Details for the next COBA meeting have been posted. RAW Processing Software demoed, including:

• Apple Aperture
• Adobe Lightroom
• Light Crafts Lightzone

Spread the word about the first meeting of 2006! See you at the SLAC Orange Room on February 8!

The highlight of Day 2 of the 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference was hearing the stories Walter Smith and James Joaquin. Walter was the father of NewtonScript, and James was one of the early product marketing managers for the Newton. If you’re a fan of the book Defying Gravity, you can see Walter and James gracing many of the book’s pages. Turns out late-night coding sessions and jet-setting producting marketing meetings make for great photos. After Newton, James went on to do some great work in the digital photography space; today, he’s focusing on bridging the payment gap between the connected and disconnected as CEO of Xoom.

Newton memorabilia was shown on Sunday, including some rare Newton prototypes and development t-shirts. It turns out that Walter was the winner of the Newton Museum eBay auction. In the coming months, he’ll be updating the website to be the definitive resource for Newton’s past.

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Einstein is now running on a Nokia 770 phone!

One of the next steps in bringing Newton back from the dead is to move the development environment away from Classic and onto Mac OS X. Thanks to the efforts of Paul Guyot and Makoto Nukui, we have the beginnings of a native Mac OS X NTK.

In my (limited) spare time, I think I’ll noodle around getting this working a little better. The ultimate goal would be to have backward compatibility with existing Classic NTK projects. A more reasonable goal would be get the system working for new package development. We can worry about backward compatibility later.

I had a little trouble getting NTK installed on Classic on the Quad. Just so I remember in the future, to install NTK on Mac OS X under Classic, perform the following:

1. Download NTK from the United Network of Newton Archives
2. Move AppleTalk ADSP Tool and Apple Modem Tool into the Extensions folder of Classic’s System Folder
3. Move Newton Toolkit Font into the Fonts folder of Classic’s System Folder
4. Download TCPSerial 1.0.1 and install the two files in the archive into the Extensions folder

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The big news coming out of the 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference is that the NewtonOS runs on Linux PDA’s! You read that right, we’re one step closer to having a Newton running on non-Apple hardware.

At the 2004 WWNC, Paul demoed Einstein, an emulator running on Mac OS X. He’s improved it over the past year, making the emulator seven times faster. On my Quad PowerMac G5, it has a speed rating of 9400 iterations/second when running Frank Gruendel’s NewtTest. A stock 2100 has a rating of 11,000. An accelerated Newton clocks in at 13,000. So, we’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer to matching and breaking the speed barrier. The Linux version of the emulator is much, much slower. I don’t doubt, however, Paul’s ability to get the speed up to an acceptable number.

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Digital Vision Fellow Robert Maranga is featured in Red Herring this month!

I’ve got a networking troubleshooting problem for readers to help me solve. Network transfer performance when copying from my Quicksilver PowerMac G4 to my Quad is really slow, 1MB/second. Both machines have Gigabit Ethernet, so transfer rates should be at least 10MB/second.

What’s strange is that network performance from the Quad to the G4 runs at Gigabit speed. If I connect the two computers together, transfers between both computers run at Gigabit speed. I have an AirLink Gigabit switch, but I don’t think that’s the problem because I get Gigabit speed going from Quad to G4 and from my ReadyNAS to both the G4 and G5.

Here’s a quick table to explain my speed problem:

Anyone have any clues as to why this might be happening? Performance is slow from G4 to G5 regardless of the file transfer protocol AFP, SMB, FTP, etc.

You’ve seen him officiating NFL games for the past 12 years. Now learn how he stays fit!

This is a reminder that there will be no January 2006 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group.

The next meeting will be held on February 8, 2006. We will be discussing new RAW processing applications such as Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture. Other topics to be announced.

Adobe fired back at Apple with a public beta release of Lightroom. The beta is fully functional until June, 2006! There’s quite a bit missing from this iteration, especially in the realm of metadata handling, but Adobe plans to release several more versions before the final release.

After downloading, do check out the 20 minute video overview of the product. You can make a drinking game out of the number of jabs the narrator makes against Aperture. Things of note include:

• Ability to reference images in existing locations. You can import images directly into Lightroom’s library or keep your files when you originally placed them.
• Ability to run on less powerful machines.
• Speed of exporting images. Uses a high-resolution version of the image for exporting to PDF. No need to rerender the image.
• Camera RAW. The RAW processing algorithms should be similar to Adobe Camera RAW. If you like the results from ACR, you should like the results from Lightroom.
• Fitts Law. You can configure the app in a way where you drag your mouse to the edge of the screen, and various UI elements, such as the adjustments panel, the library pane, and the thumbnail film strip appear. Nice.

MacWorld is this week, and you can be sure that both the Adobe and Apple booths will be packed with photographers asking questions about Aperture and Lightroom. Good for us. The pro photo organization software market is ready for some innovation and competition!

What I continue to find amazing is the frequency of concurrent product ideation. Lightroom and Aperture have been in development for some time, so it’s not as if one product was whipped up days after the other’s product release. The feature sets for both products are very similar. It’s as the industry is a real entity with a mind. The companies act simply as implements for its thought processes.

More people are talking about Lightroom:

• Uwe Steinmueller has an in-depth preview of Lightroom on Outback Photo.
• Michael Reichmann on Luminous Landscape
• Story on the development of Lightroom