So an old friend of mine asked me today if I was still using my Newton. Sadly, like everyone else left with a newton when the hammer fell, I eventaully switched to a Palm device.

I was happy with something so small, fast, and.. well, so small and fast, and as they got smaller and faster, I forgot what I loved about my Newton. It wasn't the size (well, after the first few months) and it wasn't the handwriting recognition (which finally got really good just a few months before the whole thing was scrapped).

It was the interface.

I pulled out my messagepad an hour ago and I still remembered how to edit text, use Newton's shortand for touching up notes, navigationg around the OS, sending a fax, all of it. This, even though I hadn't touched a Newton in two years.

After playing with it for an hour I wanted to see if they actually got IrDA compliance in before Newton was sacked, so I got my Palm V and tried to beam it a note. No go.

Then I tried to beam from the Palm to my Newton and it literally took me two minutes to figure out how to beam something from my Palm! Don't get me wrong, I beam stuff all the time, but using the Newton for 30 minutes was the clearest case of cognitive dissonance I've ever seen. Its interface paradigm is so embracing that after using it, I found the Palm OS to be clumsy and minimal (note that I've always loved it for being minimal before, but it's under the limit of what it should be).

The problem is the menu bar. The menu bar on the Palm OS is a cop-out. It's where programmers put functionality they don't have the ability to incorporate into their program's interface.

The menu bar has always served as the catch-all repository for functionality, but the Palm OS not only uses it as an unseen repository for essential functionality, they make it counterintuitive to get to it.

First off, you don't see any representation of a menu bar on screen, just a button at the bottom of the silkscreen which, if tapped, will bring up the menu bar. Never mind for a moment that it's the only button that won't entirely transport you from your current environment, a condition that strongly impedes a user's curiosity, but if you do need to access menu functionality, there's no affordance that it's there, and you can only get an indication that additional functions are available by tapping at the very bottom of the screen, to get a menu bar that appears at the very top of the screen, necessitating a full navigation of both the eyes and the stylus.

Basically, it sucks. Without going into (more of) a tirade, it's bad enough that PalmOS creators and other developers can't incorporate all the needed functionality into interface elements without resorting to menus, but to implement menus in a counterintuitive and inhibitory fashion is just plain criminal.

Yet, even with all that, it's a hundred times more intuitive than Windows CE. I won't even go in to my recent experience trying to play with a few of these at Circuit City.

A Microsoft logo does not a quality product make.

It makes me cry for my Newton.