January/February 1996
Newton 2.0 Impressions
Date: Thu, Dec 21, 1995 4:02 PM PST
From: 73602.2535@compuserve.com
Subj: Newton 2.0 impressions
To: davemacneill@eworld.com
Dave:
The way it works with many technologies is that they initially are not useful
enough to be widely adopted. People must make a conscious effort to use
them which means that it is primarily enthusiasts that make it work for
themselves. These technologies ave somewhat useful for few people. At some
point, a breakthrough comes that changes everything, and all of a sudden
the technology is quite useful to many people. This is what has happened
to Newton with OS 2.0. Newton still isn't perfect but the improvements make
Apple's PDA infinitely more useful. The combination of a much improved new
printed recognizer, an infinitely more readable font, much snappier folder
switching, and checklist and outline features in the Notepad make all the
difference in the world.
The new printed character recognizer significantly advances the state of
the art. If your printing is neat and your letters do not run into each
other, recognition can approach 100%. Since recognition is primarily by
letter you don't have to worry about Newton completely misinterpreting a
word. The new recognizer also has an edit field pop-up for correcting words.
This works fine, but personally l would have preferred a Graffiti-style
edit window. Fortunately, Apple's new recognizer is so good that you rarely
need to correct a word. Another new feature also greatly improves writing
on the Newton: a caret cursor now always shows where the Newton will insert
the next word, no matter where you write on the screen. You can even place
the cursor anywhere in the text and new words will be inserted there. The
caret fulfills yet another function: tap on it, and a pop-up for punctuation
appears. Super.
Under OS 1.3, creating a summary overview of notes, or switching between
folders used to take forever. 2.0 has speeded up those tasks by a great
margin. It is now perfectly feasible to first get an overview, pick a note,
start reading or editing, then switch folders, open another note to look
up or copy something, then return to the original note.
The Extras drawer is now much more flexible. You can select which icons
should be shown. The concept is similar to switching between folders. You
can create new folders for, say, your applications, your utilities, etc.
Tapping the summary button toggles the view between icon and list. The list
view shows where an item resides and how much memory it uses.
Newton 2.0 represents the second most important event in the history of
PDAs, the first ,of course, being the original Newton MessagePad. Those
guys at Apple are doing a super job.
- CHB
Pen Computing
Issue #8