Re: [NTLK] OS X's Inkwell, and the Newton Mini

On Jul 10, 2007, at 11:46 AM, John Derbyshire wrote:
>As the iPhone's OS is an OS X variant might it be possible for some clever soul to allow it to use OS X's Inkwell? Presumably this would involve using the iPhone's screen as a graphic tablet screen? Result, iPhone's the Newton Mini.

It's a neat idea. The issue raised about normal styluses not working with the iPhone's tablet might be a killer, but there might be ways around it. The software side probably could be done from inside Apple, though it does require cooperation from CoreGraphics and Text Services Manager, at least, and possibly from Carbon and Cocoa (although I suspect all native apps on the iPhone are Cocoa). I don't think you could accomplish this from outside Apple, as you'd need to compile the code for the ARM processor and link it with the version of the OS being built for the iPhone.

At 12:19 PM -0700 7/10/07, Martin Joseph wrote:
>The OSX on the iphone is kind of in name only as far as we can tell.  
>The processor is an ARM, and the development tools for the iphone are 
>not available. So, no there is no inkwell. Even if inkwell was 
>there, it hardly makes OSX a newton. No gesture recognition and the
>wrong interface make this kind of lame in my experience (on OSX).

Actually, Inkwell does recognize gestures, some of them quite familiar to Newton users, such as join and scrub. But you're right that not all apps take advantage of the recognition. I'm sure the InkPad does. (Heck, if I remember right, I even made the text cursor in the InkPad look like the one in the Newton.) I think I stuck some compatibility code in that caused most of the gestures to work even in apps that didn't recognize the events, but it's been a couple of years since I left Apple and memories are starting to fade. There were plans to integrate more Ink support into the low-level text engines used throughout OS X, but, sadly, they never came to fruition.

- larryy

-- 
This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries
Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/