Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Apple Newton, more than I thought

I just saw a video in PDAColombia (seen in Geekotic), showing the operation of the Apple Newton, the PDA that Apple sold between 1993 and 1998, but that did not get a sufficient success and finally ceased production. The video lasts eight minutes, but worth it.

What led me to comment here is the surprising amount of good ideas which had its front end:

  • Move the selected text by dragging the stylus from one part to another of the screen,
  • corrector to a dictionary that can add new words to the style of word processors,
  • a vector drawing tool, which allows for easy moving shapes within the drawing objects as if they were independent.
  • the ability to write directly to the point of the screen you want, without having to start at the top left corner and go down to return coup,
  • and many watermarks as a graphic animation to send a message to the Trash or shifting after a few seconds of the handwriting entered by the user to the machine as it recognizes the text, with a lot of credit for how well they seem to be even it is a monochrome screen and no backlight.

La Newton mostrando texto normal, manuscrito, un dibujo a mano y formas vectoriales en una nota
The Newton showing normal text, manuscript, a drawing by hand and forms vector in a note

The truth is that watching this video means the number of users of Newton who struggle to keep it alive. How is it possible that no manufacturer of PDAs has yet incorporated these ideas?


Related Articles


25 comments on "Apple Newton, more than I thought"


Pages: [1] 2 3 »

Pages: [1] 2 3 »

Leave a comment


Labels valid: <a href="" title=""> <ABBR title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <'s datetime = "" > <em> <i> <q Cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Akismet has protected and in this blog of thousands of fraudulent reviews. But if your comment filtered by mistake please let me know by e-mail contact from the right.