Earlier this week, Simon Bell announced the version 1.1 release of his Newton Connection for Mac OS X app on the NewtonTalk mailing list.

Honestly, I haven’t gotten a chance to test it yet, but I have upgraded. Among the fixes in this release are, as Simon says, “Works Import/Export and a host of other fixes too numerous to mention.”

One important update that’s not listed in his initial announcement email, but is mentioned in various replies and in the included ReadMe.pdf file, is that NCX is now a standalone application. This means that all the required frameworks (including his custom Newton framework, mentioned briefly in my previous coverage of NCX) are now contained within the application itself¹ and so NCX can be installed to, or run from, any location.

As a Mac OS X admin, I find this a great bonus as it now can be easily installed in ~/Applications instead of /Applications and so not requiring administrator account to install.

Versions 1.1 is still missing the sync features, which is probably the most requested feature these days, but as the application already fills such a much needed hole in the Mac OS X/Newton world he deserves accolades all around.

As I’ve mentioned before, he’s done an excellent job being true to the original Newton Connection utility’s form and function but still making it feel like a Mac OS X application.

¹ Hopefully my offering the link to Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzch’s excellent Embedded Cocoa Frameworks screencast was helpful in this area. Anyone else looking to do this kind of thing should really check it out.