[NTLK] Announcing Dash Board 1.5.2013d1!

[Woody Smith]

Thank you for this awesome uti;ity.

Woody


On Jul 1, 2013, at 10:26 AM, Mason Mark wrote:

> 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/