Re: [NTLK] Semi-OT - Magic Cap vs Newton?

From: Vaguely Radio (vradio_at_maine.rr.com)
Date: Sun Mar 21 2004 - 16:48:23 PST


Thanks Peter. I foolishly did not search the NTLK archives before
posting my questions - though a few of them still appear unanswered
even after I did so. Some of the other questions do seem to be
answered, and Ed also had a beta version of Magic Cap 3.x for Windows
that I downloaded and played with for a little while in Virtual PC.
It's got a very novel UI but does seem kind of limited. The price is
right, so I'll probably end up getting one regardless just as a toy,
but I doubt that I'll be using it for anything "practical" as I can
with my Newton. Looks like it also doesn't have HWR, though it does
support "ink text" if you will in a notepad application - basically
just a glorified paint program it seems. Perhaps someone will correct
me if I'm wrong on that, but seems like most text would be entered
using the onscreen keyboard. Still, pretty fun and a truly
new-and-novel concept (as someone mentioned in an earlier post on this
list that I found in the archives, it is reminiscent of Microsoft's
"Bob" project...).

Certainly on the surface it looks like the ultimate in easy-to-learn
interfaces, so kudos to General Magic's designers on that score. Again
I must wonder how useful it is in the modern world considering, for
example, the absence of serial ports on modern computers... SMTP
password authentication apparently does not work for Magic Cap
devices... syncing doesn't appear as robust as the solutions for
NewtonOS... Maybe Ed or someone else will chime in on this one and
answer some of those questions. Certainly before I bought my Newton I
had the same reservations about using a device from 1996 in the year
2004... and look how that turned out!

-Dan

On Sunday, March 21, 2004, at 07:34 PM, Peter Cameron wrote:

> on 21/03/04 6:10 PM, Vaguely Radio at vradio_at_maine.rr.com wrote:
>> - Is Magic Cap fairly Newton-like? If so, how - graphical interface,
>> object-oriented data soup structure?
> I've never owned a Magic Cap device, but I did play (briefly) with
> the
> emulator (it ran on the Mac) that was part of CodeWarrior 9. If memory
> serves correctly I'd say the interface was more like HyperCard. I
> didn't
> really look into programming Magic Cap so I can't answer your
> questions on
> data structure immediately, but I'll dig around for the CodeWarrior CD
> and
> see if there's a programming manual with any helpful info.

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