tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-148610962024-03-13T13:04:51.737+13:00My Apple NewtonAn Apple Newton is a personal digital assistant (PDA) first introduced in 1993. Eight different models were produced before it was discontinued in 1998. It was so advanced for its time that in 2012, most modern smartphones/pdas have yet to surpass it for usability and battery life. This blog records my Apple Newton experiences, as well as comparisons with other PDAs, Smartphones and Mobile Devices. It is also a repository for storing complex set up procedures for future reference.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger578125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-33470299215747795612022-06-02T11:49:00.002+12:002022-06-02T11:49:38.273+12:00Apple Newton celebrates its 30th birthday<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2-yBOxmOYluudkGmmICXfLKq66qaJ23Fdekzq0B5DVl5opTdd6MkGeWlJB5GSqwVv2wYj4lKLj8E0W1kHkFegFD3-Wu5rsn66x91--v4tL21QjqacIfnYHK23wnzor23dAa2v27b6BCj9wpY_YAyrWWJIzHnpZT0-0dlRDh_jf6YcHWQ9Tn4/s1435/2022-06-02%2011_24_27-Remembering%20Apple%E2%80%99s%20Newton,%2030%20years%20on%20_%20Ars%20Technica%20and%203%20more%20pages%20-%20Person.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="883" data-original-width="1435" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2-yBOxmOYluudkGmmICXfLKq66qaJ23Fdekzq0B5DVl5opTdd6MkGeWlJB5GSqwVv2wYj4lKLj8E0W1kHkFegFD3-Wu5rsn66x91--v4tL21QjqacIfnYHK23wnzor23dAa2v27b6BCj9wpY_YAyrWWJIzHnpZT0-0dlRDh_jf6YcHWQ9Tn4/s320/2022-06-02%2011_24_27-Remembering%20Apple%E2%80%99s%20Newton,%2030%20years%20on%20_%20Ars%20Technica%20and%203%20more%20pages%20-%20Person.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />It's been 30 years already, and Ars Technica have written a <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/remembering-apples-newton-30-years-on/" target="_blank">retrospective</a>.<p></p><p>These days my Newton MP2100 has been replaced by a Samsung Galaxy Note, and the integration with telephony, email, SMS messaging, the Internet, MS Office applications, MS Teams, OneDrive, Flickr, LinkedIn, FaceBook, Instagram, and my PC lifts the mobile experience into another strata. </p><p>Even modern handwriting recognition has leapt forward and is so much more accurate now, not that the latest version of the Newton's HWR was bad.</p><p>Do I miss anything?</p><p>Sure.</p><p>I miss </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The Notes application. It was glorious and finding another note was just so easy.</li><li>MoreInfo. Task management and scheduling seems so much more easier with this than Outlook.</li><li>Soups allowing apps to share data, but I realise that it was conceived in a more innocent and naive world, where malevolent developers were few and far between.</li><li>Modelessness. I could write anywhere on the screen and my writing would be inserted wherever the cursor was. It's frustrating having to tap and bring up an input panel before I can start writing.</li></ul><div>My Newtons are stored in a nice dry cupboard but I've noticed the external coating has started to oxidize and its gone strangely tacky like a partially wet contact adhesive. I haven't opened them up but other users have noticed that some of the capacitors are starting to bulge with age.</div><div><br /></div><div>So sadly, I look at them and think about what might have been, but I've moved on now and going back to using the Newton as a daily driver isn't really an option now in a modern office environment where expectations around collaboration and coordinating with others is such a key requirement.</div><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-83048034515834622712021-04-14T10:22:00.005+12:002021-04-14T10:23:35.148+12:00Fan creates new USB-Newton cable, no adapters required<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZaXmDzNq5JU/YHYY1thFFnI/AAAAAAAAE_c/CqbM2ecmin8P9RhXd3gILYtRJ8oe8v_eQCLcBGAsYHQ/s552/USB-Newton%2Bcable.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="546" data-original-width="552" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZaXmDzNq5JU/YHYY1thFFnI/AAAAAAAAE_c/CqbM2ecmin8P9RhXd3gILYtRJ8oe8v_eQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/USB-Newton%2Bcable.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Well, well, well!<p></p><p>AppleNewtonFan has produced a cable for connecting your Newton to a Mac or PC, that removes the need for adapters. It uses an FTDI chip.</p><p>Available for GBP 25 + P&P. </p><p>You can get in contact with him <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CNm0KbvgPhd/?igshid=smg4xt7m3ehu" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-35653758364456336172021-04-09T10:10:00.003+12:002021-04-09T10:10:18.004+12:00Newton friendly search site launched<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uBcqg4Ckctg/YG9_FsMJPnI/AAAAAAAAE_Q/8J-iky5FrJMiCQPDHEJznSbAO1FbC7g-QCLcBGAsYHQ/s587/Newtfind.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="587" height="386" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uBcqg4Ckctg/YG9_FsMJPnI/AAAAAAAAE_Q/8J-iky5FrJMiCQPDHEJznSbAO1FbC7g-QCLcBGAsYHQ/w421-h386/Newtfind.png" width="421" /></a></div>Impressive!<br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-25344139838942114702020-11-05T22:33:00.009+13:002020-11-05T22:33:45.238+13:00Newton, Reconsidered<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B8PIRNbujs8/X6PGV2sSFVI/AAAAAAAAE5I/FwXqiOnJ6UUSCYnRMBN8iue6nw_CxUxWQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/message_pad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="260" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B8PIRNbujs8/X6PGV2sSFVI/AAAAAAAAE5I/FwXqiOnJ6UUSCYnRMBN8iue6nw_CxUxWQCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/message_pad.jpg" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p><p><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">I came across this retrospective from Time magazine by Harry McCracken about the Newton shortly after the 20th anniversary of its initial launch. Being eight years old, I thought it might be useful to preserve it on MAN:</span></i></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">A hands-on assessment of Apple's pioneering, ill-fated Personal Digital Assistant, twenty years after its original unveiling.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">In the grand scheme of things, 1992 is such recent history that it barely qualifies as history. When it comes to portable gadgets, however, it’s an era that’s nearly unrecognizable to us 21st-century humans.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Sure, there were pocketable gizmos back then: The Game Boy, for instance, had been around since 1989, and the Sony Watchman was hot stuff. There were even miniature computers, such as HP’s 95LX. But in 1992, nobody had an MP3 player. Or a GPS handheld. Or a smartphone. (Less than five percent of people in North America had a mobile phone, period.)</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">And in 1992, nobody had a PDA. That’s Personal Digital Assistant, in case you’ve forgotten, and even though nobody had one, lots of people were talking about them. Apple CEO John Sculley had coined the term in the keynote speech he made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7. He announced that Apple would release PDAs–pocket-sized information devices, easier to use than a PC and selling for under $1000–in 1993.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Twenty years ago this week, on May 29, 1992, Sculley spoke again at another CES, in Chicago. This time, he didn’t just talk about PDAs. He brought one with him. It was a Newton, a prototype of the device which Apple planned to start selling in early 1993. Actually, Apple had multiple Newtons on hand that, which was good: The first one it unveiled on stage had dead batteries and didn’t work.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Using a second unit, Steve Capps, one of Newton’s creators, showed how you could use it to order a pizza by moving topping icons onto a pie and then sending out a fax. In 1992, that was show-stopping stuff.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">The hype surrounding Sculley’s CES announcement of the Newton was immense, a precursor of the hoopla that would later accompany Steve Jobs‘ keynotes for iPods, iPhones, iPads and other post-Newton gadgets. But it didn’t change anything right away. Sculley, in fact, was demoing vaporware: The Newton was nowhere near ready. Apple held another unveiling fourteen months later at Macworld Expo in Boston, when the product which it officially called the MessagePad finally went on sale on August 2, 1993. (It was one of what was supposed to be a line of Apple products based on “Newton Intelligence,” most of which never came to be; Apple also licensed Newton technology to other companies.)</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">The earliest MessagePad reviews tended to accentuate the positive, but public sentiment quickly turned against Apple’s PDA, so much so that the Newton, like Microsoft Bob, remains convenient shorthand for “technology flop.” People remember that the handwriting recognition didn’t work–or, more specifically, that Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury featured a week-long sequence in August of 1993 in which the handwriting recognition on Mike Doonesbury’s Newton-like PDA didn’t work. They recall that the Newton didn’t sell in huge numbers. They know that Steve Jobs axed it when he returned to Apple in 1997.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">But simply dismissing Newton as a failure is unfair. Microsoft gave up on Bob after about a year; Apple, by contrast, stuck with Newton for six years. It released seven distinct models and worked with companies such as Sharp and Motorola, which released their own Newton-based gizmos. If someone other than Jobs had been in charge of Newton in 1998, the year it went away, it’s at least conceivable that there might be Newtons of some sort even now.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">What Newton wasn’t was a hit. Apple sold 50,000 MessagePads in the device’s first three months on the market; the company trumpeted this figure as evidence that the gadget was selling briskly, but it was more likely a major disappointment. (In July 1992, MacWEEK‘s Jon Swartz reported that the company expected to sell a million Newtons in the first year.)</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">A lavish 1993 coffee-table book on the Newton project was titled Defying Gravity, but Newton’s problem was that it never quite took flight. In the six years between its premature debut and untimely death, it wobbled and sputtered like a leaky balloon, neither soaring nor crashing.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Of course, most of the people who have only a foggy understanding of why the first Newton failed to live up to the early irrational exuberance have a good excuse: They never actually used one. Including me.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">I was a working technology journalist in 1992, but I paid only scant attention to the Newton’s launch. I didn’t try to get my hands on one when they went on sale in 1993, and didn’t bother to attend the unveiling at Macworld Expo Boston even though I worked nearby. In 1995, I bought my first PDA, Psion’s wondrous 3c; I don’t remember a Newton even being on my list of possibilities.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Several years later, I reviewed some of the final descendants of the original model, such as the MessagePad 2000, and met with the Apple executives who ran the Newton business. But when it dawned on me that 2012 marked the 20th anniversary of the Newton, I still felt like I wasn’t in a position to express informed opinions about it.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">So I bought one.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Thanks to the modern miracle known as eBay, it’s not hard to acquire a Newton. I lucked upon a remarkable specimen: a first-generation model, the MessagePad H1000, running version 1.0 of Newton OS. It wasn’t just in mint condition, in the original boxes with all the original accouterments and documentation, plus a shrinkwrapped introductory videotape. There was no sign that it had ever been booted up. By buying such a virginal example, I would get the same Newton experience that the earliest adopters got when they plunked down their $699 in 1993.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">eBay turned out to be an embarrassment of Newton riches. As long as I was shopping around, I bought a vintage external Newton fax/modem, capable of operating at a blistering 2400-bps. And a memory card called the Newton Enhancement Pack. And the Newton Connection Kit, which included hardware and software for hooking the MessagePad up to a Windows PC.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">A few weeks later, my sister-in-law–who didn’t know of my Newton experiment–told me that she’d uncovered her own MessagePad H1000 and asked if I wanted to check it out. It turned out to be in nearly as pristine condition. I gratefully borrowed it as a backup.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">This article isn’t a history of the Newton-here’s a good one–but rather my notes after six weeks as a Newton user, at long last. I had fun and wound up with a new appreciation for this groundbreaking gadget. But I also got a better sense of why it wasn’t the epoch-shifting breakthrough that Apple promised and pundits predicted.