OS/2 e-Zine! May 1996 Volume 1 Number 7 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1996 Haligonian Media ISSN 1203-5696 In this issue we take a look at OS/2 graphics software, some Internet apps and, of course, games. And don't miss our new "Answers from e-Zine!", or our on-the-spot reviews of the Technical Interchange and the Warp Teleseminar 2! DEPARTMENTS: OPINIONS: Editorial the Rants... Chris' | Trevor's the Beta File the Rave Heath's Tips Linfield's Line the REXX Files Will Windows 95 Disappear? the Warped SOHO REVIEWS: Graphics Software Misc Reviews Games - ColorWorks V2 - DragText - A word from an OS/2 developer - NeoN Graphix 3D - Japanese Warp - SimCity 2000 - PMJPEG v1.74 - Secure WebEx - The Alphabet Zoo - JView v1.0 - Surf'nRexx PROFILE: * Super Shareware Support Bob Smith takes a close look at Nick Knight's thorough approach to technical support--a mailing list done right. REPORTS: * The IBM OS/2 Warp Teleseminar Chris Wenham stopped by the The IBM OS/2 Warp Teleseminar 2 at the end of last month to see what was up. For those of you who missed it, we have his full report! * IBM Technical Interchange Report Stardock Systems President and all around OS/2 advocate, Brad Wardell, gives us his impressions of the goings-on at the IBM Technical Interchange. ARTICLES: * A day in the life of a CyberMasochist * How to Install/Uninstall Programs in OS/2 * GNU: OS/2's Hidden Treasure - Part 2 * How to Rescue a Damaged Desktop NEW!: * Chris' ColorWorks Power Tips * Answers from e-Zine! * The Chronicles of John Ominor ODDS & ENDS: * Hot Sellers 1 - the top 10 selling commercial OS/2 applications. * Hot Sellers 2 - the top 10 selling OS/2 shareware applications. * How to Subscribe to OS/2 e-Zine! for FREE. * How YOU can Sponsor OS/2 e-Zine! * The Sponsors that Make this Issue Possible Copyright 1996 - Haligonian Media ISSN 1203-5696 *********************************** Magic Birds and Other Apparitions - editorial Well, it seems that after the months (and years for some) that we have suffered persecution from the non-OS/2 computing world, we are finally going to get our day in the sun. Some of the events of late last month bode extremely well for OS/2 in general and, yes, for OS/2 in the "home" market too. Despite its "demise" according to some computer journalists years ago, it seems that OS/2 is about to finally shake off its voodoo curse, rise up from its trance and walk the world of the living once more. The source of all this magic? Merlin of course. OK, I know that was a horribly inconsistent use of symbols and metaphors but you get the point, I'm sure. o IBM is officially and loudly stating that not only is OS/2 here to stay, they _want_ it to stay--and they are adding some killer enhancements to Merlin to make sure it does; o on top of last year's increase in OS/2 retail products, yet more vendors are planning and delivering apps, some targeted at a release date coinciding with Merlin's; and o IBM is nearing the point where it will finally play the Lotus card with, first Word Pro 96 for OS/2 and (relatively) soon after, the rest of the SmartSuite. To put it bluntly, instead of withering away, an OS already arguably the best in the world is about to get beefed up, prettied up and generally, "kick some butt" (to quote a well known OS/2 ISV). Speaking of well known OS/2 ISVs, one of the "events late last month" that I mentioned above was, of course, the IBM Technical Interchange which took place in Nashville, Tennessee and included its share of OS/2 celebrities. The event was a showcase of IBM's and Independent Software Vendors' (ISVs') commitment to OS/2, both as a corporate and an end-user platform. Stardock Systems Inc. President and all-around OS/2 advocate, Brad Wardell, took a minute to jot down some notes for those of us not fortunate enough to make it to Nashville and was kind enough to post them on Stardock's WWW site. There's no need to go all the way over there though (not just yet anyway), since we've reprinted Brad's thoughts and impressions right here in the pages of this month's e-Zine!. And if you thought that was about all the earthshaking news that IBM could muster in one month, think again. Our crack reporter, Chris Wenham stopped by that *other* major display of OS/2 magic last month, The IBM OS/2 Warp Teleseminar 2. Among other things to amaze and delight, IBM's David Barnes performed his own magic with Merlin to the crowds' delight; but don't take my word for it, Chris reveals all in his *full report* this month! In fact, so much noise is being made lately about Merlin that we've been wondering if IBM has started hiring away Microsoft marketing employees. Of course they haven't, but regardless, on top of official demonstrations at the TI and the Warp Teleseminar, screen shots of Merlin have been popping up on FTP and WWW sites worldwide. So is our day in the sun at hand? Initial response from the non-OS/2 media seems promising. As some are saying, with the disappointment of Windows 95 sales in retail channels (the vast majority of sales being preloads) and the present technical superiority of Warp, this rejuvenation of interest and interface might be enough to finally dispel the image of hopeless underdog OS/2 has suffered from. Well, maybe that's hoping for too much, but it would be nice to be *just* an underdog, wouldn't it? I can feel that sunshine now... *********************************** Our Sponsors: BMT Micro (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/) Your complete source for over 75 of the best OS/2 shareware applications available. Drop by today and check out our WWW catalog or download the .INF version. ChipChat Technology Group (http://www.ChipChat.com/home00.html) ChipChat produces excellent 32-bit OS/2 software for wireless text paging and state-of-the-art multimedia Sound Cards for Micro Channel PS/2 computers. EmTec Innovative Software (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/zoc/) EmTec Innovative Software produces state-of-the-art OS/2 ISDN, modem and telnet communications software. OS/2 Magazine and Inside OS/2 1995 award winner. Indelible Blue (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue, a mail order company, provides OS/2 software and hardware solutions to customers worldwide. Post Road Mailer (http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) The Post Road Mailer is a high performance, 32-bit, email program with drag and drop filing, printing, shredding, word wrap and multiple MIME attachments. Surf'nRexx (http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) Use REXX to build powerful Internet utilities using our DLLs. Package also includes 10 utilities as samples. Mt. Baker Software (http://www.Mount-Baker.com/) Developers of "Money Tree", a full featured personal financial package for OS/2. ScheduPerformance, Inc. (http://www.prioritymaster.com/) Patented priority scanning logic and visual priority identification give you performance and control. Shenandoah Equipment Co. (http://www.cfw.com/~shenan/) Providers of lifetime warrantied name brand simms, laptop and printer memory at competitive prices. SPG Inc. (http://www.spg-net.com/) Creators of ColorWorks for OS/2 - The Artist's Ultimate Power Program! ColorWorks has earned both the 1995 OS/2 Magazine Editor's Choice & the 1995 OS/2 Professional Magazine Best New Product Awards. * Readers Who Have Sponsored: The entire staff of OS/2 e-Zine! would like to extend special thanks to the following readers who have made significant contributions. Dr. Ronald E. Wyllys David Busby Stephen Boileau Quentin Z. Whiplinger Gregory Mobley Ian W. MacKee Christopher A. King Michel Slivitzky Dennis J. Tuchler Robert Griswold Wm. Bradley Read II R. Edgar Scrutton Mike Quinn Ralph Cohen Robert D. Miller Jan Schatz Michael Shillingford J. McMillan Vicky Stables Dennis Hayes Scott Allen Craig Sawers Axel Webers *CLC Innovative Designs Ltd.* *********************************** the Beta File Welcome back to the Beta File, your source for the latest breaking news in OS/2 beta development. The big news at the IBM Technical Interchange this month is that there are a *lot* of OS/2 vendors with products in development, including Lotus (SmartSuite 96) and Stardock (rumoured to have more apps in the pipeline than you can shake a stick at). And that's just the big guys! Of course, during any given month, we don't come across every company currently in development. What's that you say? You want to help fill out this column? You have a product that you're sure is going to be the next killer app? You want a little free hype? Well get off your keister and (editor@haligonian.com) drop us a note! Now, to business. ***** (amueller@stargate.rz.fh-offenburg.de) Axel Mueller will be beta testing his new Small Internet Dial-In Server package for OS/2 (SIDIS/2) until the end of the month. The test period is a bit short but he does not expect many problems. Over the last one and a half years SIDIS/2 has grown out of the need to provide efficient and reliable Internet access for students at a local campus and since the package has been in daily use for quite some time, Mueller does not expect to receive many bug reports. (Developers are so optimistic!) Obviously there is some interest in this kind of software package as the log file of Mueller's FTP server can attest to. As you already may have guessed this software package is designed to give people access to a LAN or the Internet via a LAN connected PC and up to 4 (2 currently tested) modems. Shortly before the end of the month there will be a new version which most likely will be shareware at a very reasonable registration fee. The SIDIS/2 package contains programs for 2 major areas: o e-mail services (POP3 server, mail processor) o modem services (modem control, user access control) While there is no official web site at this time, Mueller may arrange one after the beta stage. There is no limit to the number of testers that will be accepted so contact Mueller for further details to join. Depending on the feedback during the beta test, there may be a shareware version some days before or soon after the beta test is over. If there are a lot of problems there may be another beta round. Mueller says that the final product, "will be available at a price where nobody has to think it over for a long time if he/she wants to register SIDIS/2." If only all developers were so pleasant. ***** Also in communications news, (cawim@train.oche.de) Carsten Wimmer and (werner@einstein.oche.de) Werner Fehn are currently testing CapiTel, a 32-Bit multithreaded Answering Machine for OS/2 Presentation Manager, which is based on ISDN CAPI 1.1. They promise us an easy to use and fast product with MMPM/2 support which will provide all interesting info about callers. This beta version will expire on June 1st 1996 and the authors will release a non-beta shareware version then. Further information can be found at the CapiTel (http://www.oche.de/~werner/capitel.html) web page. The current test is a public beta, with the main testing being done in Europe, especially Germany. While the final shareware version will be released on June 1st (how's that for a firm prediction?) the final price has not been decided yet. If you're interested, just download the beta from the web-site above and you're ready to go. ***** The Number Company, Inc. is currently testing (http://thenumberco.com/SWare.htm) MonetaArbor, a program that employs an inverted tree metaphor to represent selection logic used by list managers in direct-marketing. MA features an intuitive, easy-to-use GUI for adding, deleting, changing, copying, and moving nodes (and subtrees) and supports drag-and-drop. In addition, MA provides the user with a real-time view of each list prospect's tour through the selection tree. Lead developer, (weinerhd@thenumberco.com) Howard D. Weiner tells us the beta has been ongoing for over a month with 22 testers. The Number Company is still accepting beta participants though; to join, download MonetaArbor from the above WWW site or from (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/) BMT Micro. Final delivery is scheduled for May 15, 1996, the price is expected to be US$99 and the product will start its general availability life as a shareware product. After this, The Number Company intends to make it a commercial product (sometime during the late summer of 1996). Weiner claims that traditional selection is a classic software development activity (labor intensive requiring list managers to rely on the skills of software developers) but that, "MA is a product for list managers who wish to take control of the selection process, eliminate the costs and delays traditional selection development entails, and make the process of