You know, I was there at the Newton protest, and Apple was surprisingly
accommodating. Originally they threatened to throw us off their
property if we showed up, and then they welcomed us with open arms, so
to speak. They cleared out the guest parking lot, put out signs helping
us navigate to the correct spot and find parking, and set up booths
with demo equipment and food givaways (which were, appropriately
enough, Apple Newton cookies). They turned what may have been a media
circus into a friendly celebration of a beloved product, and I think
more dignity and class was shown by all because of this.
It's kind of funny, when I interviewed at Apple three years ago, my
manager asked me if I had ever seen the Apple campus before, so I told
him... luckily he has a sense of humor :-)
NewtSync has gained a surprising amount of publicity not because I'm
making a big noise (I didn't tell anyone, save for posting it on
VersionTracker and mentioning it on the list) but because it's a new
product that does something people want. Some people are insisting that
I'll never sell 300 copies of the product, either because of the
license or because of the size of the Newton community. And I for one
would love to prove them wrong.
What we need is to do something that's difficult or impossible with
other PDA platforms. Perhaps that means a FilePad plug-in to sync with
SQL databases. Or a Web Services client of some sort... try to think of
something new that PDAs don't currently do, download the newton
programming documentation and put something together.
But I wouldn't expect the Newton to get resurrected... ever. I'm going
out on a limb here, but I doubt there's any chain of events that will
cause this to happen, from Apple anyway. A better solution here would
be to band together and create a new PDA... one that embraces the
strengths of the Newton and addresses its weaknesses. I'm a software
guy and therefore lack the know-how required to pull this together, but
someone on this list may be able to. The important thing to remember is
in order for a product to succeed, it has to fill a void of some sort.
What concrete thing could this new PDA (or even a resurrected Newton
product) do that others don't? You can't qualify things like better
handwriting recognition and a more intuitive OS on paper.
John Anderson
everchanging
On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 06:30 AM, Jon Glass wrote:
> Another thing, I really don't think that the Powers-that-be at Apple
> are
> ignorant of NTLK. I really think that we would have a hard time
> springing
> something on SJ without his prior knowledge. This means that Apple
> would
> probably do something preemptive to either lessen the impact, or to
> eclipse
> it entirely. I don't have enough imagination to guess what, but I do
> wonder
> if we could pull this off. :-) But, no, I don't think it will be
> perceived
> as a pie or a slap in the face. It _might_ be perceived as a bunch of
> raving
> lunatics, or rabid fans, but beyond that... OK, it would be fun. ;-)
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Dec 02 2002 - 22:03:38 EST