You know - I'm totally a newbie when it comes to my Newt, but I'm
already indebted to Paul for his help. I've used his tools to get
Hiroshi's driver working on my machine (I just got paid, so reg. is
coming soon!), he's answered my questions when I was getting into NTK
and his posts to the group have been the first place I go for system
questions. And you know what, I think that $50 (or whatever the
exchange is these days) is about right for the usefulness of the driver.
That said, I have to admit that the amount of shareware / demo-ware /
commercial software that's still out for the Newton really caught me by
surprise. I thought about why it would be so surprising to me, and I
think it's because I'm so used to this Internet notion of Open Source
and the need for everything to be FREE FREE FREE! That, of course, went
hand in hand with my acceptance of Beta quality software as final
software. Why not use the crap - it's free!
Now - keep in mind that I'm not so gung-ho Newton to be oblivious to the
fact that there's a good deal of bad software out there. Even
commercial software seems to have major bugs and issues, which is why so
many of us have worked hard to find our "stable" setup. Compound that
issue by the fact that many of the good projects are dead (I know - just
because the last beta for YAZI was in 1998 doesn't HAVE to mean it's
dead, but come on) and it becomes hard to understand why the need to
charge for this stuff. Is it because it's an Apple product and Apple
users are used to paying out the wazzoo for their equipment (silly
little jab there from the Basilisk II user who wishes he could connect
via AppleTalk)? Is it because the Newton started out expensive, so it's
just in line with the platform?
Well - as I mentioned - I've been playing with the NTK and I realized
that programming for the Newton is a real pain in the butt!!! The IDE
is rough at best. Debugging is a nightmare on Win32 (running four
instances of slowdown isn't what I'd call elegant). Who were the ad
wizards who came up with that one?!? So sure, nBattleship is only a
Battleship game, but what a phenomenally amazing piece of software to
use so many parts of this thing! And MAD Newton blows me away every
time I listen to my personal stream. Hiroshi's driver boggles my mind,
and Paul's ATA driver is absolutely mystical.
I guess this rant is to say that nothing on the Newton is simple. I
won't pay for much of the really bad software out there, but the stuff
that's good deserves what's coming to it. If I ever finish something, I
don't know if I'll charge for it, but I don't think I can blame anyone
(even the YAZI folks) for asking what they do.
Thanks to all who have made a difference in this community.
Chris
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