selection and the planning of promotions/campaigns real-time." ***** Back on the Internet front, Insomniac Software is developing a new usenet news reader for OS/2. The new app will be called Newsbeat/2 and is currently being developed and tested by the lead insomniacs themselves, (vipin@meena.cc.uregina.ca) Vipin Bhargava and (tomkat@cyberbeach.net) Dave Minogue, along with a handful of beta testers. Anyone reading this column most likely knows what a news reader is but for those who don't, Newsbeat/2 is a full 32-bit, multithreaded, PM USENET newsreader for OS/2. It will support reading, posting, e-mail replies, uuencode/uudecode, kill-files and multi-user logons. In the words of the developers, "Newsbeat/2 is multithreaded, allowing you to read, post, e-mail, uuencode and uudecode, ALL AT ONE TIME!" More info on features and progress can be found at (http://meena.cc.uregina.ca/~vipin/nb.html) Insomniac's web site. The beta code was delivered on May first to 15 testers for one month's testing. Unfortunately, this is not a wide beta and no more participants are being accepted but the general availability release should be out by June 15 so you won't have long to wait to see the final product. Expect a shareware registration price of US$30 (or CDN$40). ***** (gl149@appl2.hrz.uni-siegen.de) Patrick Schulte has been testing his text mode address manager for OS/2, WHO, for about five months now. WHO features the ability to edit, delete, insert, list, sort, print (telephone lists and entries in brief), look up next birthday, search, and etc. through your contact information. Since WHO is a text mode app (boy, this sounds like the Abbott and Costello "Who's on First" routine), it is a very small program for those of you concerned about system resources. While there is no official web site for WHO, HTML documentation is provided with the program. Schulte is still accepting beta participants as long as they have access to reliable e-mail. For further information contact him at the e-mail address above. In Schulte's words, "All my betas work fine. So there will perhaps be a full version in the next two or three months..." And put your wallets away, WHO will be released as Freeware! To get a look at the current code, grab who00043.zip from (ftp://ftp.uni-siegen.de/.mnt/2/lokales/div/os2) the FTP site. ***** Another freeware application currently under development is PageMage by (cau@cc.gatech.edu) Carlos Ugarte. PageMage is a virtual desktop utility for OS/2 2.1 and up. The key ideas were to emulate some of the features provided by the "fvwm pager", a virtual desktop packaged with the X window manager known as fvwm. When asked what makes PageMage different from other typical virtual desktop programs, Ugarte responded: 1. It's free. 2. There are many ways of switching desktops (mouse hitting the edge of the screen, hotkeys, clicking on a desktop, etc). 3. Many user configurable options. 4. It's fast (what some users say of it, compared to other virtual desktop programs). 5. I'm open to suggestions from users. But don't take his word for it, check out the (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/cau/pagemage.html) web page and get more info for yourself. So far it's been an open beta (the file is on the "standard" OS/2 ftp sites) for about a year ago or so. Since then, there have been seven public releases and new testers are always welcome. Just grab the zip file and, if you prefer, e-mail Ugarte to ask to be put on a list maintained to notify folks of new releases. Ugarte says the program will be finished, "whenever all bugs are fixed, and [he] stops adding new features." I like his honesty. As I mentioned, the app is freeware so no registration is required, although donations are welcome. ***** And finally, (http://www.adobe.com/Amber/) Adobe is in the OS/2 news with their new "Amber" Acrobat reader for OS/2. Acrobat is a software application that allows reading of Portable Document Files (.pdf files) which are used for publishing application-independent documents (often on the Internet). This initial version is limited in some ways, but Adobe is monitoring how many copies are downloaded so if you have any interest in this type of product drop by their site and grab a copy! *********************************** Heath's Tips - by Heath Phillippi Welcome back. In celebration of OS/2 e-Zine! 's new column, "Answers from e-Zine!, this month's column is a hodgepodge of various tips and questions readers have sent me over the past few months. Hopefully we will answer some common nagging questions that are out there. Q&A First off, some questions and answers... Question 1: What do I have to do to Warp to get Netscape (or any other Winsock app) to run? Answer: First off, see (http://www.xs4all.nl/~ronvwier/OS2/ ) http://www.xs4all.nl/~ronvwier/OS2/ and (http://www.wizard.net/~sissors/) http://www.wizard.net/~sissors. They are very good sites for getting started. You can also get some necessary file updates installed for you by using the "Retrieve Software Updates" icon included with Warp. My additional suggestions are: 1. Copy \tcpip\etc\*.* to \tcpip\dos\etc and rename the file resolv.org to just resolv. 2. Do a search of your hard drive and make sure there is only one winsock.dll on the entire thing. Make sure this is the OS/2 one, not a Windows version. Delete all others and make sure the good one is in your path. Question 2: How do I get Web Explorer to erase it's temp files? Answer: Change the settings of the program object you run WebEx with to point to EXPLORE.EXE and not LINKUP.EXE. WebEx should now clean up after itself. Question 3: After I dial my ISP once and hang up I have to reboot to dial again. How can I fix this? Answer: Add the line SET HOSTNAME=UNKNOWN (you can put anything in the place of UNKNOWN). This is a known bug with the dialer that hopefully will be addressed in the next release. Tips The following are a few of the better tips I have received in the past months. Many thanks to all the readers who sent tips (even if I didn't have the space to include them this month). Tip 1: Here's something your readers may be able to use. I've certainly been saved by it several times. A lot of folks like to "experiment" a lot with OS/2, screwing around and changing hardware, etc. I have Boot Manager installed, and the operating system itself is contained on a fairly small partition. That small partition contains only Warp itself, drivers, and TCP/IP stuff. I have another hard drive, and I have found that using the BACKUP command to make an archive of my entire C: partition has gotten me out of a jam many times. The archive file is huge, but for someone who has the disk space to spare, this can be a life saver. - (bookter@ibm.net) Jerry Bookter Comment: I also install another working copy of Warp to a spare partition to play with. Boot Manager allows you to boot to it very easily, and this setup allows you to just delete everything if the need arises. Tip 2: Here are three quick tips that took me quite some time to figure out--but all's well that ends well. 1. If you are having trouble getting OS/2 installation to work with your hard/floppy disk (the error message is not specific about which one is causing the problem) try the following: A. In CONFIG.SYS in the BASEDEV=IBM1S506.ADD add the parameters /A:0 /I this causes IBM1S506.ADD to ignore the primary adapter in your system and allows the driver IBMINT13.I13 to control the hard disk(s)--I needed this for a Buslogic3 IDE Cache Card controller (PCI Bus version but I presume it applies to all bus's). B. If you still get the message about not being able to control hard/floppy disks check out your floppy disk drive. They rarely go wrong but if your 3 1/2" drive is connected as drive B: and you use the system Chipset Setup to swap the floppy drives (so that your 3 1/2" drive appears to be A:) then OS/2 is going to give you the above message. I got around this by disconnecting the 5 1/4" drive temporarily for the installation. Afterwards I reconnected and used the "Swap Floppy" option with no problems. If you are wondering why I my system is set up like this--well, the floppy cable isn't long enough to stretch, twist and turn in the right order to reach the drives. 2. If you connect an IDE CD-ROM to the EIDE port on the motherboard and you get what appears to be random read errors (particularly on a CD-ROM installation) then check with the CD-ROM manufacturer to see whether their hardware will work attached to an EIDE port (note the first "E" in EIDE). I used a Hitachi CDR-7730 and this needed a special driver and some kind of BIOS extension to avoid the dreaded SYS3175 - File Not Found. 3. When booting off a floppy disk and using a Boot Manager setup in which OS/2 is not the default choice you need to do a hard disk boot first and select OS/2 (even if it causes a crash) so that the non OS/2 partition is hidden when you do the floppy boot. By the way IBM OS/2 Tech Support in Singapore is the best support I have ever had to use anywhere--very patient and forgiving of my dumb questions--if you read this guys, thanks. - (paulmuir@singnet.com.sg) Paul Muir ***** Well, that's it for this month. If you have any questions you want answered mail the (editor@haligonian.com) editor or (heathp@athenet.net) myself. Also, if there are any topics you feel should be covered in greater length, let me know. Thanks again for reading. ***** (http://www.athenet.net/~heathp/) Heath Phillippi is currently a Customer Engineer for AmeriData, Inc. in Appleton Wisconsin. He is the OS/2 Warp Champion for the OS/2 BESTeam, as well as a proud member of Team OS/2. *********************************** the REXX Files - by Paul Monaghan Okay, so here I am again, talking about my REXX exploits. I apologize to all my readers for not being here last month, day jobs can be such a pain, but the dust has settled and I am back in the REXX saddle again. I left you last time, talking about REXX add-ons such as REXXUTIL, and I'm back to continue where I left off. This month we'll talk about Surf'nRexx, a REXX DLL from InnoVal Systems Solutions, Inc. I'll also lead into Visual REXX and VX-REXX, the granddaddy of REXX DLLs. Surf'nRexx is a great little REXX extension, and really shows what REXX can do if someone sits down and writes a simple DLL. Surf'nRexx is an Internet add-on for REXX that comes with a great set of already written utilities for doing such things as sending e-mail from the command line, etc. But I don't want to turn this into a review of Surf'nRexx (after all there is already one in this issue). I want to talk about Surf'nRexx from the programmer's standpoint. Surf'nRexx is quite a simple DLL, and if used correctly will let any REXX program be "Interneted". Take myself for instance, as a Network Manager of an Internet Service Provider (my new position) I intend to write a program that monitors the e-mail server on our network by simply sending e-mail to the server every 15-20 minutes--a simple thing to do with Surf'nRexx, but this is not where the program will stop. The program will then get the e-mail that it just sent; if there is a network error during the sending or receiving, the program will send the message again; if it fails again, it will then send a few commands to a modem that will page me. Quite simple and very easy to do with Surf'nRexx. There are a few things that one must know when implementing any of Surf'nRexx's functions. First, many people probably don't understand the TCP/IP protocol as well as Surf'nRexx wants them to; you don't simply send e-mail with Surf'nRexx by giving it a command "Send Email". Suffice it to say, you need to connect to the correct TCP/IP port for the service you wish to use (TCP/IP has standard ports for most functions, for example, HTTP (WWW) is port 80). You also have to make certain that you are using the correct protocol for the service you want to use; the WWW uses HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). For the most part Surf'nRexx is configured to use the de facto standard ports and protocols for the services it utilizes, but all of these things have to be taken into account when using Surf'nRexx if you are writing your own REXX programs or using nonstandard port addresses. Once the protocol and the port have been established, you are more or less off and running, and can "Internet enable" your REXX applications in no time. Imagine writing a small text editor in Visual REXX; you could simply add a few lines of code and the Surf'nRexx DLL and e-mail text files directly from the editor, it's that easy! Speaking of Visual REXX... Okay, now on to visual REXX. There are several companies out there making visual programming tools for REXX, but I'd have to say that HockWare's