Simon Bell, developer of some excellent Newton software such as Mail V, has released a pre-beta of his previously-unannounced Newton Connection for Mac OS X software (or “NCX”, for short). It’s basically the Mac OS X functional (and visual, although modernized) equivalent of Apple’s Newton Connection Utilities which ran on Mac OS 9.x and earlier.

It appears that it’s built on the Desktop Connection Library (now hosted on SourceForge), but I’m sure Simon has included plenty of extra glue and shims, esp. considering he’s planning on using Mac OS X’s built-in Sync Services.

From my initial testing using my Newton MessagePad 2100, Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11GP WiFi card, and my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo), it seems to be slightly more stable than DCL & Escale, but some of the instability may be due to the fact that neither NCX or DCL/Escale is Universal yet.

What works:

• Installing a package from the MacBook Pro
• Using the MacBook Pro as a keyboard

What doesn’t work:

• Synchronization (I didn’t bother testing it, since Simon says)
• Backup (It fails every time I try¹, but some have gotten it to work)

What’s untested:

• Restore²
• Import³
• Export³

I’ve had constant problems with my connection being lost between the Dock app on the Newton and Escale and not being able to get Escale to respond for long periods of time (15 minutes or more) after relaunching it, often having to resort to a reboot (my guess is the socket was being kept open even after the crash). I have not seen this problem with NCX, so I’m very happy about that.

The interface is beautiful—an excellent job modernizing the Desktop Connection Utilities icons and interface—and functions better than Escale.

It has now already replaced Escale on my system and I can’t wait to see the future updates.

Update: A fellow NewtonTalk-er provided the solution to my issues getting the backup functionality to work: although the “Documents” folder is selected as the default backup location, you need to select a destination (or reselect “Documents”) for it to function. After doing so I was able to initiate and complete a full backup from NCX, but it still seems to fail when trying to initiate the backup from the Newton.

Update #2: Simon e-mailed me, as well as the list, to inform us that he did not, in fact, use the DCL. He wrote his own custom libraries to do this, so mad props to him! I was definitely wrong on that guess.

¹ Of course, I was attempting to back up all packages, so it may have been conflicting with NIE or Hiroshi’s WaveLAN Drivers. I really need to do some additional testing. Update: I’ve gotten backups to work when initiated from NCX.

² Obviously, since I couldn’t do a backup I’m not really able to test the restore functionality. This is my day-to-day Newton, so I’m not about to test the restore functionality on it yet anyway.

³ I just haven’t had time to do this yet, partly because it’s a lower priority as I currently use BlueTooth (with a Pico card & Blunt) to transfer files between my Newton and MacBook Pro.