Re: [NTLK] linux kernel running on the iPhone and iPod Touch

On 30.11.2008, at 21:39, John Broughton wrote:

> Matthias,
> I think some people do things just to do them. They seem to miss the
> point that some things are not done because there's not a good
> reason to do them. As you said, why do this? It just doesn't make a
> lot of sense to waste time doing something that nobody will ever use.

I know. I did a lot of useless programming when I was 16. Now at 42,
time has become very precious ;-)

I just think that the iPhone is a bad hardware replacement for the
aging MP's. Just because iPhon is an Apple product (and has a wow
factor) does not make it a good platform. Pretty much any navigation
would be a better replacement for the MPs. They have roughly the same
screen size, can work with a pen, and run hours on a single battery
charge. Some of them are "open", so porting NewtonOPS to one of
*those* would be great.

But here is the best solution: we need to develop beyon mulation. We
must replace the most used parts of the OS with native code that runs
at full speed. This would likely quadruple battery life on an emulated
system and make the whole OS work as spiffy as it was meant to be. Oh,
and if we have native code, we can start fixing it and add features
like color support.

It's nice that we have Linux on the iPhone. Kudos to the developer.
This must have been a 24h job for a few weeks.

But if *that* man power would have gone into improving Einstein and
writing native code, gosh, NewtonOS would run on the iPhone at full
speed already. I wish I still had that kind of time! ;-)

Matthias

PS: I am restarting my Newton software efforts as of today, and I hope
I will have the first new Einstein feature out by the end of the
week :-P

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