VisPro REXX, and Watcom's VX-REXX, are the two big players. Using a visual programming environment is a little daunting at first--after all, you're programming backwards! But these visual tools for REXX are nothing more that a collection of DLL's for describing Windows, dialog boxes and the like. VisPro REXX, and VX-REXX, like any graphically oriented development tools, are also event driven. By this I mean that you draw a button, such as an "OK" button, and you then assign REXX code to the button. Every time the "OK" button is pressed it executes the code associated to it. A little weird at first, but you soon get the hang of it. In this day and age most people don't take a program seriously unless it's visual, and with REXX visual tools you can create these programs with very little bother. I hope to be speaking more on VX-REXX and VisPro REXX in upcoming columns. For those that are interested, both (http://www.nando.net/ads/hockware/) HOCK-WARE and (http://www.watcom.com/) WATCOM have Web pages, with downloadable demos of both their visual programming environments. As for Surf'nRexx check out (http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) InnoVal's web page for more info, and don't forget to read the full review of Surf'nRexx in this month's issue. That's it for this month, tune in next time for more REXX, and hopefully we'll dive into VisPro or VX-REXX. See ya in a month! ***** (paulm@ulix.net) Paul Monaghan is a Network Manager for (http://www.ulix.net) ULIX a Montreal ISP. He also maintains a web page on (http://www.ulix.net/freedom) How to make a BBS Telnetable and is a member of Team OS/2. *********************************** The Warped SOHO - by Collin Summers Welcome to the third installment of "the Warped SOHO". I have appreciated receiving so many e-mails about my column. The most requested subject that people seem to want to learn more about is connecting computers together. This is a perfect situation for OS/2 Warp Connect; it contains almost everything that the SOHO needs to easily connect computers either in one site or from remote sites. So this installment of the Warped SOHO will dig into the creation of the "Warped TAN" (Tiny Area Network). Let's begin with the requirements. Hardware-wise you'll need two computers at the minimum (if that isn't already obvious). If you are planning on connecting two computers at the same site you'll also need two network interface cards. (The latest version of "Warp Start" has a new file called NICWC30.TXT which lists some Network Interface Cards (NIC) cards tested for Warp Connect.) You can also check out the hardware compatibility chart to see what adapter should work. In most cases an NE2000 compatible card will work. If you choose to use one of these cards check out WARPNET.ZIP since there are known problems with the NE2000 drivers included with Warp Connect. You can also choose to use a parallel port connection in your TAN but I don't recommend this for three reasons. One, it's harder to set up; two, it's not very fast; and three, most computers only have one parallel port which makes it hard to use a printer with this type of connection. If you plan to connect to remote sites then you'll need a modem at each, preferably high speed modems such as 28.8 bps models. As for the computers' resources, I would suggest that they have a minimum of 12 Megs of RAM, otherwise performance with Warp Connect won't be very good. Remember that more memory is often more beneficial than a faster processor. As for drive space I would recommend at least 150 meg of hard-drive space to install Warp Connect and its network features. If possible, a separate partition for Warp Connect is desirable to keep things more organized, although not necessary. As an example, I am going to use two computers, as this is a very common situation in a small home office. However this approach easily works with more than two computers, in fact I have helped to implement this in small offices with up to 15 computers. And I am sure you could have more than that; however, if you plan to have many more users than 15, a full network environment such as Lan Server or Warp Server might be more desirable. Before we install Warp Connect make sure you have the network cards installed and wired together. Also make sure you have the OS/2 drivers for your NICs on disk if they are not already a part of Warp Connect. The Install OK now lets go through an install. If you are not using the C: drive to install Warp Connect then you need to select ADVANCED INSTALL, otherwise EASY INSTALL should be just fine. I highly suggest that you decide how to set up your system before doing anything. If you use the EASY INSTALL, a panel will pop up asking if you want to install OS/2 PEER. Answer yes. Now you will need to enter a workstation name and description; I suggest using descriptive names. I used POWER TOWER for my main Pentium based computer and entered "My Main Warped Computer" as the description. I entered VIRTUALOFC as my domain name. However you can use any names that you want, and of course, the defaults work just fine as well. You will then be asked if you want NetWare and then TCP/IP. Answer "No" to these options for "The Warped TAN" we are creating. If you need these options feel free to install them now, but you can go back later and install then as well. Warp connect will churn for a while to see if it recognizes your NIC card. Select the proper NIC card if Warp Connect didn't find the correct one. If your adapter card is not listed you need to select "other" and insert the diskette with the right driver into the A: drive. Make sure that the path displayed points to a file with the ending ".NIF". Also make sure that the OS/2 NIC driver is in that path. If that still doesn't work, check with your network card vendor to see if they can help. Also check the (http://www.europe.ibm.com/getdoc/psmemea/progserv/device/) Device Driver Home Page to see if a driver for your card is there. Once you've got the right card in your list, highlight it and select OK. Now click on "Change" and check that the IRQs and address for the NIC card are correct. You also need to make sure that the IRQ and IO address are not in use by another part of your system. To do this type "RMVIEW" from an OS/2 command prompt with "/IRQ" for IRQs and "/IO" for hardware addresses. Initial Setup Once the install is done, it will have to reboot a few times and can take a hour or so depending on the speed of the computer. You'll be prompted to enter a default user-id and password so you can log on and manage the peer resources on that machine. If the office is small enough just a first name should work great for the user names. If the office is little bigger, a good practice is first initial and last name. Make sure that you remember these, otherwise you'll need to start over to set up the LAN or logon and use its resources. OK now that this is done you can install the other computers which are going to be on your peer TAN. Make sure they're attached to one another! To install Warp Connect on the remote machines the easy way, you just need to go into the "OS/2 Warp Connect Install/Remove" folder and select "Warp Connect Remote Install". Create the two disks needed for each NIC type you are using (most likely they will all have the same NIC, otherwise you'll need to make multiple sets). Once the disks are made, you can boot the remote computers with them, making sure that you have the OS/2 Warp Connect CD-ROM in the CD-ROM of the first machine, and install each machine following the same steps as above until you are done with all of your computers on your Warped TAN. Just make sure to use the same domain name for each machine so that they can easily share resources. If you have problems installing Warp Connect check out "Warp Start" and the usenet groups for more help. User Administration and Setup Now that the machines are up and running and "the WARPED TAN" is installed we need to configure the users. If you defined yourself with the same password for all the workstations you can easily manage the users from any workstation. What you need to do now is make a few decisions. The first one is who needs to have access to each machine. By this I mean do some people need to log on from different machines and get to their resources, or do you only need to worry about them on one machine? Make sure that all the machines are up and running and open the UPM Services folder. Here you can select either LOCAL or REMOTE workstation management. First select local and define any users who need to use the machine you are on from the "Manage Users" pull-down menu. Most likely you'll define them as Users only, so that they have no control over access control or creation and deletion of resources. However, you can give some people more control if you want to. If you check the "Accounts Operator" box, they will be able to control access to that PC's resources. Now define any other machines the users will need to access. To do this, in UPM select the "Actions" pull-down menu and then click "Select destination" and enter the computer's PEER name. Resource Administration and Setup Now that we have some users we need to setup the resources on each computer for them to use. Unlike user administration you must go to each computer that is going to share resources to set them up. Open the "Peer Sharing and Connecting" in the PEER SERVICES folder. On the SHARES page we'll set up the resources which will be shared by that computer. Click on the "Share" pull down and select CREATE. In the case of a CD-ROM drive, select the drive radio button and then select the CD-ROM drive to share. Give it a description which explains what it is, such as Collin's CD-ROM Drive, and then select "Grant access". In here we need to define who has access to the resource. You could also use groups here to define access to a resource instead of on a person by person basis. Another option is "Basic" (which I use for printers) which assigns everyone access to a resource. The "Audit this resource" option will keep a text log of all activity for a device. For a CD-ROM drive select "Read Only", for a hard-drive you can select from either "Read Only" or "Read/Write" depending on what kind of information it is and how you want it used. Also, if you have a modem that you want shared, you can grant everyone access to it but limit the number of concurrent users to one to protect from any application resetting the modem on someone. The option to limit the number of people accessing a resource can also help reduce system load. However, this is not much of a concern for resources other than the communication ports except when you have a larger number of users or lower end hardware. Once you are done assigning resources your users should be able to use modems, printers and drives on other peer machines that they have access to when they log on. If something doesn't work, make sure it works on the machine on which it's physically located then make sure you have assigned access to that machine. Otherwise check out the news groups or "Warp Start" for some more help. Remember you can always go back and change the settings around until they work best in your environment. It's also easy to share resources on the fly. Simply right-click on the object for that resource and select "Share". From there you can start sharing, stop sharing, configure sharing, control access, or apply access permissions. So if you decided to share something across your peer but only for a short time, you can use the desktop menus to control it. This also allows you to stop sharing a resource if, for example, you need to use a different CD-ROM and don't want anyone getting access to it. Hopefully this helps you set up a Warped TAN. If you have any other topics related to this, or for that matter, any topic, drop me a note. Until next time, remember that if the US NAVY can run OS/2 Warp it should have no problem keeping your business afloat. Definitions: DOMAIN - A collection of computers and their resources. TAN - Tiny Area Network PEER - A computer on that can share its resources as well as share resources on other computers. NIC - Network Interface Card UPM - User Profile Management ***** (http://www.ice.net/~collin) Collin W. Summers is president of CSSolutions Inc., a small computer consulting firm in central Illinois, specializing in OS/2 and related products. Currently he spends much of his time doing technical support/marketing for IBM. He also contributes to OS/2 Warp Monthly. *********************************** Chris' Rant - by Chris Wenham Et Tu Brute? It takes a while to tell if something is really for you. That's why couples get engaged before they get married, or why shareware authors give you 30 days to try out their programs. At first everything may be peachy, but for some reason or another you may find that your needs are different and it's time to go elsewhere. Most of us shrug, say "heigh-ho", and get on with business as usual. Now why is it that in this far-too-political world of operating systems there are so many journalists who feel like they have to leave a blade in the chest of a platform when they go? I am talking about a few individuals, who's names I shall not mention, that used to be good OS/2 journalists and advocates until they decided that they'd had enough of the race. They switched their platform or closed their shop as anyone would do when faced with the crunch, but marked their exit with a line of *self-indulging tripe* that stinks to high-heaven of *unwanted pity.