WWDC 1994 Newton Track Report
This was originally posted to a Usenet newsgroup
I attended the Newton track of Apple's World Wide Development Conference today. (WWDC continues until Friday)
The Development Overview session was a reasonable introduction to the Newton Tool Kit environment. The Building Newton Solutions session focused on four or five applications for specific markets. One was a program for the State of California's disaster evaluation. The user filled out a form using popup menus, lists and so forth, got the location from an attached GPS unit, and could sketch the scene. Another was for farmers and talked to a Windows database. Monsato had started the project three years ago, found interest by farmers in having information in the field, but no interest in using laptops PC's on truck dashboards. The PIE pioneers program will be restructured at the end of the summer.
I skipped the Newton Communication Wired & Wireless session and the Bookmaker session to take advantage of the debugging lab, where the Apple engineer fixed one bug in our application and identified what needed to be done for another.
The synchronization session was very interesting, identifying various levels of ease of use. Users were classified as using the Newton as either a lunch box, a credit card, or a collector. PIE's strategy involves PIE doing the enabling work to allow third party developers to develop communications software. "Code less, ship more" Newton Connection is considered a first generation product, and they are moving toward toolboxes and API's for direct Mac & Windows application communication. Integration Libraries will be available sometime during the summer to allow developers to produce Mac files from the synch files. Newton Connection for Developers was announced, which has a Listener window similar to the Inspector window in NTK to allow debugging of Meta Datas. It has been seeded to some developers and will come out this summer.
The feedback forum was lively, with developers stating their desires and the PIE DTS people giving an idea how soon various upgrades and interfaces will be available. The compiler is still under development. One fellow complained that there was no solution for the 30 app barrier that worked on original MessagePad's, but another member of the audience said he had one in hand. Most of the concerns expressed here were addressed and a number of others besides.
Some notable facts I gathered:
- Transparent 110's were for sale, and a number of Apple people had them.
- Application storage fills up separately from frames storage (used by running applications). The division between these two domains is fixed.
- Running applications from Flash RAM cards or static RAM cards is not noticeably slower than running from main memory.
- Don't use full justification in print formats, it's broken.
- No Newton on a Mac any time soon.
- TCP-IP is 6-12 months away
- There will probably be a Newton Development conference in the fall.
- The Alpha draft of the Human Interface guidelines has been posted to various sources.
- There is hope of support for application deletion, as distinct the RemoveScript, so applications that are being deleted (not just having their card removed) can deleted their soups, etc.
Don't take any of this as gospel, I'm just typing this out quickly.
So, overall, nothing earth-shattering, but the development environment is maturing and more and more applications are coming out.
I used a MP100 to gather notes, and looking back, my note gathering was rather inefficient in gathering information and spending time wisely. I didn't waste any time pawing through paper notes to find the one I wanted, but I lost more time trying to get notes into the Newton. However, I did get answers to almost all of my questions because I had a To Do list of them on hand. I exchanged electronic business cards with about two dozen people, and that was nice because I have the information in a usable database. It was also quite useful to be able to show off the applications I'm working on. The Newton was also a great way to kill time and accomplish modest amounts of work while traveling. I killed a half hour in the San Jose airport entering the data from the two paper business cards I received. This echoes the direction that many developers are taking, limiting the amount of written input necessary to use the program.
For the next conference, I suggest speakers have their lecture outline available for downloading, by beaming or otherwise. If I had the outline as a base, I could have added comments and extensions and ended up with decent notes. Text editing is much more feasible on the Newton than primary text entering.
