From: DJ Vollkasko (DJ_Vollkasko_at_gmx.net)
Date: Wed Jan 04 2006 - 03:39:55 PST
The current super-low profile of Waba on Newton seems to be more from
lack of marketing than from any limitation of its own.
Maybe if we could get some more (Newbie-)compatible public relation
going on... I'm thinking of a couple pages on the WikiWikiNewt on:
-- how to run Waba on Newton
-- which Waba-apps work great on Newton
-- how to port stuff to Newton Waba/how to develop for Newton Waba
I think that might help getting people to actually try it out. I mean,
knowing about it gives you the feeling it's a neat thing and
everything, but what does it offer you?
Now, if we'd have a publicly maintained Waba-ressource with a listing
(and hopefully reviews) of compatible apps, that would give the whose
thing a much bigger user base. I guess. I mean, if there is a whole
Waba developer community out there, who knows what their apps have to
offer us.
How do you feel about this?
> so allow me to clear some things up about
>Waba. It's a bytecode interpreter for a subset of Java. Its core is
>written in fairly optimized C++, *not* in NewtonScript.
Aaaah ssso!
> However
>there's a lot of NewtonScript attached to it which is crucial for it
>to do its job. Most importantly for this discussion, in order to
>draw to the screen, Waba must construct NewtonScript requests and
>submit them to the NewtonScript interpreter to draw for Waba. That's
>where most of the slowdown comes from. The reason for this is that
>Apple never released a C++ API to Quickdraw; the only way to do this
>is to go through NS. In my experience, if you're doing lots of
>computation, Waba is *fast*. Quite surprisingly fast. If you're
>drawing to the screen a lot -- games etc. -- Waba starts to slow
>down. On an MP2K, Waba's pretty good.
So Waba might even calculate faster than NS if you neglect the graphics?
>Now it just so happens that Jim Witte (whom I've cc:ed) has been
>poking around with C++ calls to QuickDraw. He thinks he may be able
>to get DrawShape working, which would speed up Waba's screen drawing
>tremendously.
Wow, that would be great! More power to the brave developers of
Newtonia!
Hmh, now, how can we get the developers working on applications again?
;=}
Cheers,
'Kasko
-- 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/
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