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General Magic makes technology for revolutionary consumer electronics products that enable people to communicate in new and powerful ways. These personal intelligent communicators use the latest technology in hardware miniaturization, communication, power management systems, advanced graphical user interfaces, and object-oriented operating systems.
Communication is the soul of General Magic's work, and communicators using General Magic's technologies are intended for all kinds of people, including general consumers and business users.
General Magic's products are Magic Cap(TM) and Telescript(TM) software.
Magic Cap provides the software foundation for personal intelligent communicators. Because these communicators must be small and inexpensive, they have limited computing resources. To meet the challenges of these limited resources, Magic Cap is compact and efficient, but also rich and flexible enough to support a wide variety of sophisticated software packages. Magic Cap is highly user-customizable, in order to reflect each user's individual personality and tastes.
Because communicators must be usable by people who aren't familiar with computers, Magic Cap presents an interface that makes it far easier to use than even the friendliest personal computer.
Magic Cap has been designed with an architecture that allows it to run on various hardware configurations and remain a viable platform for many years.
The first products that use Magic Cap are the Sony® Magic Link® and Motorola® Envoy® communicators.
Telescript is a set of technologies that provides the software foundation for electronic messaging, distributed processing, and remote programming with communicators, computers, telephones, and the networks that link them together.
Telescript includes a programming language that enables software developers and users to implement and customize powerful messaging systems. Telescript lets users send messages that include not just static message information but also intelligence, in the form of Telescript programs or agents that give additional instruction to the message, such as telling it how to move through the network or what to do when it arrives or is removed.
Telescript provides an environment in which messages are active programs, not just passive data. In many ways, Telescript is to messaging what PostScript® is to printing.
Programs written in Telescript are executed by a Telescript engine running on a computing device in the network. Telescript engines are available in several forms and will exist in many places. Every communicator equipped with Magic Cap includes a Telescript engine, as will some communicators without Magic Cap. Personal computer manufacturers will provide Telescript engines as extensions to their system software. Workstations and larger computers will run Telescript engines to provide an environment for Telescript agents to execute.
Creating Telescript services requires an additional product, the Telescript Developer Kit, which is available through a special license. Contact General Magic for updated information about availability.
The first service that uses Telescript is AT&T PersonaLinkSM Services.
AT&T PersonaLink Services is a network service based on Telescript. AT&T PersonaLink Services offers advanced electronic mail, news, electronic shopping, and other information services. Every Magic Cap user can join and use AT&T PersonaLink Services.
AT&T PersonaLink Services also provides a Telescript-based platform for software developers and information providers. Telescript developers can create software packages that work with Magic Cap and use Telescript to send intelligent agents to and from the AT&T service.
Magic Cap is designed to work on a variety of hardware platforms. The first platforms for Magic Cap are families of hand-held communicators created by various manufacturers under license from General Magic. Each communicator contains a set of essential features that support the software, including at least the following features:
This list shows the minimal feature set; different communicators vary in their specific features. For example, most communicators include an infrared transmitter/receiver, and some communicators include a two-way data radio for advanced wireless communication. The ROM includes a system area, which is filled with Magic Cap, and a vendor area, which contains software chosen by the manufacturer.
Magic Cap communicators use a Motorola Dragon I 68349 central processing unit. In addition, Magic Cap will be available as an application program that runs under Microsoft Windows on personal computers. Magic Cap will be available for communicators based on other microprocessor platforms in the future.
General Magic has created a set of technical books that document Magic Cap and related subjects. This section describes General Magic's technical books.
Read Magic Cap Class and Method Reference for in-depth descriptions of classes and methods provided by Magic Cap that are significant for software package developers. For each class listed, Magic Cap Class and Method Reference includes a brief description of the class and its fields, attributes, and methods; a list of methods of the class that package developers might call or override; and a description of each important method and its parameters.
Magic Cap Concepts (this book) presents the principles of Magic Cap software and explains how its various class families and subsystems work. Magic Cap Concepts includes descriptions of Magic Cap's view system, software packages, object framework, and more.
