One of the next steps in bringing Newton back from the dead is to move the development environment away from Classic and onto Mac OS X. Thanks to the efforts of Paul Guyot and Makoto Nukui, we have the beginnings of a native Mac OS X NTK.
In my (limited) spare time, I think I’ll noodle around getting this working a little better. The ultimate goal would be to have backward compatibility with existing Classic NTK projects. A more reasonable goal would be get the system working for new package development. We can worry about backward compatibility later.
I had a little trouble getting NTK installed on Classic on the Quad. Just so I remember in the future, to install NTK on Mac OS X under Classic, perform the following:
- Download NTK from the United Network of Newton Archives
- Move AppleTalk ADSP Tool and Apple Modem Tool into the Extensions folder of Classic’s System Folder
- Move Newton Toolkit Font into the Fonts folder of Classic’s System Folder
- Download TCPSerial 1.0.1 and install the two files in the archive into the Extensions folder
To get the Inspector working with the Newton, I had to:
- Create an Airport network that my Newton with a Skyline Wireless Card can connect to
- Turn on AppleTalk in Classic
- Set AppleTalk to work over the Airport network in Network System Preference
tow.com 
Eckhart Köppen has done some research into using gcc and an ARM cross-compiler under Mac OS X (using Xcode, but that’s not necessary). See “Distractions” (http://40hz.org/mottek/?p=3), “To The Moon” (http://40hz.org/mottek/?p=4), and “Classic – Here to Stay?” (http://40hz.org/mottek/?p=5) on his blog.
Transitioning to gcc and a cross-compiler would be beneficial as optimizations could make it back to the community and it could be made to work with Xcode on Mac OS X, on Linux, and even on Windows using cygwin.
I would love to see a Mac OS X development environment so I can get into Newton Development (I still haven’t gotten NTK over to my Color Classic).
Unfortunately, gcc doesn’t use the same architecture (ABI) as Norcroft compilers do. That’s the problem Eckhart went into (I don’t know if he mentions it on his blog).
Plus Norcroft compilers generate way better code than gcc for arm (actually, this statement is based on an analysis of 2.95 or maybe 3.x code, not on code generated by gcc 4.x).
Ah, now I see the problem. Your description in Events and NewtWorld (http://www.kallisys.com/files/newton/Bowels/Events_and_NewtWorld.txt) helped clarify.
What direction would you head in?
Relativity will let you use traditional gcc-based binaries.
Very cool. :)
Adam, a side note about OS X, I’ve wanted to build a dynamic site with my Mac, that uses a server app, and I am really looking into ColdFusion because I’ve liked Macromedia’s other products. The only database option (on a Mac) would be MySQL right? And that isn’t the most GUI friendly program from a designer’s background…any thoughts?