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Re: Wanted Software?

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamaisCascio (Post 114625)

The Newton could do that, so it's not a hugely demanding problem.

LOL

Empirically, we are unable to establish any correlation between "the Newton could do it", or even "it's not a hugely demanding problem", and the probability of seeing it on the tablets.

The Newton, the Zauri, hey, even the iStuff can do it. We can't unless applications go out of their way to handle it.

Re: Wanted Software?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ghoonk (Post 133589)

Karel, remember MoreInfo for the Newton? That would be killer on this device, and if the Newton could pull it off back in 1997, I see no reason why this would not be possible on the NiT :)

And yes, full screen handwriting recognition would be a blessing, cursive or otherwise. I was tinkering about with my iPaq 3970 a couple of days back and somehow found Transcriber's use of the full screen refreshing, compared to the limited area of the input panel on the NiT

It is really really important to remember that many of those amazing Newton programs depend heavily on the "soup" data structure of NewtonOS. Think of Newton's file system more as one giant relational database, rather than a file system.

I'm not saying MoreInfo is impossible to realize on another platform, but that it requires a total rethinking and recoding of the application to make it work with "normal" file systems. To get something resembling the Newton look and feel on the Itablet would (in my humble and totally ignorant opinion, of course) require to rebuild the Itablet from the bottom up on a SQL database structure. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that no-one is going to do it.

As to real handwriting recognition, I mentioned my email and reply to PhatWare on this blog. It implies that CalliGrapher, or even PenOffice, are theoretically possible on the Itablet. It's just a question of who's going to front the cash for the OEM license.

PenOffice is as close to a mode-less HWR as we're ever going to hope to get on a system that wasn't designed with this input method from the start. The program emulates standard keyboard presses and mouse movements to the OS and it really doesn't need a separate input window; you can simply write all over the screen, the recognized text will be redirected to the cursor.

PenOffice is also a very powerful graphical macro system, which you can teach to do a variety of tasks from chosen ink gestures (e.g. write "kj", draw a circle around it and PenOffice will input "Karel Jansens" at the cursor, or write "awletter" to have it start Abiword with your letter template).

Well, enough salivating. The odds Nokia will ever procure PenOffice for the Itablets are as close to zero as the god Statisticus will allow for...

Re: Wanted Software?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Benson (Post 133610)

It's not so much that, rather than that the Newton is such a different beast it is next to impossible to emulate its functionality in a different OS. Paul Guyot, the God of Newton, claimed, after an improbable amount of research, that it couldn't be done.

He then started the Einstein, now OpenEinstein, project to emulate the Newton OS itself inside other OSes. One day, this should result in the capability of turning an Itablet into a modern Newton, which uses all the hardware capabilities of the Nokia platform and still gives you the authentic Newton look and feel.

Still, even OpenEinstein requires the user to have an original Newton ROM image on his emulating machine...

Re: Wanted Software?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Karel Jansens (Post 133631)

Isn't copyright law a pain; it'd be nice if old ROMs lapsed into PD after x number of years since the last hardware.

But it only reveals the need for another project; an open-source OS for the Newton. Then that could be run on Einstein, and you'd have a Newton-clone.

The post I was quoting, BTW, was not about Newton-guts-dependent things; it was about landscape/portrait switching. Which CAN be implemented on normal OS/filesystem combos.

Re: Wanted Software?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Benson (Post 133735)

Gnuton was started and -- as usual -- pretty much abandoned.

I believe there was a project to emulate NewtonOS in Smalltalk or Squeak or something equally esotheric, but I don't know anything more about that.

Quote:

The post I was quoting, BTW, was not about Newton-guts-dependent things; it was about landscape/portrait switching. Which CAN be implemented on normal OS/filesystem combos.

But, as almost everything else, it was something Newtons did flawlessly. :rolleyes:

Re: Wanted Software?

Im a physics/EE major i would like to see mathematica on this tablet. I know there is a free linux type software out there, but i would like to see if we could put a full or partial mathematica program on the IT. Preferably 5.0 or higher. I know it was done on a mac'd IT. Any thoughts?