CodeWarrior Magic is a development environment for creating Magic Cap software packages. Guide to CodeWarrior Magic tells how to install and use this environment. Guide to CodeWarrior Magic describes the tools you'll use to develop your own packages and discusses the package development cycle.
User interface design is a key consideration in developing Magic Cap packages. Design and Magic Cap discusses important principles in creating user interface elements that are both easy to learn and easy to use. Design and Magic Cap presents general principles of interface creation and discusses specific considerations for Magic Cap communicators, especially designing for small, touchable screens with relatively poor display quality.
General Magic provides a library of Telescript classes that implement cross-platform standards for rich information types, such as images, sounds, and styled text. Developer's Guide to ICF describes this class library and how software package developers can use its features to create packages that can share rich information content across different platforms.
Each chapter of this book describes a family of classes and related concepts. Important terms appear like this when they are defined. Cross-references to other books and other parts of this book look like this. Names of buttons, windows, and other objects on Magic Cap screens are shown like this.
This is development release 1 of Magic Cap Concepts. Although this book has not yet been finished, the chapters provided in this release are thorough and complete. Other chapters have not yet been written and will be added in future releases.
Most chapters of this book end with a reference section that directs you to appropriate parts of Magic Cap Class and Method Reference. You'll find that some of the parts referenced do not yet appear in that book. See the Read Me file on the CodeWarrior Magic CD for more information about where to look for information.
This section introduces fundamental concepts about Magic Cap, including a discussion of the classes that make up Magic Cap, information about how to develop software packages, and a look at some of Magic Cap's most important classes.
Magic Cap provides a powerful, flexible platform for software packages that are centered around communication and personal information management. The software in Magic Cap is made up of sets of classes, the operations the classes perform, and related items such as constants and other symbols.
Magic Cap includes classes that provide a broad range of features for handling user interaction, objects that are drawn on the screen and manipulated by users, and abstractions from hardware details.
All objects displayed on the screen by Magic Cap are viewables. Users perform actions in Magic Cap by touching and manipulating viewables. Magic Cap provides extensive features for organizing viewables on the screen. Viewables can contain other viewables, providing a way to create a hierarchy of viewables. The current scene fills most of the screen and contains most viewables that are on the screen. The title that appears in the upper-left corner of the screen is the name of the current scene.
In addition to classes that support viewable objects, Magic Cap provides classes for high-level communication concepts, user-interface tools, text, graphics, sound, and much more.
The foundation of Magic Cap includes an environment for persistent objects, a scheme for maintaining multiple active packages at once, hardware support, an operating system kernel that provides multitasking, basic support for communication and peripherals, and more.
Magic Cap provides an object-oriented runtime environment that defines the format and behavior of objects. This object runtime provides the basic features for all objects in Magic Cap. The object runtime is at the lowest level of Magic Cap and can accommodate different programming languages. However, for various practical reasons, you'll probably use C when creating Magic Cap packages.
Every object in Magic Cap can be addressed with a 32-bit value called an object ID. You use an object's ID when you call one of its operations, get access to its fields, or pass it as a parameter. You can create objects in two ways: statically at build time, or dynamically at runtime.
When you create software for Magic Cap, you'll make software packages, collections of objects that perform functions and provide features for Magic Cap users.
Each active package collects its objects in groups called clusters. Magic Cap itself provides clusters for use by system objects. Each package has a context, a list of the clusters it can use. Magic Cap provides a mechanism that allows packages to communicate and access each others' objects. For additional basic information on Magic Cap, see this book's Introduction to Objects chapter.
Magic Cap provides several built-in packages, including the datebook, name card file, notebook, and electronic mail packages. You can add more packages by inserting PC cards that contain them, by receiving them via electronic mail or by infrared beam, or by copying them into memory via a link to a personal computer.
The built-in packages are designed to provide core features for communication and personal information management. Magic Cap provides access to some of the information that users enter into the built-in packages. For example, the list of entries in the datebook, the people and companies in the name card file, and the name of the communicator's user are all available to programmers.
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