[NTLK] Announcing Dash Board 1.5.2013d1!

[Mason Mark]

Hello, party people!! :-D

Sorry for the melodramatic title. ;-)

I'm just writing to the list to let people know that yesterday I finally released the open-source version[1] of Dash Board, my popular Newton OS 2.1 interface enhancement from the 1990s. (Hey, better fifteen years late than never, right?)

There aren't actually any new features in Dash Board 1.5.2013d1, only a couple new bugs, as described in the README. :-P

I also celebrated checking this off my to-do list by writing a self-indulgent blog post[2] about it.

I'm afraid both blog post and GitHub README (and actually the source code itself as well) are chock full of profane language and comments that aren't appropriate for a family-oriented list like this one. So please allow me to quote just a bit of the project README here:

> Finally, not really having anywhere better to express it, I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you to the thousands of people who bought Dash Board over the years. The success of Dash Board profoundly changed my life for the better.


I really mean that; I've now written a lot of other software in my life, but none of it actually altered the course of my life the way Dash Board did.

The main reason I bothered to finally open-source Dash Board, after procrastinating for so many years, is Einstein. The hardware Newton devices themselves are all dying (at least mine all have, except one intermittently-booting MP2000 on critical life support), but with Einstein, the Newton can live on. Perhaps not as an OS, but at least as an app that provides a still-functioning window into the past, and as a high-fidelity viewer of data from the past.

What I mean is this: My son is only 9 months old. If I want to, say, show him when he is in college (in 2031) what I was working on when I was in college (in 1998), Einstein is going to be the only way to do it (and presumably, at that point in time, I will also need an OS X emulator or something like that on which to run Einstein). 

For certain kinds of data -- data like that of our old Newtons, whose native format or platform was ahead of its time, or different, to the extent that there were no contemporary analogues to convert it to when the platform reached senescence -- emulators will be the only way to really maintain the ability to see that data in something close to its original form.

So I love -- LOVE! -- that Einstein is so awesome and works so well. Mad props to everybody involved. It's incredible.

But, I am seriously BUMMED that my own seminal work for Newton, Dash Board, doesn't support screen resolutions other than the MP2x00's 320x480. Because in the age of Einstein, where your Newton screen can be any size you want, that's just lame.

So, although I don't expect to have much time to devote to it (aforementioned 9-month-old baby and so forth), my hope is to add that one single feature: support for arbitrary screen size.

And also to fix the few bugs that were caused by exhuming Dash Board from its grave and re-animating it. (But that part will be easy.)

Thanks for reading!
--
Mason Mark
mason at fivespeed.com


[1]: Dash Board on GitHub: https://github.com/masonmark/Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS

[2]: my blog post about me, me, me, me, me, and a bit also about Dash Board: http://masonmark.com/dash-board-revisited/