It’s been nearly 5 years since the Newton was “cancelled” by Apple, but the Newton community has kept it going strong. Tuesday night featured the 9th Anniversary Meeting of the Stanford Newton User Group, one of the first Newton user groups ever created.
When I was a freshman at Stanford, I attended one of the early meetings at the Printer’s Inc. Cafe in Palo Alto, and was promptly scared away by all of the techie computer programmer types there! You see, coming into college, I had dreams of being a chemistry and art major! I was well-versed in computers, but I never gave much thought to studying computer science. Chem32 changed all of that, however, and I went down the path of combining art and science together in Symbolic Systems.
I became a regular at SNUG few years later after I had learned a bit about programming, but I made sure not to intimidate those without a programming background. After all, I wanted them to come back to the meeting, not run away and never come back!
Applications
There are more and more applications coming out for the Newton. The month of December and the beginning of January, I wrote a blogging tool, a powerful HTML editor, and an XML-RPC library for the Newton. You can find these apps on my temporary blog site. I’ll probably get around to installing something like Movable Type or CafeLog to work alongside my existing system. Not right now, though, since I’m way too busy with work to do anything related to this web site (hence the lack of updates recently).
For those of you who are interested, my secret project is not porting The Sims over to the Newton. The story about me on CrazyAppleRumors was pretty funny though!
We held a raffle during the meeting. While I was in San Diego during the Winter Holidays, I rounded up all of my old Newton paraphernalia expressly for this meeting. From a copy of Graffiti to various Newton documentation books, all of it went into the possession of the Newton Faithful! I did keep my Armistice NuBUS board (for the time being, there’s always next year!). Also, I ended up winning the Newton Systems Integrator sweatshirt. Though it’s an XX-Large, it seems to fit me just fine. I’ll wear it with pride!
Jeremy showed off his blue backlit Newton, which he recently had gotten installed. It was definitely brighter than the old green backlight, but the touchscreen felt a little too smooth for my taste. Perhaps a screen protector would give it the extra texture and grit that I’d like. Greg brought his MagicCap device, and I did a quick demo of Bluetooth connectivity with my Palm Tungsten-T (what a stupid name for a product). I also demonstrated nBlog, nHTML, and the XML-RPC library.
Habitat for iPod
Wayne and Rosie demoed and handed out units of their new product, Habitat for iPod to those SNUG members who owned iPods (thanks, Wayne and Rosie!). The Habitat is a kick-ass stand for the Apple iPod MP3 player. It’s far better than anything else on the marketplace today. If you take a look at the pictures, there are slots for the iPod, the FireWire connector (when your iPod is with you), and the headphones. There’s even a security slot to prevent your iPod from becoming an iWalk and walking away!
I remember talking to Wayne and Rosie about this product a year ago during the 8th Anniversary SNUG meeting. It’s amazing to see that they’ve finally got a finished product in their hands! Hard work it is indeed to create something, but if you’ve got the dedication and the passion, the work doesn’t seem like work. Amazing how that is, no? For more information on the Habitat and other products from BubbleDesign, visit their web site!
The Lunatic Collection
Lunatic demoed his software that he recently released as Open Source. I can’t remember all of the names at the moment, but them all seemed to have “-em” at the end of them. Filter-Em, Clip-Em, etc. It’s all good! All of my software seemed to have an ‘n’ in front of the application’s name, such as nHTML, nBlog, or nBattleship. StandAlone’s always had the word “man” in their apps, like DateMan.
Other Recent Events
Vienna Teng on the David Letterman Show. Nuff said!
In other news, a couple of weeks ago, I went to Stanford to see the Masters students in Product Design give their personal project presentations. I went primarily to hang out with Eric and to see Elliot and Mandy’s projects. Elliot made this light case fashioned out of aluminum, and Mandy created this cool convertible vest with many accessory pockets.
This past Sunday, I watched the Super Bowl with Rae and Randy. Though I wanted the Raiders to win, the Buccaneers were the better team (that day) and a worthy Super Bowl Champion.
Work is progressing well. The revolution is almost at hand. Until then, satisfy yourself with some photos in my photo gallery.
tow.com 