* "Goodbye OS/2, the platform that could have been..." blah blah blah "...David and Goliath..." waffle waffle waffle "...IBM dropped the ball..." blah blah blah "...Ann Landers..." etc. etc. etc. Oh boy. Folks, these are very premature obituaries. The death of OS/2 has been greatly exaggerated. When I told a friend that I wrote for an online OS/2 'zine he said jokingly, "So you're getting ready to write a eulogy, eh?" To which I replied, "No, I'm too busy evaluating and reviewing all the new OS/2 software I keep getting." An automatic response, yes, but seconds later I pleasantly realized that it was true. The market is alive, well, and even picking up. Yet somehow we're supposed to think that the ship is still sinking even when it wasn't taking on water to begin with. Let me ask those ex-Warp journalists, "just what did you gain by stabbing a colleague in the back?" Well gee, what a shame, OS/2 isn't bringing you the hordes of adulating fans that Windows journalists have. Strange, I always wrote for the benefit of my readers, not for the benefit of myself. This complaint doesn't apply to all, I concede, but it applies to many. I wouldn't mind if they didn't want to carry on for whatever reasons they had, but it hurts _us_ for no good reason at all when they announce OS/2's demise as fact. To those journalists: we're trying to make a success out of OS/2 and we are succeeding. Microsoft needs the competition we're giving them and there are many users who need the power and flexibility they can't get outside Warp. But you're hampering our progress for nothing much more than your own personal satisfaction and selfish gain. You're doing it at our expense and, surprise surprise, we resent it as much as we'd resent a knife in the back from a person we thought was a friend. I shall never write a eulogy or obituary for OS/2 for the simple reason that it is rude, unnecessary and doesn't help my readers (not to mention that it is wildly inaccurate). I know they (my readers) are intelligent enough to decide what operating system they want by *reason, not hype* and I know they'll be intelligent enough to tell if the software they have now doesn't serve their changing needs. Self importance is a fatal flaw in any journalist. Journalists can be wrong. Bill Howard of PC Magazine, however important he may be or is perceived to be, was wrong when he said OS/2 will be gone by the end of the year. There will be a new version of Warp before the end of 1996 and I, along with many others, will be at the forefront of its wave, *informing* the people who need its new features. "Goodbye OS/2" essays and premature eulogies don't help anyone. We read OS/2 related magazines to learn how to use OS/2 better, not to read whiny, depressing letters from someone who's looking for an excuse to cop out or jump ship. These letters don't make us sorry for Warp, they make us sorry for those who couldn't think of anything better to write. I lose respect very quickly for someone who loses track of what their publication is supposed to be about. Here's a *personal request* to any OS/2 journalist who wants to write a "Goodbye OS/2" letter--*Don't.* I don't feel that Windows 95 is aimed at a person like me (someone who needs _real_ power and flexibility), so why must I have to fight until my teeth are bleeding to counter the ugly propaganda that threatens to bring down the only operating system that serves *my* needs? I know who I am, I'm a "power user" who wants more control, more customization, and more flexibility in an operating system. I am a programmer with an appreciation for what goes on underneath the desktop in the guts of the software. I don't mind if there's a learning curve *at the beginning* because I know the _consistency_ of the interface will make it smooth-sailing from then on. I know what I want and I know what I need. To these journalists: please, why do you have to make our work so hard? End of rant. ***** (http://www.spectra.net/~fox) Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company--(http://www.spectra.net/~pendulum/webworks) Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews. *********************************** Trevor's Rant - by Trevor Smith A funny thing happened to me in the computer store the other day. I was just cruising through the local mall and dropped into the software store, as is my habit. While there I was once again struck by the volume of DOS software still on the shelves (games) and the relative lack of Win95 stuff and complete absence of OS/2 software. But *this is news to no one* so I didn't let it occupy my mind for too long. On my way out, I glanced at the counter where this particular store usually keeps the small boxes of CD-only Red-spine Warp (no manual, no tech support, CDN$49.95, available only in Canada) and noticed there was only one copy left and it was *not in the groovy display box IBM ships them in*. I wondered if that meant they were selling quickly so I asked the gentleman behind the counter. Indeed, he said that it was, "just because of demand." Encouraged, I assumed this meant they were selling quickly and the store was awaiting another batch. *It soon became apparent what he _really_ meant.* He explained to me that they come in boxes of four or five and take a few months to sell. *A few months to sell?!?* I commented that for $50 people should buy them just to find out what it is! That didn't get a rise out of our professional friend behind the counter though. He let me in on an industry secret. If you promise to keep it to yourself, I'll share it with you. He told me, "Yeah, well it's just that you can't get any applications for it." No, he didn't add, "around here," or any other qualifier. Now the thing you have to understand is that where I live on the east coast of Canada, although we have roughly half a million people in the local area, *no one has bothered to stock any OS/2 apps* to speak of yet. If he had said that you couldn't get OS/2 apps _around here_ I would have agreed and been on my way. But there was something about this guy's attitude that made me take the bait. Rather than *give the lout the sound thrashing and good education he deserved*, I swallowed and said the only thing I could think of: "But that's your fault, not IBM's." He stared blankly. "What do you mean?" Some more local background. I've been to a lot of stores in the Halifax area (including this one in the past) and asked to have OS/2 applications ordered for me. I did _not_ ask the stores to stock OS/2 apps, mind you, just to *order me one copy*. At almost every store (including this one) I was told, "No." Not, "It will take a month," or, "It will cost an extra 20%." Just, "No." So I told our uniform-clad friend, "I understand if you don't want to stock them, but you will not even _order_ them. Since they _do_ exist, I would say it's _your_ fault that people can't get OS/2 applications." *He stared blankly some more.* After he realized I hadn't gone, he managed a murmured, "Er, well, we stock Mac apps and they don't sell very well." I reminded him that I wasn't asking him to _stock_ anything, only pointing out that if the reason he claimed for OS/2's low sales in his store was accurate, then the store itself was directly responsible for those low sales. More blank looks. I assured him I wasn't trying to be rude, excused myself and left. *Neither one of us could take much more of that.* So what about it? Do the morons in your local area use this circular logic without realizing who is originating it (them!)? I had realized there was a reluctance to stock items, and I could understand that, but these guys don't even realize that *they are not responding to the problem, they are causing it*! Brilliant folks. Speaking of OS/2 software, *I can't believe the craziness* that erupted this month when Stardock announced the release date and upgrade pricing for Object Desktop v1.5. In a nutshell, some people believed that they should receive any upgrade for free and that giving it to _some_ for free (those who purchased OD v1.0 after April 1st) but not _everyone_ for free, was unfair. Uh huh. To paraphrase my usenet post regarding these complaints, get a grip! Many _shareware_ authors do have exemplary upgrade policies but they are not the norm for "commercial" vendors. For example, Lotus has recently announced the coming availability of Word Pro 96 for OS/2 with an estimated retail price of US$105 (on CD-ROM only), with a $20 in-box rebate coupon offered for all current Lotus product users. That's about a 20% discount. Stardock's upgrade price is $37 for registered users of OD v1.0 (instead of the full price of $89.95). That's more than a 50% discount--*and it's free if you happened to buy OD v1.0 within the last month before v1.5 was released*! The way I see it, that's pretty generous. The way some people complain, it's no wonder software stores don't want to stock OS/2 products. ***** (editor@haligonian.com) Trevor Smith is the editor of OS/2 e-Zine!. When he's not lecturing store clerks, he's lecturing you. *********************************** the Rave: PM Patrol v4.1b - by Noah Sumner PM Patrol is a great program that has existed for years. I started running it on my computer a few months ago and finally decided to register it recently. PM Patrol is powerful yet sleek and fast. Basically PM Patrol helps you monitor your system resources. It tells you how heavily you are using your CPU, the state of your swapper file, and even how much "Internet time" you have used. But this is only a scratch on the surface of the power of PM Patrol. You can also monitor the amount of free space on your disk drives, the amount of power you have left (for notebooks) and how long you have been using your computer. There are many graphs for those of you that are graphical and a nice small bar of text that sits on the bottom of your screen for those (like me) that prefer text. And for those of you that are fast asleep running ten copies of WebExplorer at once it will even yell at you that you have almost no swapper file space left! All of this is very configurable and easy to understand too. PM Patrol also includes many useful "bonus utilities". These include applications like Fast Help, Fast Find, Fast Format, and many other little programs. All of these utilities are actually useful too! "Fast Help" finds help for OS/2, DOS and Windows 3.1 programs. I detest the "find objects" utility included with OS/2 and used to use "seek and scan files", however "Fast Find" will search for many more specific items including running items! I also can't stand waiting for a disk to format. With "Fast Format" it takes less then 10 seconds per disk. Need I say more? And these are only a few of the utilities included with PM Patrol. All these features also help you configure your computer and decide what programs to use. You can see what DLLs are being loaded, and what programs are using the most resources. For example, for a short period of time I was using Live Wire but I discovered that it was a hog and switched applications. As well, you might be running out of hard drive space and need to have a swap file that is perfectly sized in order to not waste any space. You can easily determine the perfect size with PM Patrol! You can also use PM Patrol to change settings you might not know how to do on your own. You can easily change your mouse pointer from within PM Patrol (some sample pointers are included). Also, you can access folders from a small pop-up window in PM Patrol so if your desktop is too cluttered you can put many things in a sub-folder and still easily be able to access them! The price of PM Patrol is also unbeatable. Many small applications exist which can do part of its job but these programs would quickly clutter up your desktop and you would probably have to spend a lot more than $100 to get all the power of PM Patrol. PM Patrol doesn't clutter up your desktop