Newton Conference
Volume Number: 10
Issue Number: 3
Column Tag: From The Field
Newton Developer Conference 
What happened at Apple’s first attempt at a Newton Developer
Conference?
By Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief
For those of you who aren’t in the Newton community, Apple held their first
Newton Platform Development Conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center,
December 7-8, 1993. This two day conference had three “tracks” - International
Newton Marketplace, Orientation to Newton Development, and Advanced Newton
Development.
The International Newton Marketplace track was the “business” track for
Newton development. In this track, Apple and other vendors discussed such things as
solutions for the enterprise, PCMCIA as a delivery vehicle, vertical market
applications, StarCore and other distribution options, and Newton in the world market.
The Orientation to Newton Development track was meant for those that have used
Newton, but didn’t know about how to develop for it. Apple had several discussions
entitled: Introductions to Newton Programming, NewtonScript, View System &
Prototypes, Soups & Stores, Newton Connection to the Desktop, and Building Electronic
Books. Finally, the Advanced track discussed such topics as: advanced NewtonScript
programming techniques, communications & routing, application design &
performance tuning, intelligent assistance, debugging your Newton application, and
leveraging system services. There was also the Motorola sponsored party and of
course, Newton Jeopardy - testing Newton development knowledge.
Most of the sessions covered information is covered in the Newton Toolkit, in our
November, 1993 Newton issue or in the literature received by developers from Apple.
The advanced sessions obviously included information for more experienced
developers. There was information about working around NTK problems and making
your applications run more quickly.
The best place to ask questions is the online services if you run into specific
problems with Newton development. Apple is best supporting Newton on AppleLink,
but there is a good amount of support on CompuServe, AOL, and the Internet. Apple has
received a lot of complaints from developers about AppleLink (with both serious
quality and pricing problems), but feel free to complain more. They claim that cost
issues will go away when Apple Online Services moves away from the GE system to the
new in-house Apple system. NewtonMail is based on this new in-house system.
AppleLink users will be migrated to this system sometime starting in the first half of
1994.
The most important news from the conference is that Apple is planning on
releasing a version of the NTK that will produce compiled code. Today, NTK produces
byte code that is interpreted in real time on the Newton. The new version will generate
not only byte code, but compiled native code for whatever processors are available at
the time. By generating both compiled native and byte code, Newton apps will retain
their hardware independence. Developers will have the option of turning on/off
different types of generation so that they can generate smaller applications. Compiled
versions ran anywhere from 5-40 times faster depending on the type of code. Apple
recommends that you only use compiled code on those portions of the application that
really need it. Why? Because only byte code (interpreted code) will be able to take
advantage of some of the system performance enhancements to come. Note that this new
version of the NTK is not a product announcement, it was just a technology
demonstration. If it is to ship, and it will if the audience response has anything to do
with it, expect it to ship sometime in 1994.
One of the most interesting things at this conference was the mix of people.
Typically, a developers’ conference is almost entirely male computer engineers. This
conference was quite different in two ways. Not only were more women in attendance
than in the past, there were also many people who knew more about content and
potential solutions than they did technical development issues. Apple will eventually
be developing tools for Newton so that end-users can build solutions for themselves and
others.
At the end of the conference, Apple gave a CD to each attendee. This CD contained
technical information about the Apple Media Tool, Newton developer training and
technical information, PIETechnical Support, guidelines on shipping your Newton
application, information about StarCore and other miscellaneous tools. All in all, the
conference had predictable content and was a good first developer conference for a new
platform - hats off to Apple’s Philip Ivanier and everyone else who worked on the
conference.