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