>And the Newton (i.e. the technology) is still years ahead of every single
>other technology on the market today.
I've been wondering whether I should post my $0.02, and I think it's
time. Although I must admit I don't use my Newt near as much as I should,
but one thing that I think is most innovative about it is its simple and
elegant (yet powerful) programming interface.
Yes, I have heard suggestions that a successful PDA has to support
main-stream languages (i.e. C++), and I have qualms with the Apple Newton
dev environment (anybody *else* want it to be open-sourced?), it seems that
one of the *most* important things about a PDA platform is that it should
be easy to make things for it, perhaps even for *users* to be able to make
applications for it. While some aspects of Newtonscript aren't simple
enough for a novice to understand after, say, a week of study (soups,
serial i/o), the concept of the view system and the inherant object
oriented design of the system seems the way to go. I took *one* look at a
piece of Palm code, saw a main even loop, thought "*Why* do I have to use
an event loop?", and then thought, "I'll put off learning to program the
Palm for later.."
As for Apple's direction, I can't see why they don't see the advantages
of using OO in a PDA again. Now, if they would implement MacOS X Lite (and
Cocoa, which is heavily based on the NeXT OpenStep OS) on a PDA device,
that's a start.. Maybe, thought Cocoa I'm sure is *much* more complicated
an OO system than Newtonscript is (Cocoa being for a "traditional" OS after
all).
My 0$.002
Jim
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