#applenewton — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #applenewton, aggregated by home.social.
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Twenty seven years ago today, @paulguyot compiled and published the very first edition of the Newton FAQ.
This #RetroComputing resource is still maintained and actively updated by me and the #AppleNewton community.
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Whoa, if I'm reading this correctly, then Newton had Autolayout, at least as early as 1996 (Newton OS 2). Autolayout didn't ship on iOS until iOS 6 in 2012!
> The viewJustify slot is used to set the view alignment and is closely linked in its usage and effects with the viewBounds slot.
> The viewJustify slot specifies how text and graphics are aligned within the
view and how the bounds of the view are aligned relative to its parent or sibling views. (Sibling views are child views that have a common parent view.)
> In the viewJustify slot, you can specify one or more alignment attributes, which are represented by constants defined as bit flags. You can specify one alignment attribute from each of the following groups:(Source: Newton Programmer's Guide 2.0, Pages 3-13 through 3-18, Apple)
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(You can tell how quickly I'm reading the Newton Developer's Guide from these posts):
Newton OS 2 had basically 3 ways of creating apps:
1. Do everything yourself
2. Create a "form" style app using NewtSDK
3. Create a "book" app, because epub didn't exist yet.(1) is basically how modern iOS & Mac dev has worked for... basically ages.
(2) is super interesting. With Newton OS 2, they were like "a lot of apps are basically just CRUD for soups, let's make it as easy as possible to do that". Which also goes against some of Apple's current recommendations (You could kinda read parts of 4.2 (https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#minimum-functionality) as banning stuff like this). I WISH Apple had stuff like this. Way too many apps are CRUD for some backend service. A decent portion of the apps I've worked on in my career have been CRUD for some backend service. Hell, I've been arguing for years at work to get support to create something like this so that we can stop re-inventing the wheel for each sub-feature of our way-larger-than-it-should-be app. And Apple had shipped this, in the mid 90s!
(3) is one of the examples where things have gotten better since Newton. Nowadays, we've standardized on formats for creating ebooks and such, making it much simpler to publish these (though, you could certainly do MORE things with a newton-style digital book, I imagine most people just used this to ship text-based content with light images, nothing too interactive).
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If Walter Smith (the guy who designed NewtonScript) ever sees this, he'd be very indignant. If anything javascript was modeled after newtonscript (in actuality, they're both heavily influenced by a bunch of languages developed much earlier: Self, SmallTalk, C/C++, etc.)
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Reading more Newton Developer Documentation, and I learned that every app executes as a subroutine in the same process. Which means that you can fully crash every other app if you mess up particularly badly (probably wasn't that much of an issue in practice, because NewtonScript was, in many, many ways, javascript for Newton).
From the Newton Developer's Guide:
> All Newton applications, including the recognition system, built-in applications, and applications you develop, run in a single operating system task, called the Application task.
The 90s were wild!
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Spoiler … it’s definitely not the #AppleNewton
https://mstdn.social/@osnews/117095472896155575 -
I discovered that you can select script written using the “sketch” mode, and then double-tap on it to get the Newton to try to transcribe that to text.
This basically eliminates any reason I had to use the “ink text” mode.
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Twenty nine years ago today, Newton, Inc. unveiled “an exciting, new look”, including a refreshed logo and corporate identity after being spun out of Apple earlier in the year.
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So, I’ve been using my MessagePad 2100 to take notes in meetings this week.
1. The handwriting recognition is too slow and inaccurate when I’mm writing fast. Better to transcribe after the fact.
2. Ok, switch to the ink text variant. Oh no, this reduces the size of the text which makes it much harder to read (is there a way to reverse that?). But at least I can tap on the text to run the handwriting recognition after the fact.
3. But, again, this is awful because I was writing quickly, not legibly. And the text has been shrunk such that I can’t even read what I originally wrote.
4. Also, at some point, you run into the storage limit for a note. Which is annoying, but you can workaround it by just creating a new note. Fine.
5. Obvious, actual text uses less space, so if you convert the ink text to actual text, then you can have more information per note.
6. So, today, I switched to using the sketch mode, which doesn’t reduce the text (so, it’s actually legible), but I also don’t think I can run handwriting recognition on it after the fact.
7. But, the sketch mode also takes up very valuable screen real estate, and scrolling on a Newton is not as fine grained as I’d like. As far as I can tell, you can only scroll by about 3/4 of a page or so, with no option to change that. I hope I’m wrong on this. This makes it harder to read and interact with the note than I’d like.
8. Sketch mode even more so has the issue of each note has a max size it can be.
9. Also, moving things around in a note is more annoying than it should be. I like the magic lasso selection that more modern notetaking apps do, but for a newton, you need to long-press, then draw the stylus over what you want to select.
10. The scribble-over-to-delete gesture is amazing, and more things should copy that.Again, I can’t stress enough that despite my complaints, I find the Newton charming enough to put up with. I’m also sure a lot of that is just new-device-honeymoon. Like, I don’t think I’m going to be using this to take notes for work long-term.
I also cannot help but wonder how much better more modern Newtons would be if it had continued. We still haven’t seen anything quite like the Newton.
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Another accident of design that contributes to making the Newton joyful to use: The raised bezel around the screen
Knowing very little about the development, I highly doubt this was intentional. However, comparing writing a note on the newton vs. writing a note on an iPad. There's a huge issue of "where do you put your hand so that it doesn't interfere with the touchscreen?". Obviously, the Newton receives a massive boost due to the fact that resistive touchscreens naturally do this (because they suck), but I also strongly suspect that the raised bezel helps with this as well (that, and the small screen. This is smaller even than my iPad mini. Which I use because pilot). It just gives you a place to rest your palm, where you know it won't interfere with the screen (or deposit palm-grease onto the screen).