and is only US$29. PM Patrol v3.0 was considered a steal at approximately $100, but version 4.0 is shareware, more powerful, and only $29. As well, bulk pack discounts are available. PM Patrol is a great product for those of us that want to get the most power out of our computers. At the time of this writing v4.0c was out but by the time you read this, v4.1b will be available and promises to be even better. I strongly suggest that you look for yourself to see its true power, so head off to the site below! ***** * PMPatrol v4.1b by (http://homepage.interaccess.com/~wally/) WallyWare Registration: US$29 ***** (nss@io.org) Noah Sumner is a student at York Mills C.I. in Toronto, Ontario and a member of the (http://www.io.org/~to2) Toronto OS/2 Users Group, as well as the shareware disk of the month editor. *********************************** Linfield's Line - by Kevin Linfield Computers and Marriage Here it is, the middle of April, and although Linfield's Line is due Real Soon Now (RSN), I've been very busy. As you probably guessed from the title, by the time you read this, I will be married (April 27th at 4:00pm EST if all goes well). With marriage on my fiancee's and my minds, how much time do we have for computers? Well, lots actually. I am gaining a Windows 3.1 user, since that is what Sprint Canada uses on its PCs, and she is gaining an OS/2 (and UNIX) nut. Living with Different OSes It is not as if our use of a computer operating system dictates our lives. I am quite comfortable under virtually all operating systems (including all flavours of Windows and a slew of different UNIXes) and I do not try to be evangelical to her. Yet knowledge is power and over the years I have been able to convince her (many would say brainwash) that OS/2 is the best choice for a PC operating system. She knows that it can run DOS, Windows, and native OS/2 applications. She has used Microsoft Word and DeScribe and doesn't find either to be leaps and bounds better than the other. When she is with co-workers and the topic of computers comes up, she is quick to defend OS/2 and try to spread the word for me. Believe it or not, she has even volunteered with me at Team OS/2 events such as the last Toronto COMDEX and a local ComputerFest trade show. Wedding Programs While we were planning our wedding, my bride-to-be suggested we get a computer wedding program. A quick trip to over five local computer stores convinced us that a) there are not a lot of wedding programs, and b) there was no way in heck we would be able to get an OS/2 program. We ended up getting a DOS program that appeared to be fairly complete, but with the wedding a week away, let me advise anyone else out there that a computer wedding program is a waste of money. Use a pen and paper, and get books and magazines instead. In the time it takes to learn the program, enter the information, and then try to do something useful, you will have been married already. What I ended up using was DeScribe word processor as a Desktop Publisher to make the wedding programme (two column landscape complete with pictures) and IBM Works spreadsheet for the budget and expense tracking. No need for anything else. The Honeymoon Sorry, no "hubba hubba" here, but I would like to mention that my bride has offered to let me bring the notebook computer on the honeymoon. Frankly, I was shocked. What sane wife would let her new husband bring the computer (with games and the Internet Access Kit) along on one of the most special of all vacations? Maybe it was a test, but so far I have indicated that I am leaving it home. Hence, I will not be able to reply to e-mail or comments about (../list.html) Linfield's List until some time in May. Concluding Remarks Well, I apologize to those who checked out Linfield's Line looking for more rumours, gossip, or dirt on OS/2. But right now, Doreen is the one that I have to spend time with, not my computer (will it ever forgive me?). Merlin beta has been delayed until June, and don't expect it to be released until just before fall COMDEX in Las Vegas. Until next month, this is Kevin Linfield signing off, saying thanks for reading this, and don't worry, I will have LOTS of fun on my honeymoon with my new bride. ***** (linfield@torfree.net) Kevin Linfield is a freelance Writer for Canada Computes! and OS/2 e-Zine!, Vice President of the (http://www.io.org/~to2) Toronto OS/2 User's Group and maintainer of (../list.html) Linfield's List: Best OS/2 Freeware. *********************************** Is Merlin going to make Windows 95 Disappear? - by David Chan We all have heard about the upcoming version of the OS/2 operating system from IBM. The question on most minds now is whether Warp v4.0, codenamed "Merlin", is going to be a major step for IBM in winning market share from Microsoft's hyped operating system, Windows 95. Microsoft's Stumble and IBM's Opportunity Although Microsoft's two year marketing campaign surrounding Windows 95 has finally subsided, no one can argue that it has served its purpose. It has made an impact on the impressionable computer marketplace, and left a mark on buyers' minds that will take a long time to fade. Although actual sales of the Microsoft product fell drastically short of their initial predictions, millions of users willingly upgraded to the new version of Windows and many computers are now being pre-loaded with the software. So even though it offended many people, and cost Microsoft some credibility and 200 million+ in advertising dollars, the campaign was mostly successful. Step in IBM. Many critics say that IBM's marketing is the companies Achilles' heel, that poor marketing of their products is the reason why IBM fails where Microsoft dominates in the end-user market. When Microsoft spent millions hyping the release of its then brand new Windows 3.0 operating system to the world, where was IBM with its support for OS/2 (then at v2.0)? Nowhere to be found. It was this false start that helped Microsoft's Windows operating environment to gain large amounts of vendor and user support, while OS/2 dwindled away into back rooms. This was the beginning of an all too familiar pattern of Microsoft selling technologically inferior products by ways of superior marketing tactics. Now that IBM is getting ready to release it's new version of OS/2, many are wondering if IBM has learned from its past mistakes, and if it is ready to tackle Microsoft on its own territory. Will the new OS/2 stand a chance against the growing wave of Windows 95 supporters? Even if IBM manages to put together a killer marketing blitz for Merlin, some say that it is too late in coming to really contend with the Microsoft regime. And Why Not OS/2? Popular developer and user support aside, one of the strongest arguments for the OS/2 operating system is its technical superiority. Many of the large group of Warp users on the Internet are quick to point out that OS/2 is a much more robust, fully 32-bit platform with a true object-oriented interface. And the new version of OS/2 is supposed to tout yet more enhanced features that are unaddressed in Windows 95. Merlin's new interface is supposed to make human-computer interaction easier and more intuitive than Windows' interface by comparison. Merlin is also scheduled to support voice navigation without the need of any special hardware, just a standard Sound Blaster compatible sound card and a standard microphone. Combine this with the fact that Merlin will, and current versions of Warp already do, support direct video access API's (known as DIVE) for multimedia programs and games, (Microsoft is still working on their equivalent, DirectX API's), will come with a complete package of Internet applications and utilities and support for almost all DOS and Windows 3.1 applications, and one must wonder why everyone doesn't want to switch to OS/2. The answer is simple--very little developer support. Vicious Cycles and Popular Developers It is a lack of popular developer support and not actual programs that hampers OS/2's general acceptance in the market. Contrary to popular belief, there are currently more OS/2 applications than Windows 95 applications. The problem lies in the fact that although OS/2 boasts more numbers in native applications, most of these applications are from small-name developers and companies generally unknown to the non-OS/2 world. Big name developers like Corel, Symantec, Sun, Borland, Origin, and Lucasfilm (to name a few) seem to have flocked to the Windows 95 boat making the OS/2 market seem wanting. Unfortunately, customers like to buy products developed by brand name developers which won't start developing for OS/2 until they see more customer demand. It is a vicious cycle that leaves OS/2 without much "celebrity" support. However, there is another way to gain developer support, and this method requires that IBM supply subsidies to give developers an incentive to program for the OS/2 platform. This method was very popular with Microsoft in the early days of Windows' introduction. However, with the current "belt-tightening" and restructuring of IBM, it doesn't seem likely that IBM will continue this avenue of developer incentive. Predictions for the Future of Two OS's Will Merlin be a Windows 95 killer? It is very unlikely at this point in time that the new offering from IBM will have a large impact on the established Windows market. Conversely it is also unlikely that Merlin will have no impact at all. The probable outcome is likely to be somewhere in between. To the established OS/2 supporter, Merlin will be the undisputed upgrade of choice. On the other hand, Windows 95 users will be sceptical of Merlin's merits and be wary of yet another upgrade. Most will recognize Merlin's technical and aesthetic superiority but will hesitate to give up their Windows 95 programs which they have just begun to get accustomed to. But to those who have installed Windows 95 and have already become fed up with its shaky stability, its interface inconsistencies, its backward compatibility problems, and its general broken promises of a revolutionary way to use a computer, Merlin will prove to be an upgrade that will fit just right. As for Merlin making Windows 95 disappear, even magic can't rid us of all our demons... ***** (djchan@novice.uwaterloo.ca) David Chan is currently an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Waterloo, on Co-op workterm at IBM Canada. He was a big MS Win95 supporter, turned OS/2 advocate after learning the truth about OS/2. *********************************** _____________________________________________________________________ Visit Indelible Blue's Web Page* - (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue is a mail order reseller specializing in state-of-the-art OS/2 software and hardware solutions for corporations and individuals. Corporate volume discounts available. _____________________________________________________________________ Feature Reviews: Graphics Software In the past year, OS/2 has made great strides in becoming a "serious" platform for all types of businesses. With incredible products from companies such as SPG and Team Computer, OS/2 is no longer a follower in the high end graphics market, but instead, a leader. And there is also a wide selection of low or medium cost graphics software available for the home user. We took a look at PMView v0.92 in our (../v1n1) first issue_ and this month we review a few others. Whether you're looking to convert file formats, touch up the odd family photo, apply creative effects or create something never seen on this earth, OS/2 vendors are providing the tools you need. ***** Reviews: * ColorWorks V2 - Chris Wenham * NeoN Graphix 3D - Nico Nabholz and Mario Schunda. * PMJPEG v1.74 - Tim Walker *JView and JView Pro v1.0 - David Seldon *********************************** ColorWorks V2 - by Chris Wenham "I'll be back" - ColorWorks 1.0 Graphics professionals might want to take a peek from behind their screens and look at a piece of software that has just entered into its second generation and could quite possibly offer OS/2 another "Killer App". The software is ColorWorks V2, hailed as "The Artist's Ultimate Power Program", it shows off some features and characteristics that made us blink in astonishment, quite frankly, as you'll soon read why. SPG Inc., the makers of ColorWorks, are to _innovative, compact and versatile software_ as Porsche is to _fast cars_. Its RAM footprint is only 1 megabyte, its in-use memory requirements can be halved by switching on DIMIC (Dynamic In-Memory Image Compression) and its speed can be boosted to high-end workstation levels by adding more CPUs. Its power and flexibility have no definite limit since any effect can be combined with others and "painted" to a canvas using any of the drawing tools (text, freehand, geometric shapes, floodfills and splines) and its photographer's-style masking power makes a "magic wand tool" look like a toy. Strangely enough, those features were already in ColorWorks 1.0. New in 2.0: Plug-ins SPG has caught on to Adobe's trick of using plug-ins to extend the functionality of their product. A plug-in is a software module, usually supplied by a third party developer, that gives ColorWorks the ability to handle more file formats and supply more artistic effects. Plug-ins were popularized with the highly successful Kai's Power Tools (for Photoshop) on the Mac and Windows platforms. To help developers along, SPG has included a full developers kit on the ColorWorks V2 CD-ROM and made it, along with a free testbed program, available for download on their (http://www.spg-net.com) web site. Note that this does not mean you can take a Windows plug-in and use it with ColorWorks, even if you have Win-OS/2 support. It is up to developers to port their respective tools. There is a limit to how far plug-ins can go though. They can not be added to the effects stack (explained below) so the artist must resort to using masks if he or she only wants part of the canvas altered. Gradients In ColorWorks,gradients are *very* nicely woven into the software. Gradients are simply a gradual change from one color to another to provide a smooth blended effect, but ColorWorks uses them to also control _opacity_, not just color. You get three basic gradient styles; linear (right-left or up-down), radial (circular), and square (also called "Star"). We missed not having a conical gradient style but the ability to rotate, invert and even adjust the mapping of the gradient was a great bonus. By adjusting the map of the gradient we could create interesting ripple effects and "sawtooth" patterns. Anti-Aliasing, halfway on the mark ColorWorks can use anti-aliasing when drawing with filled objects to smooth edges and get rid of jaggy lines. This is very important with web publishing because the resolution of most monitors is nowhere near the crispness of a high-quality printer. For the most part ColorWorks does a good job--except when it comes to text. Large fonts may end up with funny looking bulges and small fonts may blur to unreadable. This doesn't stop it from being a whiz with fancy text effects though, as is demonstrated with SPG's "Killer Text Effects" tutorial available for free download from their web site. Combining effects and painting with them This is ColorWorks' main and most prominent feature even since version 1.0 and we haven't seen the like of it in any other graphics software package on any platform. Musicians may remember when the new breed of synthesizers came out that could combine different sounds and musical instruments together in near unlimited combinations, then play them through any key on the keyboard. Suddenly musicians could create their own "instruments" and sounds that were not already built into the synthesizer by combining existing ones and tweaking to their taste. This is what ColorWorks does for art. It comes with a complete stock of every effects filter an artist could need, the power to tweak each one individually, and the power to *stack them together* as a combination effect which can be painted to a canvas with _any_ of the drawing tools. In other high-end graphics software like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Photo-Paint you have single tools that do one dedicated task. You get one tool for dodge/burn, one tool for contrast, etc. If that tool only works in freehand style and you want to apply the effect with an ellipse then you're out of luck. Also, take the "magic wand" some users rave about, it's just a tool that selects an area of a similar color. If you want to select more than one area though, the program discards what you had just selected as soon as you try to use the tool a second time. ColorWorks is different. Your dodge/burn is now an effect that can be painted with using _any_ of the drawing tools, and your "magic wand" is actually the floodfill tool when ColorWorks is in mask mode. You can select multiple areas to your heart's content, invert them and "unpaint" any parts you don't want. When you're satisfied, you can save the mask and perform your operations on it. Those who work with the same images during different sessions may be irritated by ColorWorks' inability to save its masks to disk though. This is not the case for its 8-bit masks which are used to control opacity when drawing to a canvas, nonetheless, you can't use an 8-bit mask for everything and we'd love being able build libraries of "Cookie Cutter" shapes if we could. And yet more precision On top of what we've already covered, ColorWorks has improved the user interface over other programs when it comes to actually drawing shapes or text or lines on the canvas. Since ColorWorks 1.0, users have been able to interactively zoom in and out on a canvas _as they are drawing to it_. Zoom in on one corner of a rectangle to get your positioning pixel-perfect, zoom out again for general sizing, then zoom back in to position the end corner exactly. And when applying text you have always been able to use the cursor keys to interactively adjust kerning, font size, height-only size and width-only size. ColorWorks V2 also has a "one time" drawing feature previously only seen in Ron Scott's QFX (a $795 package): hold down the shift key after drawing an effect with freehand and ColorWorks won't reapply the effect on the area you have just drawn to. Say, for example, you drew freehand to the canvas with the "invert" filter to reverse the colors of an image, you don't want to accidentally re-invert them back to normal on the next pass if the brush strays over the area you had just drawn to on the first stroke. Lastly, those who have invested in a pressure-sensitive digitizing tablet will be happy to know that ColorWorks will use that too, to vary any combination of opacity, palette color and brush size. You can adjust the way ColorWorks maps the responses as well to compensate for an imperfect tablet or different drawing needs. But unfortunately... The main user interface of ColorWorks is still not the easiest to work with. Too many of the most frequently used operations are tucked away in submenus without any shortcut keys. If you're trying to move quickly you'll be slowed down while you look for the right option. We had one artist remark that his fingers wanted to go to the PhotoShop key-assignments but they didn't work the same way under ColorWorks. Although unimportant to most of us, this could generate some frustration and curses from migrating artists. SPG has admittedly made the interface a little better since the 1.0 version, but we find that the most common annoyances are still there: o There's no indication that you have any effects enabled except by explicitly checking the "Effects" menu before performing a draw operation. Often we found that after drawing an effect, then going off and searching for another file to work with, we forgot we had an effect switched on and jumped in surprise the next time we used a tool (ironically, this is the source of many pleasant "accidents" where new tricks are discovered that would not have been found otherwise). o ColorWorks is modal, you're either in the painting mode or the masking mode. This is a trade-off between convenience and power (since after painting a mask you can then make it an image, protection, _or_ distortion mask), however, in ColorWorks you'll find yourself working harder than in some programs to perform some operations. o Some effects require you to interact with a preview window that's a fixed size. For example, to apply the points for a warping effect you have to work with a preview window that will display a scaled-down image of your canvas. Since this preview is scaled down, the accuracy at which you can place the points is "scaled down" too. o A canvas must be a minimum of 100x100 pixels in size. While this doesn't prevent you from editing smaller (or narrower or shorter) images, you must still use another program such as PMView to crop it down to the size you want. ColorWorks will load images of a smaller size, but it will paste them into a resized window with whitespace taking up the slack. Also, ColorWorks barely acknowledges the Workplace Shell. It can't even load a file that's passed to it as a command-line parameter (nor by drag-and-drop to its icon), or by associating the program with an image file format (although you _can_ associate formats with ColorWorks, all that will happen is that the program will load, but not open the file for editing). This is a big disappointment since a desktop folder or a Light Table is infinitely easier to use than the standard File Open box. We wish ColorWorks would remember your last directory between sessions or disk drives too. After going to the CD-ROM to load a photo-CD image we found ourselves stuck back at the root directory when we wanted to open or save another file from the hard drive. We've been told that there is a shareware thumbnail browser plug-in being developed which may help with the WPS deficiencies. SPG also tells us that version 3 will have more shortcut keys, a macro-recorder, and will remove the 100x100 pixel minimums. Workstation speed? SPG claims that with ColorWorks (any version), a multiprocessor machine and OS/2 SMP you can have workstation speed at a budget price. A system with two Pentium 150s or three Pentium 90s and ColorWorks will equal the speed of a $30,000, single RISC processor graphics workstation and Alias Sketch (a software package usually sold at $13,000 a pop). ColorWorks will divide the work of each drawing operation among the CPUs, whereas another program (like Alias Sketch) would simply submit the whole job to one CPU regardless of how many you actually have. If systems with _more_ than two or three CPUs are available to you, then ColorWorks would, to put it bluntly, Kick Butt. Of tonal ranges and printing SPG likes to do the job the "right way" the first time instead of trying to patch it later. A crucial flaw in Adobe Photoshop's treatment of images when it comes to printing is that it clips the tonal range short in order to make it "fit" the color depth of the printer. This method has the potential to shave off a lot of an image's color detail in the upper and lower tonal regions (shadows and highlights). ColorWorks, however, uses tonal _compression_ to squeeze all of the color data into the range that the printer can handle, making sure none of the detail is lost. ColorWorks is the photosetter's friend when it comes to printing too. It has an incredibly wide range of facilities for separating the CYMK layers of an image and for printing and, therefore, is used in print-shops everywhere. The Manual The Manual (capital "M") for ColorWorks V2 weighs about 4 pounds (we had to measure it on the bathroom scales) and stands 1 3/4 inches off the floor. It has been declared a lethal weapon in five states and has been used more than once to intimidate a mugger. This is *The Unamanual*. Built to the highest possible standards, it is printed cover to cover with 100lb coated glossy text, smythe sewn signatures with head and foot bands, reinforcement, and case bound using a .098 caliper binding board. Twenty-one out of the twenty-four signatures (each signature is 24 pages) are in color. Many have remarked that you could keep this book on the coffee table as a conversation piece (but hide it when the IRS comes to audit you). It's more than just software documentation too, it's a tutorial on the computer art and photosetting trade. This is the book you use to learn not only what the heck the "Adjust Color Maps" effect is, for example, but how you can use it to compensate for a cheap scanner that gets all the colors wrong. What's also remarkable about the book is that SPG is using it _as the packaging_ for the software. The idea is that it sits on the shelf without any shrink-wrap so the customer can pick it up and leaf through, seeing if it can do the job he/she wants it to, and make an informed purchase. SPG calls this "Full Disclosure Packaging" and hopes the stores will like the idea because it means less returns of merchandise--the customer already _knows_ that the program can do what he wants because he's had the chance to interrogate The Manual before purchase. Even though the printed manual is a magnificent feat of engineering, I could still use a simple quick-reference pull out sheet for commonly used keystrokes. The Manual has such a reference in the appendix, but you can't exactly clip the monster to the side of your monitor. Keeping this