PDA UI - Learning from Newton

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Mon Jan 7 02:35:38 UTC 2002


On Sun, 6 Jan 2002, Aaron J Reichow wrote:
[snip]
> There's probably a lot more, but I need to shut up before I convince
> myself to sell my iPAQ 3150 and just cling to my Newton for the next 20
> years. (the iPAQ is for Squeaking!)

Heh. I'm trying to make *exactly* this switch myself. While parts of the
Newt UI were daft (it has its share of "Drag disk to trash to eject"ism),
it's the best for actually working with handwriting and being "in the
page" (rather than the way the Palm and WinCE use a keyboard analogue
(i.e., Graffiti, Jot, or a tap keybaord) + stylus as mouse interface).

I too took serious notes using my Newt (and pubbed them for the students I
was TAing). I wrote a good chunk of my Squeak Anthology chapter in it
(using the hand writing recognition!). It was really quite slick. My
impression is that the 2000/1s were really way beyond the 1xx models.

I'm afraid that the iPaq is never *quite* going to make it, because of the
super dinky screen. ANd MS digital ink, frankly, sucks. The screen is a
bit wierd too. Not as accurate or responsive, IMHO.

Anyhoo, Aaron, I'm *totally* up for a newt inspired Squeak interface with
newt lever (or better!) capabilities.

Biblio333, a bilbilography manager I've been on again offagain porting to
squeak from visualworks (you should be able to google for it) has an
intersting record/field model (with fields being first class objects). It
might serve as a useful base for a newton framelike thingy.

I hope to release the port soon.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.





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