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Looming Large</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Even before I used my new H1000 for the first time, I realized how unfamiliar I was with it. For one thing, I didn’t know it was so big. As the Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg pointed out in his 1993 review, it’s roughly the size of a VHS videotape. Technically, you can squeeze it in a coat or pants pocket–as long as you don’t mind everyone knowing that you have something roughly the size of a VHS tape stuffed in your pocket. A shirt pocket, however, is out of the question.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">The MessagePad is an example of the gadget category which many people (including Steve Jobs) have disparaged as “tweeners.” Neither truly pocketable nor capable of replacing a full-blown PC, tweeners have never gone away. Current examples include Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">That might help explain why so many people appeared to be oblivious to my MessagePad when I used it in meetings, on airplanes and at a fancy banquet: At first glance, a reasonable person might mistake it for a Kindle or a Nook, especially when its screen is shut off. At one point, I silently sat it on the table during a lunch I had with an employee of a legendary Silicon Valley company. (No, not Apple.) She didn’t exclaim “Hey, a Newton!” Instead, she gestured at it knowingly when we discussed the current tablet boom, as if it were an example.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Once I’d put four AAA batteries and a watch-battery backup into the MessagePad for the first time, powering it up felt like bringing it out of cryogenic suspension. Newtons, it turns out, begin their lives believing that it’s 5am on January 1, 1993. And the only way to set the year to 2012 is to flip the calendar forward, one month at a time. I tapped the MessagePad’s screen 230 times to set the date, watching the months flutter by like pages falling off a calendar to indicate the passage of time in some old movie.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">As I did, I was already struck by a fact about the PDA’s screen: It’s terrible. Terrible.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">This surprised me. Back in 1993, reviewers had plenty of beefs with the Newton, but display quality wasn’t one of them. Critics apparently thought the screen–monochrome, 240-by-336 pixels, no backlight–was okay. High-quality color LCDs already existed, but they were the stuff of $4000 laptops; nobody would have expected one on a $699 gizmo.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">The H1000’s display is greenish gray on grayish green; there’s a contrast setting, but it only lets you choose between gradations that amount to bad, worse and illegible. In optimal light, with contrast set just right, the MessagePad’s screen is readable but unappealing. Anywhere else, it can be a challenge to make out. At a cocktail party in a murky bar– the sort of place where I generally peek at my iPhone a dozen times an hour–it was hopeless.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">The screen doesn’t even look too impressive in the introductory video which came on a VHS tape with new MessagePads.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64QuJdJmCbA]</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">20/20 hindsight may make the MessagePad’s screen look worse than it seemed in 1993; its battery life, however, benefits from a couple of decades of diminished expectations. Back in the 1990s, people squawked that the MessagePad H1000 drained its four AAA batteries too quickly. I found, however, that I could go for a couple of weeks on a set. In an age of smartphones that conk out after less than one day, that was more than enough to keep me happy.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Now, about that handwriting recognition. (It was, incidentally, developed by a team of Russian computer scientists who later went on to create Evernote, the gem of a note-taking app for the iPhone and other devices.) The H1000’s core apps include a note taker, a calendar and an address book, and the principal means of entering information into all of them is to write it with the PDA’s stylus. The original Newton TV commercials certainly played up the feature.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7ie78LuL0k]</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">And in this excerpt from a 1993 episode of public TV’s Computer Chronicles, Apple product manager Tony Espinoza shows off the recognition working correctly–albeit slowly–and demonstrates most of the PDA’s other major features.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJkI6xOPspM]</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">As you write words on the screen using the stylus, in either cursive or block letters, Newton OS checks them against its dictionary, which contains 10,000 words, plus any you add yourself. If the software manages to understand your scrawls, and the word is in the dictionary, it’ll convert it into editable text. But if it fails to decipher the characters you wrote–or it does decipher them, but the word isn’t in the dictionary–you’re toast.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">(There’s an option you can turn on which, in theory, lets the MessagePad recognize words that aren’t in the dictionary, but in my experience it didn’t work. Ever.)</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">It’s difficult to say exactly what percentage of the time the PDA has managed to correctly turn my handwriting into text, in part because it theoretically gets better at the job as it goes along. When I write painstakingly and use words that are in the Newton dictionary, the handwriting recognition works, sometimes. Manually adding words it doesn’t know–like my own last name–helps.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Overall, though, the MessagePad is iffy for words even if they’re in the dictionary. It only seems to know proper names if they’re extremely commonplace ones, such as “John” or “Perkins.” And it’s downright abysmal for brand names. Especially ones that didn’t exist in 1993–strangely enough, “Google” and “Facebook” aren’t in its dictionary.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">All of this is crippling, and leaves me thinking that one piece of conventional wisdom about the Newton–that it was doomed by crummy handwriting recognition–is correct. How could Apple have expected a PDA with an unusable input system to sell? How could anybody?</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Sculley and company weren’t the only ones who failed to flag the recognition as a product-destroying flaw. The Wall Street Journal’s Mossberg cautioned that it was “probably still a bit too imperfect for most people” but still praised it as by far the best he’d ever seen. Investment fund manager Roger McNamee, who would eventually help run Palm, told the New York Times’ John Markoff that the MessagePad had “the best handwriting recognition that I have used.” InfoWorld‘s Stewart Alsop declared that “the handwriting recognition beats everything I’ve seen hands down (and I’ve seen them all).”</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Mossberg, McNamee and Alsop were right: The Newton did have the finest handwriting recognition anyone had seen up until that point. But that didn’t really matter. It needed to be good enough to be useful, and in its original form, it wasn’t.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">By the time Apple started selling the MessagePad H1000, it may have understood that the recognition was a disaster in the making. My friend Phil Baker–who’s worked on interesting gadgets as old as Polaroid’s SX-70 and as new as the Barnes & Noble Nook–led the team that built the second-generation Newton, the MessagePad 110. (His industrial designer was a new Apple recruit: the not-yet-legendary Jonathan Ive.)</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Phil and his team were already at work on the 110 before Apple had unveiled the first MessagePad, and were startled by the favorable reviews in publications such as PC Magazine. At the original model’s launch, he told me, “I got worried when the marketing manager was entering words in the dictionary by hand an hour before the demo.”</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Once I got tired of entering words into my Newton’s dictionary, I turned to a magnificent piece of software called Graffiti. It felt like a homecoming: The streamlined form of handwriting recognition, which has you enter simplified characters one-by-one, was the primary means of input on Palm’s PalmPilot PDAs for years, including several models which I owned. But before Palm put Graffiti on PalmPilots, it offered it as an app for the Newton and other early pen-based handhelds. (It developed the software after its own Newton-esque PDA, the Zoomer, crashed and burned within months of its 1993 launch.)</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Graffiti may have been a tiny company’s attempt to rectify the Newton’s most glaring weakness, but it had a Cupertino seal of approval. An Apple division called StarCore distributed the software as part of the Newton Enhancement Pack, in packaging that called it “fast, accurate and frustration-free.” Even Apple, it seems, acknowledged that the standard Newton recognition was sluggish, inaccurate and full of frustration.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">It had been eight years or so since I retired my last Graffiti-based PalmPilot, but the Graffiti characters were still lodged in the back of my brain. I was able to immediately begin writing on the MessagePad at a rapid clip, with nearly flawless accuracy. If every MessagePad had come with Graffiti preinstalled, I concluded, the early history of the Newton could have been radically different–and Garry Trudeau wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Having mastered text entry, I moved on to the MessagePad’s built-in applications. They aren’t bad, and in many ways they’re roughly equivalent to the notepads, calendars and address books on modern smartphones. The gestures remain engaging–especially the zig-zag you draw to delete items, which self-immolate in a puff of smoke.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">NewtonOS also has a feature called Assistant, a sort of proto-Siri which may be the single most wildly ambitious thing in the software. Instead of tapping your way around the apps, you can enter plain-English commands such as “Call Bryan at home” and “Remember order paper clips.” It’s hobbled by the balky handwriting recognition, but with Graffiti, it works.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Little reminders that Newton software is twenty years old do lurk everywhere. There’s no unified home screen with icons for all your applications in one place; in fact, there’s no icon for the Notepad at all. And bopping between programs is an odd experience–applications and dialog boxes pile up on top of each other like a stack of Post-It Notes. You’ve got to close them one at a time to work your way back to the ones on the bottom. Clearly, the Newton’s creators were still getting a sense of how a mobile operating system should behave.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">They were also swatting bugs, or failing to do so. My MessagePad keeps slipping into a strange limboland–I can draw on the screen, but the PDA doesn’t respond to any input until I reboot it. It sometimes claims it’s out of memory when it isn’t. Neither of the Getting Started memory cards that came with either of the Newtons in my possession work in either unit; this may be due to a defect that was discovered after the first MessagePads shipped. And ActionNames, a calendar program on the Newton Enhancement Pack card, spawns error messages every time I try to use it. (Its manual acknowledges the possibility of problems and cheerfully suggests upgrading to a MessagePad 110.)</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">I’m still not sure if all of these glitches bedeviled the first owners of MessagePads, but if they did, they couldn’t have helped the device’s reputation.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Figuring out how to get additional software onto the MessagePad was no cakewalk. The Newton Connection Kit I’d bought reminded me how much computers have changed since the early-to-mid 1990s. The cable used a DB9 serial connector, an archaic standard long ago nudged aside by USB. As for the software, it came on a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks–which didn’t really matter, since it was a Windows 3.1 program which likely wouldn’t run on a 21st-century computer anyhow.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">In theory, it should have been possible to hook it up to my 2012 MacBook Air using special software and an adapter that let the MessagePad’s serial jack connect to one of the MacBook’s USB ports. After failing repeatedly to get it to work for more than a half-second at a time, I gave up. And then I remembered that I had the Zenith laptop I used in the mid-1990s boxed up in my garage.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">The Zenith had a serial port and a floppy drive, and it ran Windows 3.1. It worked fine with the Connection Kit. I ended up using my MacBook to download Newton apps — including a faux Tetris and an e-book of Alice in Wonderland — and then transferring them to the Zenith. Then I’d copy them to the MessagePad.