Michael,
> Digital hub? Isn't that what we all wanted with the Newton, already? I don't
> doubt that some company will do this for me at some point, but not
> yesterday. I'm not crying, but I am waiting.
I don't see it working this way. We tend to gravitate towards the personal
computer as being the hub because this the big piece of computing hardware
most of us have lying around.
Better would be to have a faceless, wireless server that allows me to pass
data between devices without ever having to interact with a conventional
computer at all.
I like to distribute different data among my Newts so that each one has a
distinct focus - synchronisation is not really relevant here, only data
passing, and beaming works beautifully in this context. Better would be a
central respository of all data so I could search it in one go. This is made
deliberately impossible by application developers.
Also, I would much prefer to have a dedicated colour tablet/pen to do my
Photoshop retouching, a dedicated audio device on various scales with real
knobs and switches, a distinct Web browser as a piece of hardware etc.
What interests me is the task, not the functionality. Having to slope back
to the PowerBook to do the non-Newton tasks shows how compromised it is as a
solution (and how good the Newt is for what it does).
We face two massive hurdles to computing's currently stagnant state:
Forget about applications in their existing monolithic forms and move to
document-centric approaches to solving problems.
(OpenDoc was going in that direction - another victim of the pressure
that can be brought to bear by the encumbant developers.)
Ditch proprietary file formats which block the free exchange of data - the
only thing any user of a computer really cares about in the final analysis.
(The WWW Consortium is doing its best to promote open data standards.)
Newton technology was already bluring the edges of the established way of
doing things and was therefore dangerous. We're so lucky that the MP2k/eMate
made it to market so we could benefit from all that development work.
The iPOD is a perfectly reasonable device, if a little pricy and lacking
recording capability, but like OS X it is the product of what has sadly
become a deeply conservative and backward-looking company.
Joel.
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