Apple Quickies Comin' At Ya

There are a few new product announcements recently: MATLAB for Mac OS X is available; fink for 10.2 is available for testing; Intuit has announced QuickBooks for Mac OS X; and PowerLogix has announced even more upgrades, including dual processor upgrades. And one user notes, "I wonder if the /. effect could drain the batteries of this Newton quickly?"

Re:But will QuickBooks work?

[Otter]

Here's [tidbits.com] a fairly hostile update from TidBits. Basically, Intuit has announced a new release in 2003, but with no real info about what it will have. MYOB has taken the Mac accounting market away from them and they seem to be reacting, if not in a particularly helpful way.

As the article notes, that's what "FUD" really means, as opposed to the way it's used here to mean "said something vaguely critical about Lunix".

Fink Question

[addaon]

Maybe this is obvious, but I've looked for a bit and not been able to figure it out. I have a current fink install on 10.1. I want to switch to 10.2, and I'm going to do a clean install to do that... so all my fink software will be wiped. I don't mind redownloading everything at all... but is there any way to grab my current fink list of installed programs, and have fink reinstall those automatically? I managed to get the installed list through `fink list` and a bit of grepping... but that includes all the dependencies, and dependencies might have changed, so some of those installed items may not be needed any more. Also, if I pass that list to `fink install`, the first item that's unreachable will cause fink to terminate after a few retries (with the --yes) option, meaning I'll have to rerun the whole script, no? Any workarounds/ideas/people calling me dumb?

Yes, nHTTPd is actually useful

[RevAaron]

The Newton webserver- nHTTPd- part of the Newton Personal Data Sharing (NPDS) system has been mentioned on here a few times over the last 3 or 4 years I've been reading Slashdot.

Most of the time, I imagine that people see NPDS as a novelty, like running Apache on WinCE. And to some who run it, it is just a novelty. However, unlike some Htttpd for CE, NPDS actually manages to be useful. It serves your Dates, Names, Todo and Notes data, accessing the object-oriented database that makes up the Newton system for data storage. Of course, it can also serve regular HTML pages. I've actually seen a couple organizations that were using a Newton as a drop-in solution to managing contacts and meeting schedules. Incredible!

I suppose someone could write a C++ CGI that access the WinCE DBs for the analogous data on a WinCE/PocketPC device, but then you're stuck doing it in C++, which if a major pain in the ass compared to NewtonScript. Does anyone know of NSBasic [nsbasic.com] (started on the Newton, of course :P) or a similar RAD language for the PocketPC can access the internal WinCE dbs?

In other news, someone is getting me a 2100 in exchange for attempting to develop a Squeak VM for the Newton! I recently had to sell my super-nice Newton 2100u setup, and I've missed my Newt a great deal. I guess it's one of those things where you don't understand it unless you've had a Newt yourself... but in my switch attempt to an iPAQ and more recently a Jornada 720, I've been left wanting in a lot of respects, and really can't wait to get my Newton back!

New Powerlogix Dual G4 CPU -- not a great deal

[jay_in_pa]

The PowerForce Dual G4 Series 100 at 800MHz will cost US$799; the 1GHz model runs $1,119. The PowerForce Dual G4 Series 133 at 867MHz and 1GHZ cost the same, respectively. PowerLogix anticipates their availability within 2 to 3 weeks.

When you consider you can get a brand-new 867 MHz Dual G4 with all the other good things that come a long, like DDR RAM, bigger faster hard drive, etc, and then sell your olrder G4 for probably more than the difference (depending on how it is equipped), you'd be better off buying a new one and selling your old one. (Just MHO)