From: Joel M. Sciamma (joel_at_inventors-emporium.co.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 30 2005 - 01:58:11 PDT
Brian,
> So far I have had a lukewarm response to my proposal to design and
> produce
> the USB-001 board.
The issue is not so much at the Newton end as the PC end. Unless we
can get applications like NCU, NTK, X-Port Newton Bookmaker and
others working with USB, then having a USB connection on the Newt is
much less useful. X-Port will at least work over AppleTalk but who
knows how long Apple will keep that around?
Our problem is not so much connectivity - the Keyspan USB/Serial
exists already after all and it works - but software.
Development tools like NTK won't even run unless they can see a
serial port and from the Mac side we don't have Mac OS X applications
that do the same job as the classic ones yet.
As Apple transition to Intel, we are going to lose our classic
capability on new machines so either we'll have to keep a classic
capable Mac around or someone will have to write new Newton clients,
and sadly that's not going to happen for things like NTK - or the
others most likely.
So, having USB is nice but where does it get us? It might enable some
of us to do the basics without having a Keyspan adaptor but at best
it's only a partial solution, hence the muted response.
Sorry to be the voice of doom but Apple's refusal to make Newton
technologies available to us makes life very difficult.
Joel.
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Oct 30 2005 - 02:30:07 PST