Re: [NTLK] On Woody Smith...Hello:...I was just looking back ...

From: Frank Gruendel <newtontalk_at_pda-soft.de>
Date: Tue Apr 21 2009 - 17:25:25 EDT

>> who have actually kept this platform viable.

> Correction: who have kept _OS 2.x_ viable.

Hmmm...

To the best of my knowledge, everything currently available at

        http://www.pda-soft.de/software.html

works on every Newton model there is and on all non-Newton models that their author had a chance to
get his hands on.

Writing applications that way is more often than not a pain in the proverbial back part of one's
body since many features that are built into Newton OS 2.x have to be implemented "by hand". This
generally increases an application's size significantly. Since one is doing this to make an
application run on Newton models that come with very little memory to begin with, this is sort of a
step in the wrong direction and requires extreme care and time spent on dealing with insufficiently
documented OS system calls :-(

Every additional line of code might contain an additional bug. This generally makes programs less
reliable.

Coding that way takes a lot of dedication. Along with that it takes significantly more time for test
and debugging. Before the first version of NewtTest was released, it was tested on a German and an
English OMP, two Englisch MP100s with different system versions, an English MP110, an English and a
German MP120 with OS 1.3, and English and a German MP 120 with OS 2.0, an English and a German
version of a MP 130, MP2000, MP2100, one eMate and one Sharp ExpertPad. The fact that it wasn't
tested on a German MP100 was because the author did not have one back then.

Had this program been written for OS 2.x only, its size would be half of what it is today. The time
for testing would have been less than one third of what it actually was. Just as the time actually
spent on coding would have been.

This is OK if one does not plan to make money with one's software and if one has the time and skills
to write this kind of code. But for people who code for a living, coding for 1.x Newtons does not
make any commercial sense whatsoever. Not only for the reasons outlined above, but also because in
all likeliness about 99% of one's customers are unlikely to need it since they use OS 2.x Newtons.
It would be a bit like endangering the success of a new Windows 2007 application because one wants
it to run under Windows 95...

Frank

-- Newton software and hardware at http://www.pda-soft.de

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Received on Tue Apr 21 17:24:58 2009

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