Re: [NTLK] might give up on newton

From: Morgan Aldridge <morgant_at_makkintosshu.com>
Date: Thu May 15 2008 - 08:14:28 EDT

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 1:25 AM, Martin Joseph <NT@stillnewt.org> wrote:
>
> I wouldn't be so negative about it just yet Brian. Sometimes it
> takes a while for the right person to come along and decide to work
> on an open sourced project. You never know, it could still prove to
> be a great gift to Newton users everywhere to have access to the source.
>
> Of course I do thing the the previous poster over states his case
> with regards to this, as there are also MANY examples of open sourced
> projects that have languished into inexistance.
>
> Hopefully Newtchat comes back to life.

It is definitely a problem that can happen with any open source
software, but we in the Newton community are at a very dangerous point
right now. We've got hardware that works and a great user community,
but the number of developers has dwindled to just a handful.

And that's not just skilled developers, but all developers, from the
looks of things. More worrying is the fact that the developer tools
are inaccessible to many people. There's obviously already the hurdle
of learning the NewtonScript language, but then there's a lot of work
involved in getting the developer tools up and running, and debugging
is available in only two of the somewhat less practical cases: you can
either find an old Mac or Windows PC and get NTK installed (you'll get
debugging, but NTK has some serious flaws); or you can set up an
emulated/virtualized environment and run an old copy of Mac OS or
Windows, then get NTK installed (and lose debugging capabilities in
most cases, plus NTK is still buggy); or you can try some of the
recent, but incomplete third-party developer tools (DyneTK or Eckhart
Köppen's NewtonTools, also with no debugging capabilities).

There's lots of Newton development documentation on UNNA and Kallisys,
but the shortage of developers (esp. those that have time to play
mentor) and the difficulties surrounding setting up, let alone using,
the developer tools are really hurting us right now.

I personally have had interest in contributing to a couple of the open
source projects, but while I understand much of the NewtonScript
language, have yet to been able to get any of the developer tools to a
point where I could really play with them. Given a weekend, I'm sure I
could get one of the aforementioned methods working, but the truth is
to provide a few patches to open source software, let alone major
contributions, requires an amount of free time I just don't have at
the moment.

It's really a considerable disappointment.

Morgan Aldridge

---
morgant@makkintosshu.com
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
==================================================================== 
The NewtonTalk Mailing List - http://www.newtontalk.net/
The Official Newton FAQ     - http://www.splorp.com/newton/faq/
The Newton Glossary         - http://www.splorp.com/newton/glossary/
WikiWikiNewt                - http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
====================================================================
Received on Thu May 15 08:14:33 2008

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu May 15 2008 - 09:30:00 EDT