The Curse of the Mummy

NewtOS may be dead and buried according to Apple, but it takes more than that to keep a good product under the ground. The upgrade programme for Newton 2000 to 2100 finished at the end of April, and that was the final official Apple activity for Newton. Future products are expected, but based on MacOS and using the eMate 300 form factor. If you've seen the Apple PowerBook G3, or their new iMac, it is clear that the new house style for Apple comes from the Newton Division (and a British designer). Translucent cases with bits of electronics showing through is a fashion statement on a par with models wearing cling-film: it's sexy, but the attraction can wear off.

Most of the Newton developers have moved on to other PDAs, announcing products for PalmOS and Windows CE, but they still have a good breadth of products for NewtOS. There used to be many web sites devoted to Newton, but some of these have closed up shop or just stopped updating, leaving only a few with frequent updates.

http://www.planetnewton.com
http://www.newton-underground.com

Newton is a great PDA because, despite being the first, it is still the best implementation of the sheet of paper concept. Its handwriting recognition is far superior to any competitors (say Grafitti on the PalmPilots, or Jot on Windows CE), being full recognition rather than a strict character by character recogniser, and is both fast, and can work on pages of stored ink. The only disadvantage it shows, for a personal machine, is that the late models were consistently too big and heavy to keep with you.

I was recently asked by another journalist why there wasn't a word count feature in the Newton Works package that ships on the Newton 2000, 2100 and eMate 300. Journalists in general don't ask much of their word processing packages, but they get very cranky if any features that they really need are missing. In general this amounts to just a very fast text editor with good search and replace features; spell checking is optional, but word count is essential; it is also a feature that most real world users don't really care about. The solution is to buy Works Better, from Stand Alone Inc, who are one of the developers that are continuing to support the Newton. This costs $29.95, and adds a lot of good features to NewtWorks. Most of these are aimed at imporved printing: multiple column support, headers and footers, enhanced page numbering, landscape printing; but it also enables handwriting recognition in the word processor, and adds a go to page option, and word counting. Strongly recommended.

http://www.standalone.com

One of the consequences of the Newton being abandoned by Apple was that some things were released from the labs by disgruntled developers. One of the most interesting of these was the text to speech program. This adds itself to the routing menu, which can be reached from any document on the Newton (Memos, Contacts, etc). A somewhat robotic voice reads out the selected text. That's all, but it has a lot of uses beyong the obvious gee whizz! factor. Reading out notes or email in poor light conditions, or reading from a Newton Book are straightforward examples. I find that a spoken rendition makes spelling and grammatical errors easier to locate and correct, as another example.

Another project that finally came to light after Newton was cancelled was the Newton Quake project. This is just great; a full scale implementation of Quake for the Newton, respecting the limits of that platform. Memory sizes and the black and white display obviously mean that it wouldn't be possible to implement a full version of Quake; but if Palmtop can produce a version of Doom for the Psion Series 5, which uses a slower version of the ARM processor than the Newton 2000/2100, Quake for the Newton has to be at least feasible.

http://www.emeraldnet.net/~ravenous/NewtonQuake/index.htm

Of course, as with everything, there has to be a catch. The catch with Newton Quake? Look at the last question in the Newton Quake FAQ - it's an April Fool.

Quake on a Newton. Really?

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: July 6, 1998