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">I had faint hopes of using my MessagePad and fax/modem for e-mail. It had come with a post card you could snail mail to Apple requesting a starter kit for the NewtonMail service; Apple apparently used the postcard as a means of buying some time, since NewtonMail wasn’t ready until months after the first MessagePads shipped. But NewtonMail is the only e-mail program that’s compatible with NewtonOS 1.0, and I assume that Apple discontinued it at some point in the past two decades. Even if it didn’t, it ran on Sprintnet, a dial-up network that’s no longer with us.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Unable to use my fax/modem to get online, I jotted a note on the MessagePad, then faxed it to myself. That worked perfectly.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">A Newton Post-Mortem</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">Even by Newton standards, my original model, running 1.0 software, is a relic. Eventually, Newtons would enter the Internet age; clever people have even used later models to tweet and connect to wi-fi networks. And as Phil Baker explained to me, Apple was busy refining the MessagePad hardware and software even before the first MessagePad was sold.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Like Bullwinkle repeatedly declaring that he’s about to pull a rabbit out of his hat–“this time for sure!”–the company kept releasing new Newtons which looked like they might be the model that would make the MessagePad a bona-fide success. There was the 110, the 120, the 130, the 2000 and the 2100, plus a fascinating proto-netbook called the eMate 300.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Newton hope tended to spring eternal. In March of 1994, the New York Times titled John Markoff’s story on the MessagePad 110 “Apple’s Newton Reborn: Will It Still the Critics?” A year and a half later, a Markoff piece on NewtonOS 2.0 was called “Apple’s Newton Poised for a Rebirth.” But neither the 110 nor OS 2.0 nor any of Apple’s other improvements did the trick.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Along the way, the Newton handwriting recognition got much, much better. That didn’t help enough–which may be a sign that consumers simply aren’t as interested in taking handwritten notes on an electronic device as Apple expected. After all, the only major post-Newton attempt to popularize handwritten input, Microsoft’s Tablet PC, also fizzled.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Even back in the 1990s, I remember becoming convinced that Apple was energetically pushing the Newton in the wrong direction. Sheer technological potency wasn’t the problem: Compared to the first model, the final Newton PDA, 1997’s MessagePad 2100, had fifteen times the clockspeed, 90 percent more pixels and more than twelve times as much RAM. It also had vastly better software.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">But the 2100 moved the Newton even deeper into tweener territory. It was taller, wider and thicker than the H1000, resulting in an even less pocketable gadget. It started at $1000; the H1000 had been $699. And it still didn’t come standard with the hardware and software you needed to exchange data with a PC.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Might Apple have served the Newton better by moving it in a different solution? We don’t have to treat that question as an imponderable. We just need to look at the case study provided by Jeff Hawkins’ Palm Computing.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">After Palm’s big-time partners, Radio Shack and Casio, bailed on the Zoomer II, the company retrenched. With almost no resources, it got to work on a PDA that was far smaller, simpler and cheaper than the Zoomer. The new gadget used Graffiti instead of conventional handwriting recognition, and it came with a docking station and software that made syncing calendar and contacts with a PC a breeze.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Palm called its creation the…Taxi. But only briefly. When that moniker turned out to have trademark problems, the company changed the name to Pilot, shortly before the first units went on sale in 1996. Starting at just $299, the Palm Pilot became the phenomenon that the Newton was supposed to be but never was. It eventually evolved into the Treo, which was one of the two most significant pre-iPhone smartphones, along with the BlackBerry.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">There was certainly some Newton in the Pilot. And there’s an awful lot of Pilot in the iPhone 4S, the iPad and every Android device–starting wtth the home screen’s grid of icons and the way apps run in full-screen mode. Had Apple followed Palm’s path–smaller, simpler, cheaper–it might have made all the difference.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Or maybe not. Newton fans took Steve Jobs’ 1998 decision to discontinue Apple’s PDA badly. They accused him of bearing a grudge against the gadget based on its origin as the brainchild of John Sculley, the man who had fired him in 1985. Perhaps so. But various other Apple executives had flirted with shuttering or selling Newton for years before the company’s co-founder returned. (Sculley was sacked by the Apple board just over two months after the first Newtons went on sale, in part because he was spending too much time being a visionary and not enough time selling Macintoshes.)</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Another point to consider: Jobs didn’t seem to have any problem with plenty of other products and technologies which originated during the Sculley era, including PowerBooks, FireWire and QuickTime.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">“The Newton achieved cult status, but the market was not big enough to see it become a success,” says ZDNet’s mobile-gadget guru James Kendrick, who owned an original MessagePad back in the day. “It was too expensive and big and clunky to become a mainstream hit. Jobs killed it out of necessity as the situation Apple was in when he returned was too bad to continue the expensive Newton line.”</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">Still, Kendrick sees hints of Sculley’s failed experiment in Jobs’ blockbuster gadgets. “I believe that Siri, introduced on the iPhone 4S, has a direct lineage with the Newton,” he told me. “The natural language interpretation was begun way back when on the Newton, as Apple tried to make the Newton work in a natural way.”</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;">When Jobs decided to shut down the Newton division, color screens were still unaffordable, touch input was crude and wireless data didn’t get much more exciting than two-way paging. When he launched the first iPhone nine years later, technology allowed Apple to build the sort of devices it wanted to create in the 1990s, but couldn’t. He may have killed Newton, but he didn’t kill the dream behind it so much as press a giant pause button–and after finally spending quality time with a MessagePad, I’m more convinced than ever that he made the right call.</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px;"><i>Source: McCracken, H (1 June 2012), Newton, Reconsidered. www.time.com. Accessed 5 November 2020.</i></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-39449628186703551742020-06-25T12:16:00.000+12:002020-06-25T12:16:45.054+12:00Apple Scribble: Newton HWR support on steroids?I just watched the Apple Scribble demo. It felt a little like the Newton on steroids:<pre style="text-align: left;"><br /></pre>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HKsGZgwK6Fg" width="560"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-23770126894673890842020-06-24T11:34:00.000+12:002020-06-24T11:34:04.424+12:00Is the Newton back from the dead? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pNX1Qg5g7PQ/XvKRKw_v2lI/AAAAAAAAEzQ/5b4fPsNfgRInxxr78Yfc_-y51CHeNOzigCK4BGAsYHg/s320/message_pad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="260" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pNX1Qg5g7PQ/XvKRKw_v2lI/AAAAAAAAEzQ/5b4fPsNfgRInxxr78Yfc_-y51CHeNOzigCK4BGAsYHg/message_pad.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>After 22 years, is the Newton back from the dead?<br /><blockquote><div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95); font-family: "PT Serif", Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 17px; letter-spacing: 0.5px; line-height: 28px; margin: 28px 0px 28px auto; max-width: 640px; width: 640px;"><i>The <a href="https://time.com/5843506/ipad-pc-laptop-replacement/" style="background-color: transparent; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(233, 6, 6) !important; padding: 1px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">iPad</a>, with iPadOS, is receiving a great deal of the new features found on iOS 14, along with some additions unique to the tablet. In addition to visual updates to its most important apps like Photos and Notes, there are upgrades coming to the way the iPad works with the Apple Pencil, the company’s pressure-sensitive stylus.</i></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 28px; margin: 28px 0px 28px auto; max-width: 640px; width: 640px;"><i style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95); font-family: "PT Serif", Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 17px; letter-spacing: 0.5px;">Apple’s been a pioneer when it comes to handwriting recognition, dating back to the introduction of the Apple Newton in the early 90’s, which was able to recognize text drawn using the included stylus. Now that handwriting recognition is back, built into the upcoming version of iPadOS. With the new handwriting recognition, dubbed “Scribble,” users can treat written text as though it were typed—they can select it, move it, manipulate it, and even convert it to typed text. Users can write queries in text fields and web browsers and see them converted into typed text for searches as well. </i></p></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 28px; margin: 28px 0px 28px auto; max-width: 640px; text-align: right; width: 640px;"><i style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95); font-family: "PT Serif", Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 17px; letter-spacing: 0.5px;">-- Austin, P L (22 Jun 2020). </i><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 17px; letter-spacing: 0.5px;"><font color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.949019607843137)" face="PT Serif, Georgia, Times, serif"><i>The 5 Most Exciting Things Apple Announced at its Virtual WWDC 2020, time.com.</i></font></span></p></div></blockquote><div> </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-26673982357292885282020-06-10T15:44:00.002+12:002020-06-10T16:05:57.039+12:00Back to the Future: Apple to use ARM technology for MacOS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HdvCK5o-NXo/WPaXK4pEsQI/AAAAAAAAERY/djEEy_ifLUwFEu8BRF3kUCj22g47bUm1QCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Newton%2Bw%2BGPS.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="736" data-original-width="736" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HdvCK5o-NXo/WPaXK4pEsQI/AAAAAAAAERY/djEEy_ifLUwFEu8BRF3kUCj22g47bUm1QCPcBGAYYCw/s320/Newton%2Bw%2BGPS.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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There are increasingly frequent mentions that Apple is going to use ARM chips on its MacOS platform after having been with Intel for some years now.<br />
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Apple's relationship with ARM goes back a long way and its relationship with them can be attributed to the Apple Newton.<br />
<br />
In fact, if it hadn't been for the Newton giving rise to Apple's investment in ARM, Apple may have gone under, according to John Scully's comments in <a href="https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2015/09/john-dvorak-interviews-john-sculley.html">an interview with John Dvorak</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Newton was not successful, but Newton actually made $800 million dollars because Apple eventually sold the 43 percent it owned in ARM, which, by the way, kept the doors open at Apple, just before Steve Jobs came back. It was one of the really important decisions that <a class="external" href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gil_Amelio" target="_blank">[Gil] Amelio</a> [the last CEO before Steve Jobs returned] made, and it gave them the cash to buy <a class="external" href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/NeXT" target="_blank">NeXT</a>. It's interesting how you can connect the dots by lots of things that happened with a lot of innovation along the way. Things that you don't often find in history books.</i></blockquote><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-68554606154887902472020-05-01T22:30:00.000+12:002020-05-01T22:41:08.256+12:00Newton Honk goes WiFi using WPA on an eMate with a Raspberry Pi<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3SNKJDTZdmY/Xqv4D-1qchI/AAAAAAAAExE/SpqtjxWZRjU5y2zMNF2bmdqnGHr4r47twCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/2020-05-01%2B22_13_03-Newtonhonk%2Bon%2BInstagram_%2B%25E2%2580%259CDid%2Bsome%2Bwork%2Bon%2Bmy%2B%2523raspberrypi%2Bwifi-2-ethernet%2Bbox.%2B.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="861" data-original-width="858" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3SNKJDTZdmY/Xqv4D-1qchI/AAAAAAAAExE/SpqtjxWZRjU5y2zMNF2bmdqnGHr4r47twCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/2020-05-01%2B22_13_03-Newtonhonk%2Bon%2BInstagram_%2B%25E2%2580%259CDid%2Bsome%2Bwork%2Bon%2Bmy%2B%2523raspberrypi%2Bwifi-2-ethernet%2Bbox.%2B.png" width="318" /></a></div>
