Egg Freckles is the punchline from the infamous Garry Trudeau Doonesbury comic strip lampooning "the original hand-held Newton computer's difficulty in deciphering handwriting."

After several years of working the IT racket I have found that like the cartoon, human expectations and technological capabilities rarely coincide. I started Egg Freckles as a means to share some of my experiences with technology.

My name is Thomas Brand, and I am technology enthusiast from Boston, Massachusetts who spent time behind the Genius Bar before starting a career at Children's Hospital Boston. You can follow me on Twitter, or read about me on 512 Pixels or ShawnBlanc.net.

Apple's dud from the last decade may not be the most exciting theme for a technology website, but the Newton still has a lot of good things going for it.

• The Newton represents a document centric computing model which puts the user's content above the tools that created it. When you start a Newton you are presented with the last document you were working on, not a screen of applications or icons the way most computers work.
• The Newton's handwriting recognition wasn't that bad, and in later revisions it was actually quite good, if not better than similar offerings made available by Microsoft more than a decade later.
• Despite being a device developed before its time the Newton is still beloved and supported by a community of dedicated users. It has seen advancements such as internet browsing, and wireless networking it was never intended to have.

The Newton's usefulness may have run thin for most, but what better way to remind me of the potential of technology than to design my website around the little green MessagePad that continues to show its strength.

Egg Freckles current MessagePad background was designed entirely in CSS3 saving me over 176kbs of bandwidth per unique visitor over the previous bitmap version. You will need a modern browser to view it.

Before Egg Freckles was a blog, it was an experiment to see how well I could replicate the appearance of an actual Apple Newton MessagePad using only HTML and CSS. I added many features like a working dock, screen rotation, drop down menus, and sounds. Before long I was working more on the design of my web site and less on its content. Egg Freckles current design is a good mix of Newton features in a readable blog format. It is less distracting that a simulator, while still portraying the look and feel of an actual Newton MessagePad.

Egg Freckles started life as My Newton Blog on WordPress. Began gaining momentum as Egg Freckles under Stacey. Spent a few months reinventing itself with Chyrp. And reclaimed its identity baked with PieCrust. Today it is maintained with RapidWeaver.

Egg Freckles' RSS feed gives you the opportunity to read each new article I write on my MessagePad as it is published.

One of the reasons I started Egg Freckles was to improve my long form writing. I have tried maintaining a link list in the past, but found it was becoming a distraction for the topics I really wanted to write about. If you want to read great Apple link list commentary, I recommend you visit ShawnBlanc.net, The Brooks Review, 512 Pixels, and of course Daring Fireball.

Egg Freckles has never had comments. What I write on this website is my own. If you would like to contact me with comments or suggestions please email me at EggFreckles[at]me.com or send me a reply on Twitter. I am open to suggestions. If I like what you have to say I may include it in a followup post with your permission. Of course you could always comment by starting your own blog.

Since moving to an Adobe free workflow Pixelmator is responsible for most of the image preparation on Egg Freckles, but Egg Freckles' signature Atkinson dithering effect comes from a little known freeware application called HyperDither.

Egg Freckles design was inspired by screenshots first captured from a real Newton MessagePad, and later from Einstein, the Newton emulator. All of the bitmap images were created in Pixelmator, while Egg Freckles' logo was designed in OmniGraffle Pro. All of the code was written in BBEdit, while all of the content was either scribbled into my MessagePad or typed out in WriteRoom on my Mac, iPhone, or iPad. I use RapidWeaver to manage my content.

Many people have asked my permission to use Egg Freckles' theme on their own website and my answer is always the same. The look and feel of an Apple Newton MessagePad is not my property, and you are welcome to parody it as much as anyone else. However, I am not in the business of packaging Egg Freckles' MessagePad theme for distribution, or supporting its installation on various content management systems.

Egg Freckles by Thomas Brand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

That means you can republish, and remix my work for noncommercial purposes just as long as you link back to EggFreckles.net and share your revisions in a similar manner. If you do decide to republish my content I would love to hear from you.

ICDSoft has hosted my projects for almost ten years now, and I couldn't be happier. Based in Boston their email customer service is excellent. I usually get a reply in mere minutes after making a request, and have never experienced a noticeable downtime during the entire time I have hosted with them.

EggFreckles[at]me.com is a good start, but don't forget to check out Egg Freckles' Twitter stream. I look forward to hearing from you.