I bet I could achieve a similar effect just wearing some padding on my palm when writing using an iPad.
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Thirty three years ago today, Apple debuted the Newton at Macworld Boston.
#AppleNewton
#OriginalMessagePad
#RetroComputinghttps://web.archive.org/web/20140323023328/https://www.msu.edu/~luckie/gallery/mp100.htm
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I also haven't gushed enough about how much I absolutely ADORE espy sans (the default Newton system font. Used in the app/icon names and such. It's not the font for the text of the note, which I believe is Sand?). My introduction to Espy Sans was the iPod Mini in 2004, and to this day Espy Sans is my favorite font. Apple knocked it way out of the park with that.
Unfortunately, Espy Sans is not going to make an (official) comeback because it's a bitmap font, and truetype fonts are definitely a better technology.
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Only a day later, and I am finding myself significantly more impressed at the handwriting recognition on the MessagePad 2100. Yes, I’m slightly changing how I write to try to fit that, but if it’ll result in more readable chicken scratch, then this is only a good thing.
But, like, this was all handwritten, with only a handful of corrections made, and only to change the capital M’s down to lowercase m’s. No ducking autocorrect!
(I need to do the patch that’ll let me set the date to a current one, the Newton had its own y2k38 problem about a decade ago due to using 16? 24? bit Ints to represent date)
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Ok, so initial impressions:
1. There's so much whimsy in this. Deleting a note has a cute animation where the note is crumpled up and put into a trash can. Accompanied with a sound effect of crumpling paper.
2. I forgot how much resistive touchscreens suck. It takes an unreasonable amount of pressure for a touch to be recognized. Similar to when you're trying to use a ballpoint pen that's nearly out of ink.
3. The handwriting recognition is surprisingly good for the mid-90s. That said, it's still objectively bad. It's easy to forget that we didn't get good handwriting recognition until relatively recently. That said, Eat Up Martha is definitely still a thing, even though Simpsons was making fun of the original MessagePad. I'm going to keep trying, but it is frustrating.
4. The built in screen cover is so useful. Shame that the modern equivalent (an iPad) has the cover as a separate accessory.
5. The device itself is pleasantly chunky. They definitely did their best with then-current technology to make this as thin as possible, and I'm so glad the technology just wasn't there to make this thinner.
6. Turning on the backlight is non-obvious. You hold the power button for a bit until it turns off. Same deal to turn it off. Thanks NewtonFAQ for that (https://newtonfaq.com/newton-faq-hardware.html#IIC6c).
7. This thing is SO delightfully 90s. -
It arrived. I am very excited.
It’s larger than the specs made it appear.
I’m going to try to daily-drive this for a bit, but I doubt I’ll do that long-term.
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Sorry, but after nearly three decades, I still find the #AppleNewton new and exciting.
https://adhd.irenes.space/@ireneista/statuses/01KYZSBMFXHT43D73BFFRK52BJ
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Today I learned that I can’t send a package of “lightly used” #AppleNewton accessories to Germany because:
“Canada Post is temporarily suspending parcel acceptance to select European Union destinations due to new EU customs requirements for low value shipments.”
I truly hate this timeline.
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newton connection real!!!!!!
#applenewton #letsfuckingGO #selfies #nonbinary #vcfwest2026
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@rpbook nice. Had similar with a #Newton #appleNewton #retro #retroComputing
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Thirty one years ago today, Harris Corporation licensed Apple’s Newton technology for use in its ruggedized SuperTech 2000 “Craft Digital Assistant” device.
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Twenty nine years ago today, Newton Inc. and Visible Interactive teamed up on the iGo — an interactive audio tour guide based on a modified #MessagePad 130 — for the “America’s Smithsonian” 150th anniversary traveling exhibition.
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Announcing the July release of the Newton Glossary!
This edition contains 2,280 terms, definitions, acronyms, colloquialisms, cross-references, and trivia related to the #AppleNewton.
Since the last month’s update, another 43 terms and 5 sources have been added.
Latest additions:
https://newtonglossary.com/latest
Full release notes:
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Thirty two years ago today, Apple Online Services (AOS) announced the release of NewtonMail Modules 1.0 — giving #MessagePad users “… the tools to formulate, send, and receive messages more easily than ever before.”
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Thirty one years ago today, Apple announced the completion of a 10 month pilot project at the Johns Hopkins Hospital to assess the utility of the Newton #MessagePad for health care case managers.
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Thirty one years ago today, Apple announced the release of Newton Toolkit 1.5, an “enhanced” version featuring a new #NewtonScript compiler and profiler, as well as Newton Book Maker 1.1 for Mac OS.
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Thanks to John Jerney and his Pen-Based Computing History Museum site, I discovered that Apple sent out an informational press release headlined as a “Newton Glossary” in 1993.
My own Newton Glossary already includes most of what is described in this press release, but I still found a couple of interesting tidbits to add.
https://www.penbasedcomputing.com/timeline/apple-computer-newton-glossary/
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By the way, here’s the TrimBus entry I added to the Newton Glossary. With sources, natch.
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Twenty nine years ago today, Apple announced Newton Internet Enabler 2.0, bringing enhanced networking and connectivity features to #NewtonOS devices.
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Announcing the June release of the Newton Glossary!
This edition contains 2,237 terms, definitions, acronyms, colloquialisms, cross-references, and trivia related to the #AppleNewton.
Since the last month’s update, another 70 terms and 7 sources have been added.
Latest additions:
https://newtonglossary.com/latest
Full release notes:
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Thirty years ago today, Apple shipped the very first release of the Newton Internet Enabler, providing “… a suite of connectivity tools that allows Internet-based application development …”