New Geographic Interfaces Introduce World to Desktop

When you're staring at the computer screen, it sometimes seems as if all innovation began and ended in or near Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1970s.

As most students of information science know, the windows and pull-down menus first commercialized in Apple Computer's Lisa and Macintosh machines and later in Microsoft's Windows software were invented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

The companion mouse was conceived just up the road at SRI International, in Menlo Park, at roughly the same time.

To be sure, the software's desktop metaphor, with its file folders, documents and icons representing their paper equivalents, was a vast improvement over the command-line interface of earlier computer software.

But using it has never been as intuitive as its proponents claimed, or there would be no need for "Windows for Dummies" and countless other help books. And the desktop metaphor becomes much less adequate when users venture off the desktop, onto a local area network or the Internet.

Enter the "geographic interface," which attempts to depict objects from the real world _ or at least some circumscribed part of it, like your office. The first of these products to reach the market was Magic Cap, from General Magic Inc., which serves as the operating system and user interface on both Sony's Magic Link and Motorola's Envoy, two portable computing and communications devices.

Another was the opening screen for Apple's eWorld online service, which aside from this nod to geographic interfaces is otherwise very similar to text-and-icon services like America Online.

But perhaps the most ambitious implementation to date of a geographic metaphor is Novell Inc.'s Corsair technology, which has been demonstrated at a few industry conferences and is expected to reach the market sometime in the fall.

Corsair, which is embodied in a navigation tool called Ferret, presents a three-dimensional, photographic color image of a user's work space, with a desk, card file, file cabinet and other commonly used tools. The image changes appropriately when one leaves the desktop.

Click on the printer, for example, and you see the front of a printer just like yours, with a status display to show if it is turned on or if the paper is jammed. Click on the file cabinet, and you gain access to other file-server computers located on your local area network.

Click on the door to leave your office and head for the other resources in your corporate environment, like personnel files. To get to the Internet? Jump out the window, for an aerial view of information-generating sites represented as buildings.

Unlike Microsoft's much ballyhooed Bob, which the company calls a "social interface," Corsair is not aimed at the complete neophyte. And at least in its early incarnations, it won't be for the home user, either.

There are no animated rabbits or rats to guide the user through tasks, and no built-in application software, so one still needs to know the underlying command sequences of standard programs and operating systems. Corsair's value lies in helping users navigate complex networks.

"The place where geographic metaphors matter is when the complexity of the system begins to approach the complexity of the real world," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "That's one reason it makes a lot more sense for a networking company" _ like Novell _ "to do this than a software operating system company" like Microsoft.

As the leader in network software, Novell has a moderately self-serving vision of computing's future: Everyone will be on one network or another, and most likely on several.

At a recent industry conference, Robert Frankenberg, Novell's chairman, chief executive and president, said he believed that consumer PCs will follow their corporate counterparts onto the Net. And if that is to happen, he said, navigating the networks must get easier.

"Telephones were taught how to use the network, so that people didn't have to understand how the network worked," Frankenberg said. "We're applying an old lesson."

Novell executives say they see Corsair as a fundamental part of their vision of "pervasive computing," in which all computers _ from mighty mainframes to the microprocessors embedded in microwave ovens and automobiles _ will be linked via wired or wireless networks.

When users don't know where or in what form to find the information they are seeking, they will need a tool both powerful and intuitive; no one has time to learn all the specific commands and protocols of the many systems involved.

Perhaps more importantly, such users will need an interface that can be completely customized to fit their needs: the online auto mechanic will not want the same image or options as the bond trader.

To that end, all of the visual images in Corsair are what programmers call objects: self-contained bits of code that can be added or removed easily. And every pixel on the screen is a potential hot spot waiting to have a function assigned to it.

Novell will offer a CD-ROM library of standard objects with Corsair, but anticipates a thriving market for custom products from independent producers as well.

"The network administrator can customize the interface for each individual user, " said Neil A. McElwee, Novell's director of marketing for advanced access applications. "He now has something he's wanted for a long time: control."

That means the network administrator can arrange for the visual interface to give each user access only to the resources he or she can see can see on screen, while denying access to machines or databases not depicted.

On the desktop, Corsair runs on Novell's Netware, which is the network operating system used in over 70 percent of networked computer systems; on the server it runs on Netware or Unixware, which is Novell's version of the Unix operating system invented by AT T.

The program is compatible with all of the major desktop operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, IBM's OS/2 and Unix. Applications, like word processors or spreadsheets, need no modification for Corsair.

Novell intends to sell Corsair primarily to desktop computer manufacturers, so that it would come loaded on new machines' hard disk drives. To encourage its rapid acceptance, the product will be priced low, perhaps $1 or $2 per copy in volumes of 250,000 or more, although actual terms are yet to be worked out.

Site licenses would be available for large organizations that wish to add the program to existing machines. Eventually, Novell plans to offer consumer version for people who want to net-surf from home.

Unlike many new software products, which often hog memory or sprawl across the hard disk, Corsair is sparing in its use of computer resources. It runs fine on a Windows machine or a Macintosh with as little as 4 megabytes of memory (although more, as always, is better). And it occupies from 5 to 10 megabytes of hard disk space, depending on the configuration.

One caveat for Corsair and other geographic user interfaces is that because they are metaphors, they are personal statements by their designers. That means they tend to elicit an emotional response from the people who use them.

Some users find Magic Cap almost addictively intuitive and friendly, for example, while others dismiss it as terminally cute. Apple's eWorld display, meanwhile, beckons with an attractive cyber village on the surface _ only to disappoint users with underlying layers of plain text and simple icons.

"The good news about physical-space metaphors is you can hand them to somebody who doesn't know beans about computing, and pretty quickly they figure out what to do," said Jerry Michalski, editor of Release 1.0, an industry newsletter.

"But just as some people were really uncomfortable with the Macintosh, some people are just not going to be comfortable with the 3-D village of Corsair," he said. Nevertheless, he said, "I picture these things sliding in behind the desktop metaphor and becoming the corporate computing environment."

Copyright 1995
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