Read about Featured Gadgeteer - Gavin Maxwell

Gadgeteer Article

August 01, 2002

Hmm, where to start...

Name: Gavin Maxwell
Website: www.pocketscience.com.au
Location: Australia

My first foray into the world of gadgets was a few years ago when I was working as a Macintosh developer... my boss brought in this weird lookin' little greenish lump of a box from a recent visit to Apple HQ here in Australia - low and behold it was a pre-release Apple Newton - this one still had the basketball hoop for the trash can! That was it - I was hooked. I got a beta copy of Newton Tool Kit and started developing software for the Newton OS and fell in love with the simplicity of the device - no massive OS to wade through - I could churn out cool, useful little applications in under an hour! Wow!

I turned away from mainstream developing and started focusing solely on the Newton - this involved changing jobs etc - it was *so* exciting! I started gathering as many different devices and accessories as I could - it helped that the company I moved too also had a retail shop-front! :-)

It was around this time the first Palm Pilot came along - I of course bought one, along with a copy of Metrowerks Codewarrior and started writing software for it too. However this new Pilot had one feature I'd never really noticed lacking with the Newton's - it actually *fit* in my pocket!! Within a short space of time I had modems, GPS's and digital compasses hooked up to my Pilot (even did a small spot on a local cable station, Channel V, showing off my toys!).

After banging away learning the in's and out's of the Palm OS, I started wondering why there weren't any books around to help people develop software for it - there were certainly enough around for other platforms. So I sent a half-dozen emails to various contact@bigpublisher.com addresses asking if they thought such a book was of interest. Turns out it was to one of them - Macmillan/SAMS. Long story short - 9 months later there was a new book on the market called "Teach Yourself Palm Programming in 24 Hours". It wasn't the first, my friend Neil Rhodes beat me by only a month or so - but I didn't care - I was a published author in the coolest market going - the gadget market!

Not long after that I spent almost 2 years inside "gadget heaven" - yup, Palm, Inc. By this time I was a hard-core gadget junkie. I had all the toys, latest mobile phone, latest Palm handheld, latest Bluetooth bits etc... I had a bag that colleagues called my "bag of tricks" - I'd whip it out at the slightest provocation and regale people with the wonders of any number of gadgets I had on me at the time. Stuff like heart monitors for Palm devices, Bluetooth sleds, WiFi sleds etc - bleeding edge gear at the time!

I'm still heavily into the gadgets, carrying with me a trusty Palm m515, Ericsson T39m mobile phone (with GPRS activated of course), Palm Bluetooth SD card, Kodak PalmPix and a myriad of SD content cards. These tools I use constantly and would feel beheaded if I lost any one of them. Other gadgets I play with regularly are my Bluemod (www.bluemod.com), my Apple Titanium G4 PowerBook (with Airport, of course - my house if fully wireless!), and an Apple eMate I'm in the process of getting hooked into my Airport network.

Early this year I joined the newly formed Australian Palm OS Users Group (www.auspug.org), and am now the overall coordinator for the group. I was even interviewed by one of our largest newspapers just last week - they wanted to know who AusPUG were and what we did. I sure the story reads like a god-awful "star trek episode" to the uninitiated, but that's what you get when you interview a card-carrying member of the gadget-brigade!

Anyway, that's my story - please find enclosed the most recent photo of me "in my world"... I may look like I want to get out - but really I don't!!

Cheers from Sydney, Australia.

Gavin.