Re: [NTLK] How do you use your Newton?

From: Jim Anderson (jiman_at_microsoft.com)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 13:26:44 PST


Matt wrote:
> Newbie here again. At the risk of raising the ire of those=20
> tired of answering newbie questions, I'll ask one more. Never=20
> having had a Newton until now, I am curious as to the ways=20
> some of you use your Newton in your daily routine. Any and=20
> all insight would be most appreciated.

        I mostly use mine as a spare brain. My most heavily used
application is Notes, which I use for just about everything. I've hacked
together an application to allow automatic hyperlinking between notes,
which lets me keep huge piles of the things connected together via
various associations. The other main thing I do with my Newt is read
while bussing to and from work. At any given time I'll have about 20
Newton Books loaded up for this.
        I don't really use Dates too much. We all use the same PIM at
work, and I'm typically at my desk, so I do most of my scheduling that
way. I don't tend to schedule much when I'm not at work (the occasional
dental appointment, that sort of thing). I keep a list of people and
companies I deal with outside of work in Names, mostly so I can do
things like write "call pagliacci pizza" into Assist (this is a cool
thing, if you haven't tried it...).
        It's funny. I've got a 32MB memory card stuffed with software,
but I don't really end up using much more than the regular built-in
applications.

        Oh, yeah! I use Dashboard, too. I don't really think of it as a
separate app, anymore. It's just part of the overriding Newton
environment for me, an extension to the OS. Larry already described it
very well, so I won't waste space with that except to say that I really
like using it for scripting. I've got a bunch of scripts set up to do
things like freeze or thaw NIE (all packages on a Newton take up a
little heap memory, which is pretty limited. Freezing the package frees
up the heap that it consumes. You can't use a "frozen" package, though,
without "thawing" it. I use my scripts to freeze a bunch of related
packages that I'm not currently using, in order to save heap, and thaw
them out when I need them. The example I used, NIE (Newton Internet
Enabler), is a set of packages that lets you connect to the internet
from your Newton. They're a good candidate for freezing, since I only
connect occasionally).

        Cheers,

Jim Anderson

Blardy blar blar blar...

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