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Newton users are continuing to find innovative mays to adapt the technology to modern environments.<br />
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Currently Hiroshi's WiFi implementation only supports WEP, an encryption standard that isn't supported much anymore.<br />
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Newton Honk has found a way to email from an eMate using WiFi, WPA and a Raspberry Pi.<br />
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He has generously shared a walk through on how to do it <a href="https://www.newtonhonk.de/tools/raspberry/">here</a>.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-64394757033371857792020-03-26T13:08:00.000+13:002020-03-26T13:08:26.088+13:00Apple finally admits Microsoft was right about tablets | Verge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QPhvU7nfZBU/XnvwOs21SuI/AAAAAAAAEwA/iJrLeE99VXos7SrKPuSZ447zqny_WYfsACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Newton%2Bw%2BKeyboard.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QPhvU7nfZBU/XnvwOs21SuI/AAAAAAAAEwA/iJrLeE99VXos7SrKPuSZ447zqny_WYfsACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Newton%2Bw%2BKeyboard.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<i>MAN: Over on Verge Tom Warren observes that the iPad has evolved toward the Microsoft Surface. You could also argue that it has circled back toward the Newton. The Newton MP2x00 had a stylus and a keyboard too, but the 2x00 series didn't come out until 1997. </i><br />
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<div id="xZTCMr" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #424242; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Apple has spent the past 10 years trying to convince everyone that the iPad and its vision of touch-friendly computing is the future. The iPad rejected the idea of a keyboard, a trackpad, or even a stylus, and Apple mocked Microsoft for taking that exact approach with the Surface. “Our competition is different, they’re confused,” <a href="https://youtu.be/4FunXnJQxYU?t=642" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: 1px solid currentcolor; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e2127a; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; vertical-align: inherit;">said Apple CEO Tim Cook</a> as he stood onstage to introduce the new Macs and iPads six years ago. “They chased after netbooks, now they’re trying to make PCs into tablets and tablets into PCs. Who knows what they will do next?”</span></div>
<div id="ES5uTS" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #424242; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/11/20860448/apple-ipad-surface-like-keyboard-report" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: 1px solid currentcolor; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e2127a; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; vertical-align: inherit;">Every iPad has transformed into a Surface</a> in recent years, and as of this week, the <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21192146/apple-ipad-pro-review-2020-lidar-a12z-processor-speed-camera-trackpad-keyboard" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: 1px solid currentcolor; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e2127a; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; vertical-align: inherit;">iPad Pro</a> and Surface Pro look even more alike. Both have detachable keyboards, adjustable stands, trackpads, and styluses. With iPadOS getting cursor and mouse support this week, Apple has finally admitted that Microsoft was right about tablets. Let me explain why.</span></div>
<div id="ES5uTS" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #424242; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.2rem; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/19/21186500/apple-ipad-pro-vs-surface-pro-trackpad-mouse-inputs-history">Read more</a></span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-63468962879413019722020-02-20T11:34:00.003+13:002020-02-20T11:43:20.429+13:00RIP: Larry Tesler (1945-2020)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3FNDmr0PjBA/Xk21_e2b6cI/AAAAAAAAEtw/nMXmJm7kESIA6ggu7i7l7eSnSeMPfwVdgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Larry%2BTesler.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="474" height="213" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3FNDmr0PjBA/Xk21_e2b6cI/AAAAAAAAEtw/nMXmJm7kESIA6ggu7i7l7eSnSeMPfwVdgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Larry%2BTesler.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Larry Tesler (1945-2020)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Sadly, My Apple Newton has heard that Larry Tesler died on Monday 17 February 2020, aged 74.<br />
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Larry was a key contributor to the development of the Apple Newton, and you can read more about Larry's involvement here: <a href="https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2009/03/defying-gravity-where-is-larry-tesler.html">https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2009/03/defying-gravity-where-is-larry-tesler.html</a><br />
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RIP, Larry.<br />
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He was moved to make some comments relating to the Newton and its development following the release of <i>Apple Confidential. </i>These comments were published via his website nomodes.com but now with his passing, it could be lost. So here it is in its entirety:<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>"The Fallen Apple" Corrections </i><br />
<i>By Larry Tesler </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>April 11, 1999 </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc. by Owen W. Linzmayer, No Starch Press, 1999.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>This book is a good account of the story of Apple, but at least some details are quite wrong.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I'll stick to what I know first hand. The book's account of my involvement with Newton is garbled, and the chronology is wrong in many respects.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I did not beg John Sculley to let me replace Steve Sakoman as the Newton project leader. After Sakoman resigned, I offered to spend a few weeks as acting manager to assess the skills of the team, something Sculley had been planning to do on his own.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I prepared the team for the Board presentation that led to the project's continued funding. After the Board presentation, I helped the group to seek a new manager. When none could be found, Sculley asked me if I would continue as manager. I said yes with mixed feelings.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>As VP of ATG, I had been Marc Porat's and Bill Atkinson's manager, and the executive champion of what became General Magic. Both before and after that pivotal Board meeting, Sculley and I tried to get Porat's project and the Newton to combine. But the personality clashes and differences in vision were insurmountable. We spun out General Magic instead.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>During the assessment period before the Board meeting, I urged the Newton team to bring the target price down from $6000+ to $4000, then to $2000 or less. They accomplished this partly by tossing out two of three microprocessors, partly by replacing the radio LAN by infrared, partly by compromising on features such as battery life and screen brightness, and partly by reducing the size.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I was at no time an advocate of a "large tablet" costing "$5000". Work on such a beast stopped as soon as I arrived. I wanted as small and cheap a device as possible. But I did not think Apple could manufacture a pocket-sized device, so I compromised on an in-between size and a $1500-$2000 price.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The original three processors were two AT&T Hobbits and an ARM. Apple had paid not one, but several million dollars to AT&T for the Hobbit processor. The Hobbit was rife with bugs, ill-suited for our purposes, and overpriced. We balked after AT&T demanded not one but several million more dollars in development fees. Instead, we invested $2.5M in ARM, less than what we would have paid to AT&T. After ARM's 1998 IPO, Apple's financial return on that investment was something like 1000%. [Note added 10-Oct-2004: It ended up being more like 30,000%. Apple made an $800 million in profit on a $2.5 million investment. That profit exceeded the total cost of the Newton project.] The Hobbit's commercial demise a few years later validated our decision. The processor switch did not "create a lot of extra work", since relatively little processor-specific code existed at that time, and much of that was unsuited to the new system design.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The general story line is correct about Steve Capps and Michael Tchao's unflagging efforts to find a way to make Newton a pocket-sized device. They were actually a trio: the third advocate was Mike Culbert.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>We had to secure an exemption from Apple manufacturing to get a Newton designed and manufactured outside. Sculley himself helped us to make a deal with Sharp. Once we had secured the exemption and lined up Sharp, the main difference of opinion between me and Capps/Tchao was whether to run two projects in parallel or just one. Unconvinced that the pocket-sized Newton would be adequate, I refused to cancel the mid-sized version. The project had already changed direction several times. I was concerned that we would never finish anything we started.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Capps broke the impasse by (as he later admitted) intentionally understating, by a large factor, the amount of work it would take to implement the pocket-sized Newton. Based on his assurances, I cancelled the mid-sized Newton. Sculley and I persuaded Mac engineering to cancel Paul Mercer's Pocket Mac, an evolved version of a device that had been developed by Harry Vertelney's group in ATG with my encouragement. It was Capps' intentional underestimate that led to Apple's overly optimistic product announcements and the subsequent rush to ship a product before it was really working.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>On the other hand, Capps was right to want to toss out the overdesigned Ralph/Dylan language in favor of the similar but far more practical NewtonScript, a fact that the book does not even mention. One mistake I had made was to ignore one good bit of advice from Sakoman: I let ATG manage Ralph/Dylan, even though Newton was the only customer. The result was a mismatch between the goals of the language designers and Newton's needs.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Another omitted story is that early on, I hired a business anthropologist, Eleanor Wynn, to interview customers and find the right application for Newton. She concluded it would sell best to police and fire departments, medical clinics, and other vertical markets. Tchao, Capps, and others did not want to hear this. They rejected the study, ran their own focus group, and concluded that the Newton should be a Sharp Wizard-like organizer for mobile professionals. As it turned out, Eleanor's study was right on the mark. She had accurately predicted the eventual market in which the Newton was most successful.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>There were consistent messages from both studies, though: (1) a cell phone should be incorporated; (2) natural handwriting was essential--the customers were adamant that they would never learn a stylized script. We ignored (1) because it was then uneconomical. We believed (2) and struggled to make handwriting work, but the PalmPilot later proved that customers would indeed learn a stylized script.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>A draft of an early Newton flyer said "It recognizes your handwriting". I insisted that the phrase be removed, and the copy writers promised to take it out. The printed flyers did not arrive at the CES show until minutes before we started the presentation. There, on page 1, it said, "It recognizes your handwriting". The PR team must have thought that I would forgive this transgression after I saw what wonderful press coverage we received from such a bold statement. But what they had unknowingly done was to hammer a large nail into the Newton coffin by setting expectations we knew we could not meet.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Also omitted is the story of how Alan Kay tried to convince the Newton Group under Sakoman to make the Newton a wireless accessory to a desktop computer, automatically synchronizing data when it approached its host. This was basically the PalmPilot concept, three years before Palm Computing was founded. When I took over the Newton Group, I invited Kay several times to return and sell the concept to the group. He declined on the grounds their opinions were rigid and they would never listen.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Book authors like heroes and villains. But we all made a lot of good calls and a lot of terrible mistakes during the Newton project.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Source: <a href="http://www.nomodes.com/LinzmayerBook.html">http://www.nomodes.com/LinzmayerBook.html</a> accessed Feb 20, 2020.</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-53442909893071998582019-07-14T00:26:00.000+12:002019-07-14T00:26:05.926+12:00Five Speed Software is now free!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-paGxwUcBHqY/XSnMUq83vKI/AAAAAAAAEnw/Uq54Ewj-yWIo-TB9KVFKQa2YmTei0nfOACLcBGAs/s1600/FSSNGen-screenshot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="323" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-paGxwUcBHqY/XSnMUq83vKI/AAAAAAAAEnw/Uq54Ewj-yWIo-TB9KVFKQa2YmTei0nfOACLcBGAs/s320/FSSNGen-screenshot.png" width="215" /></a></div>