book on the shelf brings back images of Fred Flintstone's infamous bowling-ball-in-the-closet. ("Creeeeeek... BAM!") This book also adds about $100 to the purchase price, so ColorWorks V2 is available on CD-ROM only. In such a case you'd use the on-line "MegaManual", a VIEWable .inf file of more than 20 megabytes that contains just about everything that's in the printed version. The install program simply makes a pointer to the file on the CD so you're not using up valuable hard-disk space. Should you buy it? So is this a program for you? Let's get something clear right away: ColorWorks is not a toy. If you want a program for dabbling or sprucing up the family photos you'd be better off with something cheaper and simpler like Impos/2. But if you're a professional publisher or an artist, someone who _eats_ because of the tools you use, then ColorWorks is worth its weight in gold (and considering the manual, that's some fortune). This is a product that is used by serious publishing professionals in the real world, both for the creativity power an artist needs and the output clarity a photosetter needs. If you're looking for a product with a lot of support backing it up you've come to the right place too. (http://www.spg-net.com) SPG's website has a download area offering free demo versions of their products plus the tutorial section of the on-line MegaManual and Technique lessons for you to read (in .INF format). To encourage developers, SPG is also sponsoring a "Code Warrior" contest to find the best new plug-ins and they're offering to negotiate the rights to buy the best entries and make them available free for download. And, of course, even more tips and tricks can be found in our new monthly column, "Chris' ColorWorks Power Tips", written by yours truly. So, ColorWorks or PhotoShop? The first has a lot more raw power and artistic flexibility, the second is considered the "universal standard" and already has a lot of plug-ins available. But if you want to look good "out there" you'll want what we chose; ColorWorks. ***** * ColorWorks V2 by (http://www.spg-net.com/) SPG Inc. MSRP: US$349 (w/ hard cover manual); US$249 (CD only) ***** (http://www.spectra.net/~fox) Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company--(http://www.spectra.net/~pendulum/webworks) Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews. *********************************** NeoN Grafix 3D v2.07 - by Nico Nabholz and Mario Schunda Already shown in an early preview version at the CeBIT '95 as a big surprise for all OS/2 fans, was (http://www.neongrafix.com) NeoN Grafix 3D, a professional rendering application for producing single images and video recordable animations. NeoN comes from the Atari ST, and has now finally been released for OS/2 as version 2.07. So far I have not come across any serious bugs and it seems that Team Computer has written a nice piece of *real* OS/2 software. NeoN is extremely fast compared to other common Windows and DOS rendering applications and the program itself uses very little RAM. NeoN consists of two executables, the object editor and the scenery editor, and about 50 MB of bitmaps and example scenes, some of which are quite tricky and a good source for new ideas and methods. Both the scenery and object editor use nearly the same interface and thus are very easy to get acquainted with. They show the objects and scenes in different views from all directions including a 3-dimensional view and a camera view. The Object Editor Using the object editor, you can create object files that are later loaded into the scenery editor. A nice feature here is the ability to simply edit an object in the scenery editor by having a function automatically load it into the object editor and after the modification, return and replace the old object. Basic Bodies and Modifications Some basic objects are cubes, chess boards, spheres, tori, spins, extrudes and 3D text which can even convert normal OS/2 system fonts into NeoN 3D shape fonts. Bodies can be modified in a variety of ways, among these cutting apart along a line, stretching, mirroring, elastically rotating and stretching or by using deformations like divide quadratically, bevel and an advanced form of bevel, outline. With this function, bodies can be made into a form of grid by marking the outline and optionally deleting the inner polygons. A great tool for creating landscapes or other uneven objects is "random move" which moves points and polygons randomly in a certain direction. The Material Editor A very nice part of the object editor is the material editor. It allows the user to freely edit color, ambience, diffusion, spectrum, mirroring, transparency and reflections on the object and change some other more complicated options like black cut which defines a kind of invisible color in the body. With the material editor you can always watch the changes in the handy preview field. Also three more advanced functions can be used in the material editor: _textures_ which simulate different surfaces like wood, stone or random structures, by changing colors according to bitmaps (BMP and TGA files) and thus give the object a more uneven touch; _structures_ which create the impression of a 3-dimensionally shaped surface, e.g. an old, rotten stone wall or grassy surfaces (structures are like textures, but use shades instead of color-changes for the effects); or you can simply put a _pixmap_ on an object by loading a bitmap and modify its size and position on the object. However there are two negative points about the material editor: first, is it not possible to assign exact values to any of the material settings except by using the provided sliders. It is therefore nearly impossible to reproduce certain settings assigned to an object. Second, the preview field only updates whenever the user clicks on it. This can become very annoying when trying different combinations of effects and bitmaps. Meshes For easier handling of complex objects, meshes can be created. A mesh is a group of polygons or parts of single objects that can be shown, hidden and modified together. NeoN creates a mesh-list which is very helpful for administration of complex object parts and applying changes to groups of objects. Morphing Using the morphing function lets you assign different phases to an object and modify its material and shape in each phase. NeoN later calculates gradual changes from one phase to another in the course of an animation. Morphing also includes changes in material. Phases of morphing can be carried over to the material editor and this way, different phases of color and surface can be assigned to objects. The Scenery Editor After having created all the necessary objects for your scene, you can put them together by loading them into the scenery editor. Here the user can modify the way objects are displayed: filled polygons are a lot smaller but more exact than grids. You can apply the normal object modifications such as size, move and rotate and objects can be connected so that they behave like one object during an animation in addition to their own, individual movement. Each object can be assigned its own animation settings. Splines can be created in the scene along which objects will move during an animation. Open and closed linear and B-splines can be modified any time by adding, moving or deleting points on them. The user can simply rotate the body around the X, Y or Z-axis in relation to the body itself or even the "world origin" or use nose-feet-rotation to enable rotation in relation to or in the direction of other objects--pointing, tangential and fixed. Time Splines All types of animation, morphing, rotation and spline movement can be connected with a time spline. In the time spline editor, the relation between animation and running time (frames) can be edited using a graph. Although this graph allows the user to have a good view of the whole movement, again exact values can not be applied to the time spline. This sometimes makes it hard to have a modification executed at a very exact point during the whole animation. Lights, Camera... Objects! With NeoN basically all objects can be the camera or a light or both. Every light source can have a different color and range and there are point lights (like a light bulb--shining in all directions), parallel lights (like light coming from a source very far away, e.g. the sun) and spot lights which can have different spot-angles and border-fading settings. Lights can also be connected with time splines for animation of their brightness. Further options are constant light, fog and dimmer. Rendering a Scene After your creation is done, you can render a single picture or an animation with as many frames as you wish and the resolution, brightness, contrast and background picture can be chosen freely. For faster or more exact rendering, shadows, mirror-effects, transparency and anti-aliasing can be toggled individually. Also if you plan to record an animation on a single-picture VCR, you can have NeoN render interlaced pictures. The output files can be in either BMP or TGA format and optionally a batch file can be executed after each rendered frame. For better control over complex animations, an animation preview can be rendered on-screen using lines, filled polygons or partially rendered frames. Bright Lights Burn Quickly While beginners will quickly find their way around in NeoN, professionals will probably miss advanced functions like creation of complex natural movements or a more exact method of entering values in some places. The printed manual is the same as the on-line version and is, all in all, very helpful. Nevertheless I do not understand why Team Computer did not make the on-line help context sensitive and some people will probably not like seeing NeoN use a dongle (a small piece of hardware that is plugged into the computer's printer port--and is necessary for the program to operate--to prevent illegal copying) and its own device driver. Selling for 1.200 DM (at the time or writing about US$800), NeoN is in a high price range for the casual user. Nevertheless, Team Computer is a small company with a handful of really clever programmers, and believe me, if you've used it once, you will find it hard not to think about buying NeoN! There is also a "lite" version available which costs only 100 DM and therefore is limited in the resolution of rendered images and some other functions, which may be worth looking into. ***** * NeoN Graphix 3D by (http://www.neongrafix.com/) Team Computer MSRP: ~US$800 ***** (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/NicoNabholz) Nico Nabholz is a student, living in Riederau, Bavaria. Mario Schunda is a hardware engineer at SPEA, living in Dettenschwang, Bavaria. *********************************** PMJPEG v1.74 - by Tim Walker It was inevitable that the advent of the GUI would tilt computing heavily towards the handling of images. Unfortunately it's only recently that image file formats have standardised, and even now an application for converting and processing images is as important for a software collection as, say, an archiving utility. In the days of DOS the favourite was Graphics Workshop (remember that?), whilst most Windows users will have a copy of Paint Shop Pro lurking on the hard disk somewhere. After all, is there a GUI user who hasn't customised their own wallpaper at one time? As a convert from Windows 3.1, I'd always thought of Paint Shop Pro (PSP) as a "yardstick", by which similar apps would have to measure up. PMJPEG is one of a number of OS/2 PM-based apps which can meet that need. It's a port from a Windows version (WinJPEG), but a 32-bit program nonetheless. I tried out v1.63 in the past and found it to be a capable enough application, though it's now up to v1.74. The "what's new" file reveals mostly bug fixes since v1.63, so I plonked PMJPEG on the hard drive and got testing. A little background I Recently upgraded my PC from an 8Mb 486DX2-50 to a 16Mb P75. I mention this not to rub it in (honest), but to give a background to my experiences with PMJPEG. I used to run v1.63 on the former, a real dead dog machine for running OS/2 with more than two apps at a time, and PMJPEG never caused any performance hit in itself. I think owners of lower-spec PCs will appreciate the way PMJPEG gets on with its job without gobbling up those valuable system resources--except, of course, if you insist on loading large true-colour JPEGs. Under the hood So, what can you do with PMJPEG? For a start, it makes a very capable image viewer, able to handle JPEG, GIF, PCX, TGA, IFF, TIFF, BMP (OS/2 and Windows) and PPM files at almost any colour depth. One could argue that PSP can recognise more formats, but the comparison is