[NTLK] NewtonTalk Digest, Vol 74, Issue 13

[NewtonTalk]

> Yes, nice video. But he totally messed up the syncing part.
> It is very easy to sync the Newton with newer macs. 
> You just need a serial2usb. 

Well, in my humble and admittedly unimportant opinion establishing a serial
connection is the easiest part. Synchronization begins AFTER that. It has
NEVER been easy to sync a Newton with ANY desktop computer. My personal
definition of synchronization is that changes you made on the desktop,
regardless of whether you made them in notes, to dos, dates or mails, are
automatically transferred into the Newton and vice versa. Without having to
jump through any loops during the process. The closest we ever came to that
was when we were using the Newton Backup Utility (NBU), which unfortunately
is Newton OS 1.x only. And even then not everything was synced.

Buying and installing the software required to make Microsoft Outlook
synchronize with my Palm Pilot took but a couple of seconds. After that it
simply worked. At the push of a button. Calendar, dates, notes and mails
were effortlessly synced on both machines. Every. Single. Time. It was so
easy that I took to syncing two or three times a day at work. A long time
ago, my Palm Pilot unexpectedly woke me early in the morning because my boss
had changed the time for a meeting without telling me about the change.

Compared to that, all that Apple ever provided for our Newtons felt like a
pathetic attempt, not like a workable solution.

The up side back then was that I hardly ever felt the need to synchronize
anything. I always found it sufficient to back my Newtons up frequently to
different cards. If ever I needed anything on my desktop, I put it in a note
and either transferred it via NCU, which works as long as you stick to ASCII
text, or I emailed it to myself.

I always try to use the device that'll get the job done the fastest or most
painless. Back then I was using a Palm Pilot, a Newton, a Mac OS computer, a
Windows computer and a Linux computer. Apart from no longer using my Palm
Pilot because their software refused to work on my last 64 bit PC, this
hasn't changed.

Frank

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