Magic Mirror

David Alford

Pen Computing Magazine, Issue #8 January/February 1996

A Magic Conference

Christmas at Halloween would be an apt way to describe it. The General Magic World Wide Developers conference had me thinking that I had died and gone to General Magic heaven. For those who did not receive my daily reports on the Brown listserver, or the reports from Dan Hanttula, or the PersonaLink newsletter in which Charlie F. covered the high and low points of the conference, read on.
First, General Magic and the people responsible for organizing the conference did an excellent job in putting on one of the best developer conferences I have ever attended. The theme of the show was that of ongoing construction, with an emphasis on tools. When you registered, you were actually given a red tool box, with the obligatory T-shirt, conference agenda, and software in the form of several CDs. Sony was handing out T-shirts with the picture of a Magic Cap Communicator that was not a PIC-1000. When I asked, I was told that all would be revealed the next day. The Metro-Werks people were busy the entire conference, selling shirts, software, and a special PIC-1000 hardware/software bundle that sold out during the conference.
A nearby table held two Macintosh computers, with MagicExchange plugs sitting next to each mouse. No keyboard was required, and I hooked up my Motorola Envoy, and was soon downloading freeware/shareware packages that I hadn't had the time to get, or in some cases, didn't even know about.
The mix of the conference crowd reflected how international the General Magic partnerships have become. Throughout the conference many eager General Magic employees were readily available to talk and evangelize General Cap. Wendy Schramm, wife of Steve Schramm and the author of a new book on Magic Cap came by and talked to me at great length. Tracy Helms, and Dee Young seemed to be everywhere at once, always being very helpful. Rumors of what was going to happen during the conference were rampant. In the vendor area, right next to the Pen Computing Magazine table, an MS-DOS machine was set up surrounded by a great many unopened boxes.
The opening day of the conference was kicked off by Marc Porat giving the keynote address. The hallways were empty, but I was able to watch the activities from video monitors scattered all over the construction scaffoldings that set the mood of the conference. The major rumor was that Sony was announcing an improved version of the original Sony Magic Link, the PIC-2000, at 10:00 that morning. I stood across from the Sony booth, and watched as they unpacked the demo units that matched the picture on the T-shirt I was wearing. At the first break, the Sony both was mobbed by conference attendees coming to see the new release. I was immediately impressed by the brightly glowing backlit screen of the PIC-2000, and the new version 1.5 of Magic Cap.
The second big surprise of the show occurred, while working at the Pen Computing Magazine table, there on that PC was Magic Cap for Windows, in color! Not only was it being shown but it was the Beta II version and was being given to attendees for further testing.
The vendor area of the show was small but extremely well trafficked. Sony, and Sony Publishing, along with Motorola, Panasonic, InTouchUSA, Active Paper, Nimbus, and several other software vendors demonstrated their wares at the conference. Active Paper was very popular, selling PrestoMail and demonstrating a Web browser that should be out in the near future.
One of the best sessions was a series of presentations by several partners who have as yet to release any Magic Cap products. These included Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, and Northern Telecom (now NorTel). All were presenting their ideas of Magic Cap-based telephones. I was shown a prototype of the NorTel model which uses speaker phone technology developed for portable phones. The prototype wasn't quite as small as Captain Kirk's hand held StarTrek communicator, but it was close!
The number of new announcements, and information available from the conference was overwhelming. Everyone was interested in the changes and fixes done to the new Magic Cap 1.5 operating system version. Changes, which may or may not make people happy, is that Pocket Quicken and PenCell have been replaced by OAG Flightline. Sony wanted to provide more communication- centric software. There is now a way to get a storage map to see where your memory is being used. The annoying cleanup icon does not show up quite as often anymore, and there is a major new built-in package called CloudIP, which allows you to set up a series of IP addresses associated with a cloud name, and a port number. I have as yet to pull this bunny out of the hat, but I can assure you that it will be my next trick now that it has caught my interest. Remember: Magic is elusive, but it has a way of returning!

David Alford is the owner of WriteWare. He can be reached at 408-295-4217 or <dalford@pobox.com> or P.O. Box 21952, San Jose CA 95151-1952 or on the Web at <http://www.writeware.com/writeware>.