Metrowerks Brings Magic to the Masses

CodeWarrior Magic Opens the General Magic Development Environment

Back in the early days, circa 1993, Apple took the quantum step of releasing the Newton. Being a first generation product, the original MessagePad suffered the classic symptoms of being underpowered and overpriced. This not entirely healthy combination led to much criticism and a rather striking backlash. However, by making the Newton Toolkit (NTK) readily available—including a demo version available in the book Programming the Newton published by AP Professional—and being only moderately overpriced, Apple sowed the seeds of what was to become the most dynamic PDA development platform by far.

It was against this backdrop that General Magic later introduced its highly innovative Magic Cap platform for communicating applications. General Magic had clearly raised the ante in handheld user interface design, but it also introduced a problem when only a relatively chosen few could become full-fledged Magic Cap developers. At issue were the dual questions of quality and support. Though the company was backed by the titans of several industries, General Magic itself lacked the resources to polish the SDK enough to make it feasible to support the platform with anything less than their core staff of developers. In fact, General Magic outlined precisely this concern in the prospectus for their recent initial public offering.

The Opening of the Platform

Fortunately for General Magic and the mobile computing industry, all this is about to change with the scheduled May introduction of CodeWarrior Magic from Metrowerks. With its existing line of CodeWarrior tools, Metrowerks is perhaps the most respected developer of Macintosh-based programming tools. More significantly, the release of CodeWarrior Magic represents an important opening of the Magic Cap environment to a wider range of corporate and commercial developers than was feasible under General Magic’s current, highly structured developer program.

Development using CodeWarrior Magic will come as welcome news to experienced programmers, but may represent a hurdle to the new class of programmers that were fostered by the Newton Toolkit. Unlike the NTK, which relies on the relatively high-level and interpreted NewtonScript language, CodeWarrior Magic gives developers direct access to all the features of Magic Cap using the C language. However, with CodeWarrior Magic serving one end of the spectrum, it’s not unlikely that several vendors will use this system to offer a growing range of mid to high-level tools, meeting the needs of all kinds of developers.

A Staged Rollout

Metrowerks plans an innovative, staged release of CodeWarrior Magic that should please most every developer interested in getting started with the environment quickly. The first version, dubbed developer release DR1 is scheduled for availability in May. The DR1 will support both 68K and Power Macintosh computers, and will be based on the company’s CodeWarrior MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) tools together with General Magic’s object-oriented development environment. While current Magic Cap developers use Apple’s MPW and the Magic Cap environment, CodeWarrior Magic replaces Apple’s compiler and linker with its own high-performance offering. Metrowerks claims that this alone has the effect of significantly reducing the turnaround time in the standard compile-link-test cycle.

The subsequent version of CodeWarrior Magic, scheduled for release in September, will integrate General Magic’s object-oriented components into Metrowerks’ new object-oriented development environment, CodeWarrior version 2.0. This will allow developers to take full advantage of the easy to use features of the CodeWarrior environment when accessing the Magic Cap tool set.

Released on CD-ROM, CodeWarrior Magic includes nearly 6000 pages of online documentation stored in Adobe Acrobat and Apple Docviewer format, and divided nearly equally between information geared towards Metrowerks’ tools and General Magic’s object-oriented framework.

In fact, Metrowerks maintains an impressive update schedule for all their products by shipping CD-ROMs to their customers three times a year; in January, in May, and in September. Customers that purchase a Metrowerks tool effectively buy an annual subscription entitling them to receive three CD-ROMs over the course of the following twelve months. With CodeWarrior Magic, purchasers of the original DR1, which is priced at $299, will receive a free upgrade to the next release, DR2, along with two subsequent releases.

This scheme makes a lot of sense and certainly contributes to their success in the Macintosh community. Between scheduled upgrades, Metrowerks supplies network-based support and updates using Internet ftp (file transfer protocol), as well as through Metrowerks’ online forums on AOL, CompuServe, eWorld and the company’s web site.

Developing with CodeWarrior

Using the DR1, CodeWarrior programmers develop and debug their Magic Cap applications on the Macintosh, downloading testable versions to a Magic Cap-based communicator for final debugging. The DR1 version will not enable developers to debug applications loaded on the communicator directly from a Macintosh without a hardware debug box similar to the ones currently used by pioneer programmers.

However, Metrowerks is planning to include a feature in the September release that will allow developers to directly debug through a serial connection, further speeding the development cycle. Metrowerks will also assume responsibility for providing technical support for its development tools, however, it will necessarily defer direct support for Magic Cap related issues to General Magic.

Summary

It’s difficult to overstate the significance of the opening of General Magic’s very innovative Magic Cap environment to a wide developer community. By teaming with Metrowerks, General Magic is leveraging the talent and support of a proven player in the Macintosh arena.

With only about one third of the year past, we may already have seen one of the most important PDA developments this year.

Metrowerks Inc.
8920 Business Park Drive Suite 315
Austin, TX 78759
Jean Belanger
(512) 346-1935 x3180
(512) 346-3329 (fax)
[email protected]
http://www.iquest.com/~fairgate

General Magic
420 North Mary Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Tom Hershenson
(408) 774-4343
[email protected]