Earth

Display of a rotating Earth for the Newton MessagePad

by yischon liaw <yischon@deepfocus.com>

Copyright )1997, deep focus designs



What is Earth?



Earth is an application that displays a rotating Earth. An info area is at the left upper corner. A close area is at the right lower corner. On the lower edge of the application is an invisible speed bar. Tapping the left side of the bar will speed up the rotation of the earth. Tapping the right side will slow down the rotation. You may drag the application anywhere on the screen.



The earth will appear in grayscale on models running Newton OS 2.1 (currently the MessagePad 2000 and the eMate 300), and in black and white on older models.



Power Usage



I wrote this application as a cool demonstration of graphics on the Newton. I also hoped that it would be a way of keeping people aware that we are living on a small grayscale marble. However, running this application does use more energy to run than if the Newton were idling.



I don't expect that anybody will be running this program frequently, if only briefly as a demonstration to other people, but if you plan to run this application with any regularity or length of time, please consider running it with an AC adapter. Or at the minimum, use rechargeable batteries. Please be kind to our planet.



Installation



Install Earth as you would any other Newton software, by downloading it to your device using the Newton Connection Utilities, Newton Backup Utility, Newton Package Installer, or other package installation utility. Earth will be installed into your extras drawer as an application. Tapping on the Earth icon will launch it.



The Earth.pkg is a "fat" package that will show black and white on black and white models and on grayscale models, however, it takes up 103k. The Earth BW.pkg is a black and white only version of Earth, and will show only black and white, regardless of the model. It only takes up 26k.



You may even install both on the same machine (It's cool to see two spinning globes.)



History



97.05.03 1.02 Reversed direction of spin (corrected).

97.04.14 1.01 Released Earth BW.pkg in bundle

97.04.14	1.0 Initial public release of version 1.0



At this point, the application does take up 3.4k of heap space once it is run. I'm trying to improve that and am investigating techniques. Any suggestions or help?



Please send me any problems, questions, suggestions, or comments.



Earth Day is only once a year. Do something for our planet *every* day.



yischon

<yischon@deepfocus.com>



Earth is free but all rights are reserved by yischon liaw and deep focus designs. It can also be freely distributed as long as this Read Me file is included unmodified.



deep focus designs

<http://www.deepfocus.com/>

<newton@deepfocus.com>



Newton, MessagePad, Connection Utilities, Backup Utility, Package Installer, and Apple are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.



In using this software, you understand and agree that this software is provided Ras isS without warranty of any kind.  The authors do not make any warranties, either expressed or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, with respect to this software.



In no event shall the author be liable for any consequential, incidental, or special damages whatsoever (including without limitation, damages for loss of critical data, loss of profits, interruption of business and the like) arising out of the use or inability to use this software.



)1997  yischon liaw and deep focus designs. All Rights Reserved.