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Imagine being lost on a mountain. You know there’s a path to the road,
but all you can see are hills, lakes and woods, and the map you brought
along is little more than a sketch. This is the moment that you need the
device so beloved of 1950s science fiction – a communicator. A small device
that can display detailed maps of the area, send messages to the emergency
services and, if you’ve got the advanced model, beam you back home.

Well, there’s a small group of scientists working in a Californian development
laboratory who’d like to help you out. The communicator may not beam you
home yet, but General Magic, founded four years ago by Mark Porat, Bill
Atkinson and Andy Herzfeld, is already making the future of personal communications
happen. The trio worked on advanced technologies at Apple before the company
helped them set up General Magic to fulfil their vision of designing products
that are fun and easy to use. Today they share their laboratory in down-town
Mountain View with a growing band of softwpare wizards, their kits of lego,
capuccino machines, magicians, hats and the office rabbit – Bowser – which
comes out at night.

Atkinson says: ‘My drive is to produce tools that empower people.’ And
the way to do this, he says, is to make the technology as accessible as
possible. That is why General Magic spends so much time developing a computer
environment known as Magic Cap, which will one day make hand-held personal
communicators cosy to use in a tight spot.

An early version of Magic Cap is already available for the first communicator
developed by Motorola and versions for Apple Macs and PCs are on their way.
This piece of software provides both the graphics that the user sees, and
various software hooks for connecting different interface devices and services.

The interface uses familiar images to describe the services available,
such as address lists, electronic mail and reference material. What you
see when you switch on the machine is a desk with images of office items
like a phone, notepad and a postcard.

Want to send a message? Just tap on the postcard and a blank card appears
ready for addressing. Itching to play a game? Then touch the word ‘hallway’
in the top right of the screen, and pick the door that says ‘games room’.
Need more services? Just move ‘down-town’ and pick the building offering
the service you want.

Magic Cap provides an insight into how software designers are inventing
the future – particularly the software that will control a variety of hand-held
personal communicators. The prototypes are essentially blocks of grey plastic
about 15 centimetres by 25 centimetres and around 3 to 4 centimetres deep.
Most of the surface of the device is taken up by a touch-sensitive liquid
crystal display showing the Magic Cap interface with its icons and the option
of a screen-based QWERTY keyboard for making notes. General Magic chose
not to use recognition systems based on voice or handwriting in its early
products because it found them too unreliable.

General Magic gauges the usability of its devices by inviting people
into the laboratory to try them out. David Leffler, who monitors their performance
hidden behind a one-way mirror, says it can be frustrating for development
engineers to watch users stumble over their interfaces. Months of hard work
can be dismissed in a one-hour session. There are often shouts of ‘touch
the icon again’ from the engineers who sit hidden along with Leffler, as
bewildered users fail to get the response they expected.

But the developers can respond to criticism almost immediately. Kevin
Lynch, a designer who often starts studying a new idea by building it out
of paper on his desk, says it can take less than 20 minutes to revise
an image rejected by a user.