too.
I think you came to the right place if you're looking for people who can code sites using AJaX / Web 2.0 / XHTML / CSS / JavaScript / Java / PHP / Python / XML / RDF / RSS / iCalendar / etc.
I suspect that pretty much everyone else who reads /. (myself included) can do this for you. Honestly you're going to get bombarded with choices, and the toughest thing for you will be to figure out which ones are even worthy of a second look. As someone who sometimes competes in this arena, I can say from my standpoint that you're at a big disadvantage if you don't understand the tech yourself, as it'll be really hard to tell good work from bad work -- something like graphics design anyone can judge -- something like web programming is a different thing entirely. Get familiar with the W3C validation tools for XHTML / CSS / RDF / etc. and tinker around with multiple browsers. When you're looking at prospective designers' portfolios, run them through the validation tools and check them with multiple browsers.
This isn't too surprising. Don't forget that they outright dropped FrameMaker for Mac.
This was after they claimed that the market for it had shrunk. This was after they had released a non OS X native version about a year after the release of OS X. How many Mac users do you think were waiting for the OS X native version to upgrade?
I think the only chance of us seeing a true OS X version of FrameMaker is if some other company out there comes out with something that's actually competitive with it...
Yup. Check out the "Night Hag Syndrome", too. I've never actually experienced it myself, but I've met people who have. The tricks the mind can play on one during sleep paralysis are pretty amazing.
AFAIR they are "blink and you'll miss it" appearances. I recall watching a scene from one of the movies (although I now forget which) just because a fellow SFB player told me that he had read somewhere that they had put a Kzinti in it as a nod to the animated series, and because of the link with SFB.
Remember though the Kzinti of SFB aren't 100% the Kzin of Niven; they're based on them but they did have some changes along the way (probably in part due to legal issues, and in part due to the regular changing of details as a message gets passed from one person to the next). You have to compare against the Kzinti pictures in the various SFB materials, not the pictures of Niven's Kzin. The Kzinti in the movies are based on the ones in the cartoon series and SFB, not the ones in Niven's books.
The Kzinti were in the Star Trek cartoon series. They also made cameos in some of the movies that were based on the original series (although they were never referred to by name in the movies, and I forget which movies offhand -- I believe they appeared in two of them, though). They also served to explain why Klingon ships were described in Trek literature as being heavily outfitted with drone defenses when the Federation et al weren't described as using drones -- the solution was to make the Kzinti ships heavily armed with drones.
Keep in mind I'm saying this as a Dr. Who fan who used to play SFB -- I'm sure a Trek fan could provide more (and better) details.
I've always personally said that the two big parties differ only in which portions of the Constitution they choose to ignore. For some fun examples, try talking about the independence of Church and State to a staunch Republican or the right to bear arms to a staunch Democrat...
There's been an ongoing discussion about this same topic over at Macintouch.
Personally I'm a fan of the Zope / CMF series of content management systems; the built-in CMF is quite powerful and flexible (and actually fairly efficient -- don't be fooled by the slowness of some CMSs built on top).
There are many such systems. There are some in private use (like Boston.com and Saugus.net. There are also some commercial options (like Icoya). Most though are free and open source, like Plone, Infrae Silva, and Nuxeo CPS. Each has its own focus and tends to do certain things better than the others. Each has its own special plug-ins and extensions, but since they all utilize the same underlying base framework, it's usually a doable thing (although typically not trivial) to port a product from one to another.
The capabilities of Zope's built-in CMF are also good enough that it's not at all unreasonable to fashion one's own CMS on top of it if none of the existing products seem to suit one's own particular needs.
Not fully standards compliant. Doesn't run on Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris. Lame.
The spam problem is certainly not solved simply because there is a reduced amount of spam in users' inboxes (and even that doesn't appear to be true).
ISPs still have to pay for the bandwidth wasted on spam. ISPs still have to pay for the work required to tweak filters and otherwise maintain anti-spam solutions. Who do you suppose ends up paying for this? Obviously the end customer. I'd hazard a guess that a significant fraction of what people pay their ISPs ultimately gets spent on spam bandwidth and implementing anti-spam measures.
Maybe for the time being (while waiting for the redesign) non-trivial meta comments could be obviously labeled as such in the subject. There are many ways to do so, but if perhaps just one particular way got popular (and I submit my own suggestion in the subject of this very comment) it'd be a little easier for the useful meta comments to make their way to the ears of the editors and a little easier to skip over for those who really don't care.
Well, off the top of my head, picture a single hand-held platform that offers a free development environment with a choice of a few relatively modern (in at least two cases, solidly object-oriented; I'm not familiar enough with the other available languages to comment on them though) programming languages; support for direct wired ethernet; support for Bluetooth; support for 802.11b (and I think these days 802.11g); various techy sorts of apps like Telnet in addition to the more typical hand-held fare like address books, notepads, spreadsheets, and e-mail (and it actually has the best such client I've seen on a hand-held device); a word processor good enough that people have actually used it to write novels; a keyboard option that can actually be used for touch-typing but which is still portable; a decent graphing calculator; a full graphical web browser; a basic AI interface that can turn commands like "call Darren" into a sequence that'll actually dial your brother's telephone number, placing in all the appropriate prefixes / area codes / etc. for your current location; a free-form text-edit system that works (the early versions were rough -- the MP2000 & 2100 were both solid); a fast RISC processor that still gets excellent battery life; a grayscale display with enough resolution to be useful; Unicode support; it goes on. All of the regular add-ons for hand-helds like astronomy software, interactive fiction software, etc. are also available for the Newton.
That's just a quick list. Sure, you can get lots of these things in other packages, but you can't get them all in one package except on a Newton.
If you were to ask me on a different day I'd probably come up with a completely different list... and I'm sure other Newton users will come up with additional items that I overlooked at the moment.
The big thing is the convenience of this combination with a rock-solid multi-tasking OS in a portable form-factor. It's a little hard to explain to someone who's never used such a thing. All the same reasons that people are buying and using tablets today support the Newton, although the Newton tends to be smaller and lighter than most tablets, and never crashes...
There were lots of new Newton-related technology at the show. It's a pity it's not covered anywhere.
One little thing I worked on was a Newton book reader extension for Firefox that can read Newton books from within Firefox on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, WinXP, etc. It's now in its second public version.
The reason that people still work with Newtons is simple -- Newtons still do things that nothing else on the market seem capable of doing. There are some really good, solid ideas in that OS.
Fox sold the rights to the SciFi Channel's parent company. That's why the SciFi Channel periodically shows it.