<br />
Five Speed Software developed the famous Dashboard application that transforms the Newton's button bar and puts it on steroids!<br />
<br />
It consistently makes it on everyone's top ten Newton software lists.<br />
<br />
You can read our review of Dashboard <a href="https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2009/10/spotlight-on-dashboard.html">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Now Five Speed has released its serial number generator so that you can obtain its software for free. Their software also includes Minspector and Wake Up Call.<br />
<br />
Minspector is a debugging tool for Newton Developers and Wake Up Call is a sophisticated alarm clock. <br />
<br />
Download the Serial Number generator from <a href="http://www.fivespeedsoftware.com/buy/">here</a>.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-64690988994362152992019-05-04T17:20:00.000+12:002019-05-04T17:20:29.273+12:00Using Microsoft Dictation in Microsoft Word<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W8NpTyLXAIE/XM0d5ziIhwI/AAAAAAAAEl4/IIV8rFnIt5IjR0GzCLvKn4RUBZiu-NqFgCLcBGAs/s1600/MS%2BDictate.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="380" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W8NpTyLXAIE/XM0d5ziIhwI/AAAAAAAAEl4/IIV8rFnIt5IjR0GzCLvKn4RUBZiu-NqFgCLcBGAs/s320/MS%2BDictate.png" width="297" /></a></div>
<br />
One of the reasons why I was so enthusiastic about the Apple Newton was its ability to support interacting with it using its touchscreen, stylus and handwriting recognition. <br />
<br />
I spend a lot of time working on documents and I've found rotating between typing on a keyboard, using a mouse, using a stylus, and dictating to a PC, an important means of avoiding RSI injuries. <br />
<br />
I tried it many years ago but I found Microsoft's speech recognition features before but always found it too inaccurate, sensitive to background noise and it couldn't use the laptop's built-in microphone. <br />
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<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
Not so long ago, Microsoft updated MS Word and placed "Dictate" prominently on the home toolbar.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
Curious to see how might things have progressed now that several years had passed, I tried it out on an X-Series ThnkPad laptop and just using its built-in microphone. <br />
<br />
This is the test paragraph I used.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>In the beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth. The
earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And
the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>And God said, “Let
there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And
God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there
was evening and there was morning, the first day.</i></blockquote>
And this was what Microsoft's voice recognition system interpreted it as:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><i>In the
beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form
and void comma and Agnes was over the face of the deep. In the spirit of God
was hovering over the face of the waters. </i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-AU" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>And God said, “let there be light, in quote and
it was like. In God saw the light was good. In God separated the light from the
darkness. God called the light day comma and the darkness he called night. And
it was evening and there was morning comma the first day.</i></span></span></blockquote>
Out of 106 words including punctuation, there were six errors. An error rate of around 5%. Surprisingly good considering there was no prior training and I just used my ThinkPad's microphone. <br />
As with handwriting systems, what distinguishes the good from the rest is an accompanying set of commands or gestures for correcting mistakes. <br />
<br />
These are the commands Microsoft allows the user to execute by voice:<br />
<br />
<table class="table ng-scope" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-collapse: collapse; border-left-width: 2px; border-right-width: 2px; border-spacing: 0px; border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; color: black; font-family: Segoe UI,SegoeUI,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; max-width: 100%; orphans: 2; table-layout: fixed; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; width: 100%; word-spacing: 0px;"><thead style="box-sizing: inherit;">
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">To do this</strong></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">Say</strong></td>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody style="box-sizing: inherit;">
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Clear a selection</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Clear selection; unselect that</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Delete the most recent dictation result or currently selected text</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Delete that; strike that</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Delete a unit of text, such as the current word</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Delete <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move the cursor to the first character after a specified word or phrase</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Go after that; move after <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong>; go to the end of <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">paragraph</strong>; move to the end of that</span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move the cursor to the end of a unit of text</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Go after <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong>; move after <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong>; go to the end of that; move to the end of <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">paragraph</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move the cursor backward by a unit of text</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move back to the previous <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong>; go up to the previous <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">paragraph</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move the cursor to the first character before a specified word or phrase</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Go to the start of the <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move the cursor to the start of a text unit</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Go before that; move to the start of that</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move the cursor forward to the next unit of text</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move forward to the <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">next</strong> <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong>; go down <span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">to</span> the</span></span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"> <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">next</strong> <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">paragraph</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Moves the cursor to the end of a text unit</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Move to the end of the <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong>; go to the end of the <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">paragraph</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">Enter one of the following keys: Tab, Enter, End, Home, Page up, Page down, Backspace, Delete</td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Tap <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">Enter</strong>; press <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">Backspace</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">Select a specific word or phrase</td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Select <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">word</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Select the most recent dictation result</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Select that</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Select a unit of text</span></span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Select the <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">next</strong> <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">three words</strong>; select the <strong style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">previous two paragraphs</strong></span></span></span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="border-bottom-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-top-width: 2px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;">
<td style="background-color: #f2f2f2; border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Turn spelling mode on and off</span></td>
<td style="border-bottom-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-image-outset: 0; border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 100%; border-image-source: none; border-image-width: 1; border-left-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(208, 208, 208); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; box-sizing: inherit; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;"><span lang="EN-US" style="box-sizing: inherit; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium;">Start spelling; stop spelling</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />
Not bad, but I missed the ability to correct a word by selecting it and asking the system to give me a selection of most likely candidates.<br />
<br />
With Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I'm able to achieve 99.9% accuracy without any training and the set of commands that can be enabled by voice is noticeably richer.<br />
<br />
Microsoft currently supports<br />
<ul>
<li>Chinese</li>
<li>American and Canadian English</li>
<li>Spanish and Mexican Spanish</li>
</ul>
Other languages are supported but only as previews<br />
<ul>
<li>Australian, Indian and UK English</li>
<li>Canadian and French French</li>
<li>Italian and</li>
<li>Brazilian Portugese</li>
</ul>
Now your mileage may vary, as there are a lot of variables that contribute or detract from speech recognition accuracy including:<br />
<ol>
<li>The quality of your microphone</li>
<li>The amount of background noise in your environment</li>
<li>How different your accent is from the prestige accent of your language and</li>
<li>The performance of your PC</li>
</ol>
Microsoft's Dictation is good enough to get some text down in a hurry but as with all writing, you won't be able to avoid proof-reading afterwards.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-64814074838326344412019-04-26T16:54:00.000+12:002019-04-27T00:09:18.454+12:00The Incredible Shrinking Newton!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4EeqTE15lsc/XMKOeB06e0I/AAAAAAAAElY/E7WdlfRRvrUB5c1J4_DueGcUYvaXy7U7gCLcBGAs/s1600/Shrinking%2BNewt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4EeqTE15lsc/XMKOeB06e0I/AAAAAAAAElY/E7WdlfRRvrUB5c1J4_DueGcUYvaXy7U7gCLcBGAs/s400/Shrinking%2BNewt.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Hats off to Igor Bertolucci who has managed to build a smaller Newton MP2000!<br />
<br />
A fantastic hardware project. <br />
<br />
Here's the detail in his own words via Newtontalk:<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>I recently tweeted about my experiment in trying to make
the MessagePad 2000 as small as possible. For those who are not on Twitter and
to add a little more detail I will write more about it here:</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<i>I recently purchased a MessagePad 2000 with a beat up case.
I've had this idea for quite a while to strip down the casing and to use a more
modern battery technology to make a MSP 2x000 as small as possible while using
most of the original hardware.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>So I de-soldered the the original battery connectors and
replaced the power source with a LiPo 3.7V 2500mAh battery connected via an
Adafruit Powerbooster Charger so that the voltage is boosted to 5.2V and so I
can charge the battery via micro USB. You can see these two in the back side of
the Newton. It's a WIP but everything is working so far.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>The next step that I am hoping to do in the next week or
so is to de-solder the original barrel power plug and the interconnect port and
fill that space with a SparkFun FTDI Basic Breakout serial to mini USB board.
