Re: [NTLK] eMate for my baby?

I agree! The wiki is a great idea. We could really start something here.
eMates are available for very little money on eBay, so they make an
excellent alternative to the Fisher-Price/VTech baby computer toys.

NSBasic does indeed work on Windows Mobile, Palm OS and the Windows desktop.
Though I'm discouraged a bit by the fact that it isn't a free language. I
know applications are royalty free. Are all the runtimes free? How cross
compatible is the code? If no one knows, I can ask George.

Though if Daniel's most comfortable working in NTK, that's fine with me.

Babies vary widely. The idea of a modular system, where parents can add
their own shapes, sounds and triggers is probably the most flexible one. It
can also grow with the baby. Smaller babies do react best to faces,
especially of people they know. I'd like my Nina to see some letters and
numbers. Since we live in New York City, I might want to use both English
and Spanish. And as I'd use the eMate to occupy her on long plane trips and
such, as well, it would be neat to load it with images or references to,
say, things she'd see at Grandma's house. As I said, my wife will talk to
one of her professors next week and get some solid educational background.

One thing I wonder: how does the eMate keyboard deal with drool and/or
spills? Also, how removable are the keys? Ideally, the keys should not be
easily removable by toddler fingers. I know the eMate was designed for
elementary education, so Apple must have thought of these things.

Since all open source projects must have cute names, I'd like to suggest
"Eftoy" or "Efty." An eft is a baby newt. I was going to suggest "polliwog,"
which is a baby frog and a very cute word, but it's being used for a Java
web log analyzer on Sourceforge.

Oh, also, I'm a writer for PC Magazine. All of this may possibly make it
into the magazine. No guarantees, but that happens with a lot of my
projects. Obviously if I do end up writing it up, anyone who doesn't want to
be mentioned, doesn't have to be.

Sascha

-----Original Message-----
From: newtontalk-bounce@newtontalk.net
[mailto:newtontalk-bounce@newtontalk.net] On Behalf Of Daniel Padilla
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2006 7:18 AM
To: newtontalk@newtontalk.net
Subject: Re: [NTLK] eMate for my baby?

> I am starting to like this idea more and more. My daughter is 3, my
> son is 20mo., so this may actually be pretty interesting for both of
> them as well.
>
> On the software side, it would be great to find a language that would
> work on other platforms as well (I believe NSBasic does, not sure
> though). This would make the development more reasonable since there
> are more possible contributers.
>

    NTK is the easiest way to program for the newton, really. All the
other options are cool when you want to develop on the move, but each
of them add their own problems.
    I'd prefer to receive content and ideas, for your language/country
for example, so that I don't have to research and spend time looking
for sounds, letter shapes, baby-recognizable images, etc

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