Re: [NTLK] might give up on newton- people... people...

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Andy Hill <adhill@fastmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I totally 100% agree, surely the point is to celebrate the Newton for what
> is it. A superb note, address, diary, email, safe storage, immediate on,
> long battery life, portable, intuitive, handwriting recognition, durable,
> simple, fun, device which has many hundreds if not thousands of active users
> and supporters and a small but seriously important number of active
> developers. Take for example as already mentioned: Blunt, Mailv, Adriano's
> hardware, Doug's recent Newtway, and the exquisite iNewton which I am about
> to purchase etc etc etc. Plus all the exceptional software like MoreInfo,
> Timetrax, Supernotepad that are as useful now as they ever were. Unna,
> Newtontalk and other sources are a gold mine really!

And I agree completely. I love using my Newton every day as is and
there is an abundance of great software and hardware accessories that
have already been developed.

> It would be a great shame if the archive became increasingly filled with
> threads about it's supposed demise and the search for holy grail of pdas.

My comments were not intended as cries of "the sky is falling" nor am
I looking for a replacement for my Newton. However, my concern is that
we have fewer and fewer (if any) _new_ developers coming on to the
scene. Eckhart and Matthias have put great effort into building new
development tools, but they are not yet ready for current developers,
let alone new developers, to actively use them. Newton development has
a considerable amount of black art involved when it comes to trying to
do anything more than a straightforward NewtApp application.

We actually have a ton of documentation on the inner workings of the
Newton and Newton OS thanks to those such as Paul Guyot, Filip
Zawadiak, Eckhart Köppen, Simon Bell, Matthias Melcher, et al. I
propose a push to improve the developer tools sooner rather than later
so that we can get more people interested in developing for the Newton
platform while we still have some of these brains amongst us to tap.
Even if all new developers intend to do is keep patching the open
source software we have now, that's great. But, a few new useful and
fun extra apps here and there wouldn't hurt. :)

BTW - I've got some UNNA changes in the works (although, admittedly,
they've been delayed as of late) that I hope can help not only further
preserve what we already have, but encourage new work.

Morgan Aldridge

---
morgant@makkintosshu.com
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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