This board will power the Powerbooster Charger when I connect a USB power
source and will translate the USB signal to serial for communication/docking.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>After that I will design and 3D print a casing to hold
everything together.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>On Twitter you can see some photos with size comparison to an unmodified
Newton Messagepad 2100, a Toshiba Libretto 110CT, which was one of the smallest
(if not the smallest) Windows 98 PCs of it's time (1998 - same time as the
MessagePad 2000), and a GPD Win2, which is the smallest Windows 10 PC of today.</i></span><br />
<b></b><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />
And he did it. <br />
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><i></i><br />
Pictures on <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/40558080@N04/46757870705/in/album-72157704713572242/">Flickr</a>.<br />
<br />
Here's some additional notes on the USB connector: <br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Here is a little more detail on the internal USB
connector that I added to my Shrinking Newt project. The device is called
SparkFun FTDI Basic Breakout and here is a link to Amazon where I bought mine: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0068QKQEA/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_HLEWCbGGGVPWY">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0068QKQEA/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_HLEWCbGGGVPWY</a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>It is a tiny FTDI serial to USB converter measuring only
22mm x 15mm and only costs $17.50. I purchased the 5V version because I also
needed it to power the LiPo charger I mounted on the back of my project. There
is also a 3V version available. If you are using this only as a data port I
think either one will be fine since you will not be connecting the voltage pin
anywhere, just the data pins and the ground.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>For the wire I used this 30 gauge silicon wire that has
worked great: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M70EDCW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M70EDCW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1</a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Finally for the pins that go into the internal
interconnect port I ordered samples from Samtec.com : <a href="https://www.samtec.com/products/fte">https://www.samtec.com/products/fte</a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>The connector description is FTE-116-01-G-DV. This is the
16x2 pin male plug that would snap into the internal interconnect port. Since
the connector was too thick for my project and since I only needed to connect 4
of the 32 pins, I pulled the tiny little pins off the connector, shortened them
about 1/32" and soldered the wires directly to these tiny pins, which I
then inserted directly into the correct pin locations on the interconnect port
(with tweezer pliers). You could also probably insert the 30 gauge wires
directly into the pin holes as well without the need of the FTE-116-01-G-DV
pins.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>I would like to direct everyone to this wonderful blog
written by Jake Bordens where I gathered much of my information needed for this
aspect of my project: <a href="http://retronewton.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-internal-interconnect-port.html">http://retronewton.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-internal-interconnect-port.html</a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>After soldering all five wires (4 communication and one
ground) you just have to insert them into their proper locations. These are as
follows:</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>INTERCONNECT PORT -> SPARKFUN FTDI</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Transmit Data 3TXD ->
RXI Receive Data</i><br />
<br />
<i>Receive Data 3RXD ->
TX0 Transmit Data</i><br />
<br />
<i>Request To Send
3RTS -> CTS
Clear To Send</i><br />
<br />
<i>Data Terminal Ready
3DTR -> DTR
Data Terminal Ready</i><br />
<br />
<i>Ground GND ->
GND Ground</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>The location of the pins on the Internal Interconnect
Port from the top right as follows:</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>3TXD -> PIN 2</i><br />
<br />
<i>3RXD -> PIN 3</i><br />
<br />
<i>3RTS -> PIN 4</i><br />
<br />
<i>3DTR -> PIN 6</i><br />
<br />
<i>GND -> PIN 16</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Here is a link to a photo where you can see the pin
connections: <a href="https://flic.kr/p/2fAwQyA">https://flic.kr/p/2fAwQyA</a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>For my Shrinking Newt project I have (for now) hot glued
the SparkFun FTDI board to the Newton motherboard and put a piece of tape on
the internal interconnect board.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>...And that is basically it. I would like to thank Jake
Bordens for his great blog where I learned most of what I needed to know for
this project.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Hopefully this will be of interest and help for others as
well. The process is not particularly difficult, however the pins and wires we
are working with here are very small - that is really the only challenge.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Let me know if anybody has any questions.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>One last thing, to actually use the port you will need to
have the SerChan3115200.pgk installed on your Newton. This will activate the
internal serial port and you will be able to communicate with NCX (Newton
Connection) on a Mac at 115200 baud. I have yet to find a way to get Apples
Newton Connection Utilities working at this speed under Windows 10 – it only
gives me the option of 38400. If someone know how to do this please let me
know.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Cheers,</i><br />
<br />
<i>Igor</i><br />
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><i></i><a href="https://marc.info/?l=newtontalk&m=155499647514016&w=2"></a><br />
<a href="https://marc.info/?l=newtontalk&m=155499647514016&w=2">Original NewtonTalk thread</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-77516824077820995182019-02-23T16:20:00.000+13:002020-05-01T22:31:28.582+12:00Christchurch Earthquake Memorial<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DfYUHXZ_vEM/T0S3dpvMLnI/AAAAAAAACg0/hzqGR4I5nwE/s1600/ChristchurchMemorial.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DfYUHXZ_vEM/T0S3dpvMLnI/AAAAAAAACg0/hzqGR4I5nwE/s640/ChristchurchMemorial.gif" width="424" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-1440739263817334932018-10-16T08:20:00.000+13:002018-10-16T08:20:08.637+13:00Times have changed...How ironic...<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qNrHkM2KfjE/W8ToJCJx2LI/AAAAAAAAEf8/QcECMzbPEBwcKd-kvu8KAAVXmOpT4YWHwCLcBGAs/s1600/Elvie_045_en-GB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="900" height="283" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qNrHkM2KfjE/W8ToJCJx2LI/AAAAAAAAEf8/QcECMzbPEBwcKd-kvu8KAAVXmOpT4YWHwCLcBGAs/s640/Elvie_045_en-GB.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-87417880176007294162018-10-05T09:40:00.002+13:002018-10-05T09:40:37.238+13:00Woz warms our hearts...<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Trni_yWHCB4/W7Z6aJp_b2I/AAAAAAAAEfg/jWNxd-UNaRMGHWgDDBmqNALGyTbVXo9fACLcBGAs/s1600/Wozniak.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="256" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Trni_yWHCB4/W7Z6aJp_b2I/AAAAAAAAEfg/jWNxd-UNaRMGHWgDDBmqNALGyTbVXo9fACLcBGAs/s1600/Wozniak.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Steve Wozniak</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
This post on NewtonTalk warms the heart...<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New;"><i>I'm at the Splunk .conf18 conference and Woz is a keynote
speaker. He got on AI, and sang a beautiful sonnet to the Newton.<br /><br />He said he
got his the day the family was flying to Orlando. He was playing with it and
got a phone call.<br /><br />Needed to make a note and scribbled "Sarah dentist
Tuesday 2pm" </i></span><span style="font-family: Courier New;"><i>and he was looking for a menu because its a new computer.
S<br /><br />o he tapped assist and the calendar came up, populated the fields, and he said
that's what I wanted: technology that connected me to other people.</i></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New;"><i>There was a decent amount of cheering from the crowd when
newton was mentioned :)</i></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New;"><i>Cheers all,</i></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New;"><i>Chris</i></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: Courier New;"></span><i></i><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-76326016069905698542018-09-09T11:38:00.000+12:002018-09-09T11:38:37.946+12:00Share your Newton story at Newtonhonk<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-V51Lo9x1Dso/W5RdMIGYH6I/AAAAAAAAEe8/CFD6TMJYMO8sqcmdzh4VfHPAxD4aSDZ3QCLcBGAs/s1600/Newtonhonk.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="669" data-original-width="843" height="316" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-V51Lo9x1Dso/W5RdMIGYH6I/AAAAAAAAEe8/CFD6TMJYMO8sqcmdzh4VfHPAxD4aSDZ3QCLcBGAs/s400/Newtonhonk.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Christoph Schroder has launched a great looking Newton fan site called Newtonhonk.<br />
<br />
It's a place where you can share your Newton story and a picture of your Newton(s).<br />
<br />
<a href="https://newtonhonk.de/stories/">Check it out</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-27075322185114250252018-08-07T11:12:00.000+12:002018-09-12T10:04:04.055+12:00Newton Software and Documentation Torrent File<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yAvhye96myQ/W2jVRSDW3JI/AAAAAAAAEdo/lGF8qUBhWSY3-mE34C2_fU4yucZjV0fZACLcBGAs/s1600/bittorrent-06-535x535.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="535" data-original-width="535" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yAvhye96myQ/W2jVRSDW3JI/AAAAAAAAEdo/lGF8qUBhWSY3-mE34C2_fU4yucZjV0fZACLcBGAs/s320/bittorrent-06-535x535.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Apparently, a bot from a copyright troll has advised 4Shared that the Newton Software and Documentation uploaded there infringes someone's copyright.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
After approaching 4Shared, they say they don't know precisely what files infringe copyright, they have only received a notice from someone saying that the availability of the files represent an infringement.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
99% of the software is abandonware.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anyway, here is a magnet <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:D10CBDAB1DD0ACCA95DB0B66ACF5E7607AD3C08C&dn=Newton%20Software%20and%20Documentation&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.opentrackr.org%3a1337%2fannounce">link</a> that you can use to download all the material and then you will have access to all the software mentioned on My Apple Newton, and then some. The total download is around 800 MB. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Enjoy.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-61881715695556576832018-07-21T17:07:00.000+12:002018-07-21T17:07:09.159+12:00Cult of Mac reviews "Love Notes to Newton"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-L8KoWTW6I8k/W01hP1oCebI/AAAAAAAAEc8/VGfDEyDslzE1eM1SyieJWkyfgWqDHDs8gCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Love%2BNotes%2Bto%2BNewton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="814" data-original-width="550" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-L8KoWTW6I8k/W01hP1oCebI/AAAAAAAAEc8/VGfDEyDslzE1eM1SyieJWkyfgWqDHDs8gCPcBGAYYCw/s320/Love%2BNotes%2Bto%2BNewton.jpg" width="216" /></span></a></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The </span><a href="https://www.cultofmac.com/440737/today-in-apple-history-newton-messagepad-inspires-mobile-revolution/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Newton MessagePad</a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> is simultaneously one of Apple’s biggest flops and one of the company’s most underrated products.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A series of PDA devices available during the 1990s, today Newtons are much-sought-after relics among a group of enthusiastic Apple fans. These collectors recognize the devices for the forward-looking gadgets they truly were. The Newton product line is now the subject of a new feature-length documentary, titled <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em>. Can it do justice to its beloved subject matter?</span></span></div>
<div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 776px; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">
</div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></span><br />
