The prime purpose of this is to call a garbage collection in your Newton's memory. In theory, such a garbage collection should get rid of all the dross hanging around, and you *may* find that this staves off the need to restart from time to time (when using version 1.02 of the Newton OS). There are some who believe that this works, and would not be without it, and others who swear blind that it is nothing but voodoo, and has no chance of doing anything. However, it is clear that it does nothing if only used in extremis - when recognition is collapsing. If you want to try to see whether it works, you should call a GC every hour or so, before anything starts to slow down.
For those situations in which you do not believe it to work, or in which recognition failure is occurring, there is now (in this new version 1.0b2) a restart button, which will force the Newton to restart without your removing the battery cover. This is an undocumented OS function, and you use it at your own risk. Having tried it myself, the only adverse effect that I have noticed is that sound volume appears to be lost - thus, when your Newton has restarted, you should open the Extras drawer, turn the volume right down, and right up again. Otherwise, your Newton will remain silent. I am indebted to Robert Bruce (<robbruce@bnnrc-srv.med.jhu.edu>, who runs a nice Newton software archive on that ftp server) for suggesting this, and (almost!) pointing me in the right direction.
It incidentally includes information about free and total memory (internal store only at present), battery power, and battery compartment temperature, all of which are available in other tools on the Newton. However, try tapping on the temperature bar...
This is a slightly modified version of one of the demos provided with the Newton Toolkit. NewtonScript, which is the language used to program Newton systems, can be compiled and run on the fly, and this little utility allows you to do just this. You will hardly develop the next killer app on your Newton this way (!), but it does for instance allow you to work out sines etc. I stress my indebtedness to the NTK example code here - some have suggested that this is a straight rip-off, but I did actually spend some time tweaking and tuning it a bit, and repeat that it is *not* original!
To use this, enter your NewtonScript program in the upper editable text field, e.g.
sin(0.75)
then press the Eval! button, and the answer is displayed in the lower text window.
Note that it is possible to enter *any* NewtonScript command in this, and thus it is very easy to crash your Newton in a myriad of extremely nasty ways. BE WARNED!
Howard Oakley can be contacted on CompuServe at 70734,120, CIX as hoakley, AppleLink as UK0392, the Internet as Howard@quercus.demon.co.uk, and by fax to +44 983 853253.
