The Company

PelicanWare was already a successful Newton software company when I met Don Vollum at the 1996 Newton Developer's Conference. I liked him immediately and in a small community, for one of the premiere development organisations to be right here in my own backyard (Portland metro area), it was just too great. PelicanWare was the company behind QuickFigure spreadsheet for the Newton, one of the few marquee applications actually doing well in the marketplace.

PointPro

As PelicanWare grew, Don purchased some products to add to his offerings. One of those products was AvailWorks, an all-in-one "works"-style package for the newton. By "works", I mean that it included a simple word processor, spreadsheet and drawing mode that produced page layouts the user could print. Pretty wondrous stuff for many users that made this handheld their only computing device.

When SoftCare ended the MDPad project, I contacted Don. It turned out to be just after he had acquired the AvailWorks product. He had the idea that a presentation application, providing a kind of slideshow feature or PowerPoint lite would fill a need. Don was in contact with a company working to provide VGA output in a PCMCIA (now PC-Card) form factor. He and I talked about making the newton a tool for making real presentations!

It was my job, then, to write a VGA-PCMCIA driver for the Newton hardware, integrate it with the OS, and re-write the AvailWorks application to focus on providing presentations. In short, I did it! In this instance, a picture really is worth hundred words:

Building It

Building PointPro was one of my proudest moments. Certainly it was my geekiest, digging deeper into the bowels of a device than I'd ever like to. I wrote ARM Assembler to provide the card's functionality to the Newton OS. Wrote C++ in the Newton's Device Driver Kit (DDK) to make that functionality a part of the Newton's object model, including making the VGA registers and color mapping available to Newton developers. And I wrote the NewtonScript code to update the PointPro application.

The Results? With only that card and a Newton, a user can walk into a meeting, get connected to an overhead project and present a slide show to large hall as Guy Kawasaki did. That made my year!