<h3 style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 24px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 33.6px; margin: 3.2px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="under_first_paragraph" data-ezadpicker="623" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-623" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 33.6px;">Love Notes to Newton</em>: A whole lot to like</span></span></span></h3>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Like the Newton MessagePad itself, there’s a whole lot to like about <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em>. The documentary, written and directed by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9803714/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">Noah Leon</a>, looks and sounds tremendous. The camera work is proficient, the cinematography is considered, and there are some beautiful touches like extreme close-up shots of the various Newton models. This could certainly appear on television without raising any questions.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The movie covers a wealth of material. The filmmakers clearly know their subject, and they enthusiastically delve into just about every aspect of Newton lore.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="mid_content" data-ezadpicker="178" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-178" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em> includes discussions of the <a href="https://blog.global.fujitsu.com/fail-fast-but-please-fail-forward/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">infamous “egg freckles” <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Doonesbury</em> cartoon</a> by Garry Trudeau, which lampooned the Newton’s performance.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="mid_content" data-ezadpicker="622" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-622" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="long_content" data-ezadpicker="191" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-191" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The documentary delves into the Newton’s pioneering use of AI for handwriting recognition, and much, much more.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="longer_content" data-ezadpicker="192" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-192" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The film also makes great use of archival footage, serving up glimpses of Newton prototypes I’d never seen before.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="longest_content" data-ezadpicker="193" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-193" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The filmmakers cut no corners when it comes to interviews.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Chief among these are Steve Capps, programmer of much of the Newton UI. Then there’s <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-benett-54045b6/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">Sandy Benett</a>, COO of Apple’s <a href="https://www.cultofmac.com/482679/today-apple-history-newton-spins-off-company/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">short-lived Newton Inc. spinoff</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://shinyverse.org/larryy/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">Larry Yaeger</a>, creator of the Newton’s handwriting-recognition tech, also adds his two cents — as does <a href="https://www.cultofmac.com/481771/today-in-apple-history-john-sculley-starts-work-as-apple-ceo/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">former Apple CEO John Sculley</a>.</span></span><span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="long_content" data-ezadpicker="615" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-615" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Then there are the Newton enthusiasts, all of whom provide interesting and salient points about the device’s history.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A soft spot for the Newton</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve always had a soft spot for the Newton, and I’ve long felt it gets short shrift when being dismissed as a failure for Apple. Watching <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;"><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8346546/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">Love Notes to Newton</a></em>, it’s impossible not to be struck by the ambition of the project.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Like the tech being worked on by rival General Magic at the time (which, coincidentally, was also the <a href="https://www.cultofmac.com/550927/general-magic-documentary/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">subject of a recent documentary</a>), the Newton MessagePad gave us a glimpse of a mobile-first world that looked ahead to the iPhone and iPad.</span><span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="longer_content" data-ezadpicker="636" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-636" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Even today, features like the Newton’s handwriting recognition and ability to beam information to other devices using an infrared communications port seems remarkable. Whether you used a Newton at some time between 1993 and 1997, picked one up in the years since, or never used one at all, you’ll come away with a new respect for one of Apple’s greatest, most underrated products.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Not everything is great, though</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The biggest problem documentary makers face is not getting enough good material. The second is getting too much of it. It’s this latter problem that the makers of <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em> find themselves in. Watching the film, it’s easy to see how they could get overwhelmed by the sheer number of moving parts to this story — and that appears to have happened.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="longest_content" data-ezadpicker="626" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-626" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em> a history of the Newton project, a film about Newton fans’ attempts to keep a beloved product alive, or a documentary about innovation that just happens to use the Newton to make its points?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’d suspect that the filmmakers couldn’t give us a straight answer. As a result, <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em> feels shapeless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In some ways, it’s like watching a series of deleted scenes from a more tightly edited documentary. There’s very little through-line connecting them. And, as interesting as the individual scenes are, they don’t feel like they tell a cohesive bigger story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For instance, a lengthy section talks about coded Easter eggs in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">Newton OS</a>. But the documentary includes far too little about the behind-the-scenes managerial changes that dictated the device’s rise and fall.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="longest_content" data-ezadpicker="624" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-624" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span class="ezoic-adpicker-ad" data-ez-position-type="longer_content" data-ezadpicker="149" id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-149" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The death of the Newton is handled just one hour into the 1 hour 40 run time, after which the film simply continues.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That’s a shame because, really, the Newton is all about the big picture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s about the dream of mobile computing, and how close Apple came to delivering it more than a decade before the iPhone shipped.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Had the documentary been assembled more coherently, these individual pieces would work together better.</span></div>
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<h3 style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 24px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 33.6px; margin: 3.2px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To recommend or not to recommend</span></h3>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s also the problem of assumed knowledge. If you’re a Newton fan, you’ll get a lot out of this documentary. If you already know about Apple’s managerial problems in the 1990s, the circumstances under which Steve Jobs returned, and the various iterations of Newton OS, you’ll find some delightful stories that will plug holes in your knowledge.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But this isn’t a documentary that will likely appeal to casual Apple fans. Some tech documentaries tell a story that’s interesting and universal enough that you don’t need to be a tech geek to get excited by it.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Newton story contains those elements, but this documentary does not. That’s a shame, because all the pieces are there — just not necessarily in the right order. Were the filmmakers to revise <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em> at a later date, the addition of a narrator and more context about the early 1990s would add a lot.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Why was the Newton cool for its time?” is a question any viewer will be more than able to answer by the time the end credits roll.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Why is this worth telling 25 years later as a feature documentary?” is not so clear.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<h3 style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 24px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 33.6px; margin: 3.2px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A great documentary for Newton MessagePad fans</span></h3>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This isn’t to say I didn’t dig <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em>. I’m an Apple history geek, and it’s great to have a story about Apple history that isn’t (directly) focused on Jobs’ firing and return to the company.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you’re a fan of the subject matter, I’d not hesitate to recommend <em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em>. However, if you’re looking for an engaging documentary you can show your less-geeky significant other, you might want to keep searching.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 200; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; line-height: 26.66px;">Love Notes to Newton</em> will be available via Vimeo On Demand at <a href="http://newtfilm.com/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">newtfilm.com</a> on July 22. It will also screen that day at the the <a href="https://macstockconferenceandexpo.com/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #008cba; line-height: 26.66px; text-decoration: none;">MacStock Conference and Expo</a> in Illinois. </span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-size: 17.93px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 26.66px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<a href="https://www.cultofmac.com/563083/love-notes-to-newton-review/"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Source</span></a></div>
</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-61779851610835560792018-07-17T15:52:00.001+12:002018-07-19T09:46:23.448+12:00Love Notes to Newton to Premier at MacStock July 22<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L8KoWTW6I8k/W01hP1oCebI/AAAAAAAAEc4/2N_e1nZO58QJdSbeHdQchR0OFDresULgACLcBGAs/s1600/Love%2BNotes%2Bto%2BNewton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="814" data-original-width="550" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L8KoWTW6I8k/W01hP1oCebI/AAAAAAAAEc4/2N_e1nZO58QJdSbeHdQchR0OFDresULgACLcBGAs/s320/Love%2BNotes%2Bto%2BNewton.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">After a <a href="http://newtfilm.moosefuel.media/242575887">tantalizing and impressive trailer</a> and <span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">a long anticipation building wait</span>, "Love Notes to Newton" is set to premier at <a href="https://macstockconferenceandexpo.com/">MacStock Conference and Expo</a> on <a href="https://macstockconferenceandexpo.com/schedule/">July 22</a>!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Following the premier, LNN will be available on Vimeo On Demand. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">LNN is produced by Noah Leon, who is President of Montreal-based, Moosefuel Media, a media production company. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://vimeo.com/213677949">Watch</a> Noah promote the original fundraising project that kickstarted this project.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you look closely during the screening, you might even see my handsome mug... ;-)</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-80615020865528270952018-04-29T22:39:00.000+12:002018-04-29T22:39:24.186+12:00Browsing with Newtscape: Text-Only is Best<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3SUhEvKeROg/WuBauIL65jI/AAAAAAAAEaI/V0zQW_eo_D8sz_novEcOWT2dCNyrpwOoACLcBGAs/s1600/Mona%2BLisa%2BASCII%2Bart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="665" data-original-width="474" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3SUhEvKeROg/WuBauIL65jI/AAAAAAAAEaI/V0zQW_eo_D8sz_novEcOWT2dCNyrpwOoACLcBGAs/s320/Mona%2BLisa%2BASCII%2Bart.jpg" width="228" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Steve Weyer recently released his Newton web browser, Newtscape as freeware.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Internet and the World Wide Web in particular, has changed a lot since Newton was discontinued in 1998.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Back in 2008, this was already a problem and webpages were either taking an incredibly long time to download or would not load at all.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One work around was to have the webpage converted to text beforehand, stripping out all other formatting and images. Not only did this greatly reduce the amount of bandwidth required to download the page, it also made it easy to present any text information from the page, as well as reducing the amount of storage required on the Newton.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There were third-party websites which provided pre-processing services such as Google, skweezer.com and baresite.com. Unfortunately Google has moved all the services over to HTTPS for security reasons. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">However the Newton doesn't support HTTPS. Both skweezer.com and baresite.com have been discontinued.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Fortunately, other services have emerged to fill the gap:</span><br />
<ol>
<li><a href="http://textise.com/">textise.com</a>: works pretty well but ugly. Links are in Bold. </li>
<li><a href="http://w3dt.net/">w3dt.net</a>: works but strips out links too.</li>
<li><a href="http://textmirror.net/">textmirror.net</a>: works but it wants to present a captcha type image to you to prove you're not a robot, so no good if you are using a text only browser on the Newton.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.loband.org/loband/">http://www.loband.org/loband/</a>: Works and seems to be the most readable of the lot.</li>
</ol>
<div>
Unfortunately none of them could convert My Apple Newton. :-(</div>
<ol>
</ol>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-77565455042688073122018-04-26T11:34:00.000+12:002018-07-17T15:56:10.698+12:00Steve Weyer releases NewtDevEnv as freeware<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QT7EigeP3nw/Wt-71AcoEQI/AAAAAAAAEZ4/Zn2Lju3jJHQQO0Vap0qkDM8Rv_ITVZ_2gCLcBGAs/s1600/newticon%255B1%255D.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="29" data-original-width="32" height="181" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QT7EigeP3nw/Wt-71AcoEQI/AAAAAAAAEZ4/Zn2Lju3jJHQQO0Vap0qkDM8Rv_ITVZ_2gCLcBGAs/s200/newticon%255B1%255D.gif" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The original Newton Development Environment produced by Apple was called Newton Toolkit. It required you to write your apps on a PC or Mac and then send them to the Newton for testing. <br />
<br />
NewtDevEnv is a development environment that allows you to write NewtonScript apps on the Newton: So convenient. <br />
<br />
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<i>Newt (and all of its associated files) is shareware. © 1993-2017. S. Weyer,
All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Newt may be freely distributed on online services as long as
all of the files listed are included and unmodified.
</i></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<i>NewtDevEnv could be useful for anyone
</i></div>
<ul style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li><i>who wants to do portable or more direct prototyping,
</i></li>
<li><i>on an old or non-Mac/non-Windows platform, esp. if Apple's Newton ToolKit (NTK) isn't available or working
</i></li>
</ul>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><br />
<h3 style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 18.73px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<i>Feature Summary</i></h3>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span>
<br />
<ul style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li><i>compatible with 1.x and 2.x MessagePads (some features not available on older models)
</i></li>
<li><i>access NewtonScript source from Notepad (and from desktop via Sloup),
Paperback or Newtworks
</i></li>
<li><i>access constants and "platform functions" via plugins (for registered users)
</i></li>
<li><i>popup names of functions/methods and parameters, protos and slot/method definitions (MetaDot plugin)
</i></li>
<li><i>save applications/autoparts as packages with NewtPack plugin
</i></li>
<li><i>documentation available as HTML (and some Newton books)
</i></li>
<li><i>many (200+) examples available
</i></li>
</ul>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><br />
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<i>New in 3.4:
</i></div>
<ul style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li><i>support for context-sensitive source code editing via MetaDot plugin
</i></li>
<li><i>improved compatibility with other utilities: MoreFolders, SuperNotepad, HyperNewt
</i></li>
<li><i>new method of specifying child order
</i></li>
<li><i>localization support for user apps
</i></li>
<li><i>many bug fixes, new preferences, font and menu improvements
</i></li>
</ul>
<i></i><br />
Steve Weyer, NewtDevEnv's developer has released it as freeware. You can find it here:<br />
<a href="http://communicrossings.com/html/newton/newtdev.htm">http://communicrossings.com/html/newton/newtdev.htm</a><br />
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NewtonScript is an innovative and very efficient programming language. There are all sorts of interesting techniques that can be learnt using the language such as inheritance and prototyping. <br />
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Get it while you still can!<br />
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See also<br />
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<a href="https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2009/12/learning-newtonscript-foreword.html">Learning NewtonScript: the Foreword</a><br />
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<a href="https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2009/05/defying-gravity-where-is-walter-smith.html">Defying Gravity: Where is Walter Smith Now?</a></div>
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<a href="https://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2017/03/newt0-now-works-on-64-bit-machines.html">Newt/0 now works on 64-bit machines</a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-19235625067765383242018-04-25T02:09:00.003+12:002018-04-25T02:09:54.404+12:00Steve Weyer makes Newtscape Freeware<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gbtn1Pa5z3s/TxVL8UDAgCI/AAAAAAAADmU/J5it5--1SFo7F37bChJ4cSPQ_rQKYvEOwCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Newtscape.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="232" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gbtn1Pa5z3s/TxVL8UDAgCI/AAAAAAAADmU/J5it5--1SFo7F37bChJ4cSPQ_rQKYvEOwCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Newtscape.gif" /></a></div>
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Newt's Cape is a Newton Book creation tool and a web browser, written by prolific Newton developer Steve Weyer. </div>
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He has kindly released a freeware version (v2.1e2) of this once-popular application. The password for the .zip archive files is <i>turkeylurkey. </i>Not needed for .pkg file. You can download it from here: <a href="http://communicrossings.com/html/newton/regnewtscape.htm"> http://communicrossings.com/html/newton/regnewtscape.htm</a>. </div>
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See also <a href="http://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2006/02/browsing-with-newtscape.html"><span id="goog_64636981"></span>"Browsing with Newscape"<span id="goog_64636982"></span></a></div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-88882923099347429022018-04-12T19:19:00.001+12:002018-04-12T19:19:30.955+12:00Terry Myerson looks back on Windows Phone<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DsHES-aWaxY/Ws8Gug7adhI/AAAAAAAAEZI/N2FEe6Ai7jI1S5_jZQaVrvZvSrjpDt9jACEwYBhgL/s1600/wp_ss_20180412_0001.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="720" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DsHES-aWaxY/Ws8Gug7adhI/AAAAAAAAEZI/N2FEe6Ai7jI1S5_jZQaVrvZvSrjpDt9jACEwYBhgL/s640/wp_ss_20180412_0001.png" width="360" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>I've always admired Microsoft's Windows Phone. In many respects it paralleled the Apple Newton story:</i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br /></i></span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>A portable device with an innovative and applauded user interface</i></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Despite herculean efforts of its team, was ultimately doomed to failure</i></span></li>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i></i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>There has been a lot written on the rise and fall of Windows Phone. </i></span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aVNWXV9SqHE/Ws8H2Ushz6I/AAAAAAAAEZQ/wEp1dRpjkX0oTgTVf1bJzTMv164w_PklgCLcBGAs/s1600/wp_ss_20180412_0002.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="720" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aVNWXV9SqHE/Ws8H2Ushz6I/AAAAAAAAEZQ/wEp1dRpjkX0oTgTVf1bJzTMv164w_PklgCLcBGAs/s640/wp_ss_20180412_0002.png" width="360" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>However not much has been written publicly by those who were within the leadership team managing the project. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>With Terry Myerson's imminent departure from Microsoft, he has shared some thoughts on his time at Microsoft. Some of these thoughts relate to his time leading the Windows Phone project and he also comments on why he thinks it didn't succeed:</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>2008-2013</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Then came October 2008. Over a year earlier, just prior to the iPhone launch, I was personally involved in negotiating the Exchange ActiveSync license with Apple. I was carrying a 2007 v1 iPhone (which I still have in my office today). I was an outspoken lover of smartphones and knew how important they would be. Enabling mobile connectivity was a key focus of Exchange. Android launched that September. But what I remember most vividly, was the Friday when Andy Lees and Robbie Bach asked me to lead Windows Mobile. I knew we had so much work to do on our non-touch no-app-store Windows Mobile effort. I was honored, and more than a little terrified. Ten days later my office moved across campus. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Windows Phone experience was incredibly challenging, and much has been written about it – but looking back, I am so proud to have been part of the team. It was during this time that I started working closely with current Windows leaders Henry Sanders, Joe Belfiore, Darren Laybourn, Bill Duff, Carlos Picoto, Chuck Friedman, Linda Norman, Chadd Knowlton, Rajesh Sundaram, Richard Ward, KC Lemson, Erin Kolb, and Albert Shum. We innovated in <a href="https://gizmodo.com/5668738/windows-phone-7-review" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background: 0px 0px; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(0, 115, 177); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0073b1; font-weight: 400; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; touch-action: manipulation; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">phone user experience</a>. We had innovative plans for the business model that never came to light. We worked hard. Really hard. But the industry moved forward faster than we could catch up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When the #1 seeded UVA basketball team got knocked out of the tournament a few weeks ago in the first round, my Intersé colleague and UVA alum Ed Hott posted a famous Teddy Roosevelt quote to his Facebook feed. Today, reflecting on the experience of everyone in the Windows Phone team, this quote resonates: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Looking back at this phase of my career, my biggest learnings were that success requires a special composition of business model, user experience, and technology. We had a differentiated experience, but it’s so clear in hindsight that the disruption in business model which Android represented was enormous, and that building our early versions of Windows Phone on an incomplete Windows CE platform, designed for small embedded systems, left us too hobbled to ever catch up. </span></div>
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<h3 style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: 0px 0px; border-image: none; border: 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); box-sizing: border-box; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 600; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 28px; margin: 24px 0px; orphans: 2; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">2013-now</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Then came spring 2013. At this time, despite the competitive challenges in the phone market, Windows Phone was doing relatively ok (which lead us to Nokia…) Ironically at that time, our biggest challenges were on the storied franchises of Windows (Windows 8) and Xbox. While meeting with Steve Ballmer on a Saturday in his office, he asked me to lead Xbox, Windows, and Windows Phone – and an incredible incubation now known as HoloLens. I was honored, and humbled to now be leading over 17,000 engineers and accountable for over $40B in revenue and $5B in operating income—but we had some real challenges.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thank-you-21-years-onto-next-chapter-terry-myerson/ </span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14861096.post-66600323797122978062017-12-23T20:39:00.000+13:002017-12-23T20:39:01.968+13:00Pencil it in: Apple should bring back handwriting recognition on the iPad | Macworld<br />
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Since Apple announced the Apple Pencil, I haven’t once been tempted by the stylus. Yes, it’s an impressive piece of technology, and yes, I’ve seen some truly wonderful things accomplished with its help. But as someone whose artistic skills never progressed much beyond the doodling phase—and really, those doodles are nothing worth putting up on the fridge, much less venturing anywhere beyond the margins of a notebook—it just didn’t seem like the Apple Pencil was for me.
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But something funny happened the other night, when I’d been thinking about some ideas for a book I was working on. Lately I’ve realized that I prefer the free-form nature of jotting things on paper, which allows me to easily make diagrams as well as write notes. It’s also a little more comfortable for, say, lounging on the couch and writing in a way that typing on a laptop or using the onscreen keyboard of the iPad isn’t.
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Wouldn’t it be great, I mused, if I could just do the same jotting and doodling, but with my iPad?</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><a href="https://www.macworld.com/article/3053953/ipad/pencil-it-in-apple-should-bring-back-handwriting-recognition-on-the-ipad.html">Read more</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0