unfair--PSP costs over twice the registration for PMJPEG, and besides, the above formats constitute the vast majority you're likely to find "in the field". With PMJPEG only one image can be opened at once; however, most users would only work on one at a time anyway, so again this isn't a serious drawback. You can view the image full-screen, size it to the window and zoom in and out, and although I'd appreciate a little more flexibility with the latter feature, as an image viewer PMJPEG has practically every feature the average user like me could wish for. So, what if you want to turn that great JPEG picture of Babylon 5 into OS/2 wallpaper? (Well, _I've_ done it before.) Yes, PMJPEG can make that dream reality. We all know the procedure: resize the image, reduce the colour depth and save it as a BMP file. This program does just that, with one strange variation from the norm. With most image processing apps, you reduce the colour depth with a specific menu option. Here, you need to set the depth you want to end up with _before_ you open the image (i.e. set PMJPEG to 256 colours, _then_ open your picture. I wouldn't mind this approach, except the help file didn't make it clear this was the procedure. Other manipulation effects include HSV (hue, saturation and brightness), colour balance, contrast, gamma correction, greyscale and negative, and you can flip, rotate and resize an image. All the regular stuff. If it's _really_ fancy effects you seek, you're in the wrong price bracket but I would consider there to be enough toys here for all but the most gadget-obsessed picture person. Besides, how many folk apply motion blur and solarisation to their wallpaper? Also included are a capable slideshow ability if you should want to use it and a fairly good screen capture feature. The latter can capture all or just the interior of a window, the whole desktop or an area of the desktop. This should be adequate for most casual users' needs. The price of inexpensive software One serious criticism I have of the editing features in PMJPEG is a lack (or apparent lack) of an Undo function. It's usually customary to put this option in the Edit... menu of an application, but select the menu here and... nope, no cigar. Although it's possible to reverse certain operations by doing them again (e.g. negative, flip, rotate), and you can always reload the old image, none are a substitute for a good Undo feature. It doesn't even need to be a multilevel one--just enough to put right that last terrible resize would do me. Maybe it's lurking somewhere and I haven't found it; if that's so, all the more reason to make it more obvious in version 1.75. Another shortcoming is the inability for fine control over the cumbersome colour reduction process described above. For example, when reducing colours in an image there is no option for the resulting image to remain undithered. If you are reducing the number of colours to reduce file sizes in a GIF, this will defeat the purpose as badly dithered GIFS with few colours will probably be as large as non-dithered GIFS with many colours. Other shareware and commercial OS/2 graphics programs offer this option. The program could also benefit from some context sensitive help sprinkled throughout the various dialogs. Often a user will open a dialog such as "Batch Compression..." and with no help button in the dialog, it may not be immediately apparent what the next step to take is. But in the end... If you are after an OS/2 image viewer and processor you could spend a much worse $20 than by registering PMJPEG. Granted, it's not a "show-off-at-parties" app (though the multitasking's pretty impressive), and a bulging button-bar is notably absent. But who cares? PMJPEG is quick, easy on memory, highly capable, reasonably priced, and should suit all but the most demanding wallpaper creator. ***** * PMJPEG v1.74 by (http://www.turnpike.net/metro/kyee/PVS.html) PVS REGISTRATION: US$20 ***** (tim.walker@rapidcom.co.uk) Tim Walker is based near London, and works in electronic media (on-line and CD-ROM) for a major publisher of journals. He uses OS/2 at home, and hopes to have his own home page up before long. *********************************** JView v1.0 and JView Pro v1.0 - by David Seldon Until recently OS/2 users had few good alternatives in the low to medium end market for graphics viewing, conversion and manipulation. PMView was one notable exception to this and more or less the only tool that satisfied the needs of the more than casual user. At the first of this month though a shareware program previously called JoeView was reborn as two separate applications (JView v1.0 and JView Pro v1.0 by Crunch Products) and changed the face of the OS/2 graphics market. I have had a few weeks to play with the release versions of both JView v1.0 and JView Pro v1.0. Mainly this review focuses on JView Pro since it is a superset of the standard JView (it contains all JView's functionality plus some additional abilities including paint features--yes I said *paint features*!). Where there are differences in the two I've attempted to point them out. Installation JView Pro is still a relatively small program. It comes on one floppy disk which contains the base program executables, a few add-ons for the paint and image manipulation features, and a command line installation utility. Installing is a text mode operation and will ask you whether you would like your config.sys modified (the install program also explains that this is not necessary, just convenient). After installing, assuming you did not change your config.sys, you will be able to run JView from the program object in the JView Graphics folder which was added to your desktop without rebooting. The first time you run JView you will see a reminder that all menus are accessed by clicking the right button on your mouse--there are no file menus or button bars across the top of the window in JView. This gives you a little more room if you are working with large images and if you prefer, you can also turn the title bar off for maximum viewing area. Features JView (both versions) is, first and foremost, an image display and manipulation program. While you might think that this limits how much there is to say about such a program, this is not the case. JView is one of the most powerful and capable low or medium-end graphics packages I have ever seen for on any platform. Included are all the standard abilities: displaying or saving files as GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PBM, PCX, PNG, Sun Raster, Targa and X-11 (with sub-options for most formats); a slideshow feature; printing of pictures; making icons for your pictures; cropping, resizing, rotating and flipping images; and some zooming capabilities. On top of this, JView Pro adds many "extras", such as image transformations, advanced color manipulation and reduction, and screen capture, similar to features found in less expensive products such as PMView. But JView Pro goes much further than any other low or medium scale competitor in the OS/2 market. Its major strength is, of course, its painting and drawing abilities. Bit by Bit Crunch Products has really thrown the kitchen sink into v1.0 of JView Pro as far as painting features go. While some options are only available when working on 24 bit color images, it is a simple matter to convert any image (even a grayscale) to 24bit (by clicking Colors->Make 24 Bit; this does not change the image quality). Opening the Paint Kit displays two tool bars, one for drawing tools and one for color tools, and a Paint Kit dialog. This dialog is a little annoying since it takes up almost half the screen when running in 640x480 resolution but it does not remain on top of other windows and can be hidden. In this dialog, the user can customize any of the drawing or color tools. For drawing tools there are: AirBrush; Pencil; FloodFill; Clone; Chalk; Rectangles, Ellipses and Freehand (filled or unfilled, for selecting areas or drawing); and a Stamp tool (a quick-clone) and Magic Wand (for selection). For color tools: Adjust Color; Black & White Conversion; Blur & Sharpen; Color; Emboss; Erase; Gradient; Grayscale Conversion; Replace Color; Use Pattern; and Shadow. All the tools are *extremely* configurable. The color tools are used in conjunction with the drawing tools; for example, using the emboss tool with the text tool will print embossed (or engraved!) text on your picture. This makes the Paint Kit in JView Pro extremely powerful. In short, JView Pro gives users most of the power and abilities of some more higher end products. Readers should note that while the Paint Kit (including the Magic Wand) is not included with the base JView product, a Magic Wand selection tool is available in both versions in the Selection menu. The Down Side Don't get the impression that there is no room for improvement though. A built in selection mask for common file types would be nice in the File->Open dialog. While you can specify the file mask, and include multiple masks (*.gif; *.jpg; etc.) in an options notebook, this should be done automatically. The File->Save feature is also a little obtuse. There is no "direct" save option; the user must view a "Save As" dialog and click "OK" every time he or she wants to save an image, even if it has just been modified slightly. And some of the windows in the File->Save dialog are somewhat cramped and difficult to use. Also, the drawing tools could be improved beyond their "very useful" status to "excellent" by the addition of at least a limited Anti-Aliasing capability. As it is, circles, text and other non-square objects drawn to a picture will have fairly bad "jaggies". The program occasionally crashed on the test machine but this may have been due to flaky video drivers and was not overly common. Also, the interface sometimes seemed unintuitive. For example, it is impossible to save an image while the Paint Kit is open. Other than this, the only problem I had with JView Pro (and JView) was its prehistoric graphics. The default image, program icon and the buttons on the tool bars look like they were drawn by my five year old nephew. You would think that a program meant for graphics manipulation and titled "Pro" would attempt to put a better face on things. Of course, this is just cosmetics. Conclusions Both JView Pro and the base JView are available right now from BMT Micro and will also be available from Indelible Blue by June first. If you do not need the drawing features of JView Pro, you may find that the base version (JView), with a substantially lower price (only US$39), is a much better option for you. If you want to do image retouching and painting but feel the power of a package like ColorWorks is overkill, JView Pro may be the perfect solution. ***** * JView v1.0 and JView Pro v1.0 by (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/jview/) Crunch Products MSRP: US$39 (JView); US$99 (JView Pro) ***** David Seldon is a part time language teacher and part time student. When he's not travelling or playing games he enjoys surfing and skiing. *********************************** _____________________________________________________________________ Visit Indelible Blue's Web Page* - (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue is a mail order reseller specializing in state-of-the-art OS/2 software and hardware solutions for corporations and individuals. Corporate volume discounts available. _____________________________________________________________________ Miscellaneous Reviews_ ***** We've got another grab bag of reviews for you this month--everything from desktop enhancement software (DragText) to Japanese Warp. And in between we have a look at a few programs that will improve your 'net surfing--Surf'nRexx and IBM's Secure WebExplorer. ***** Reviews: * DragText v1.2 - Martin S. Hanoian * OS/2 Warp 3.0J - Abe & Chieko Waranowitz * IBM's Secure WebExplorer v1.1 - Larry Dreher and Dan Knight * Surf'nRexx v1.1 - Dirk Terrell *********************************** DragText v1.2 - by Martin S. Hanoian DragText (DT) is one of a small, but growing number of truly useful OS/2 utilities. DT's author, Rich Walsh of Pond Street Computing, has been hard at work extending the object-oriented capabilities of the Desktop. His first release of DT allowed drag-and-drop text (hence DT's name) and drag-and-drop file name entering. The latest edition adds drag-and-drop file creation, contents listing, URL creation and more. DT automatically changes the mouse pointer to show exactly what is about to happen when an object is being dragged, so you won't get confused and if the action is not what you've intended, you can press the "Esc" key and the operation will be cancelled. (DT does not interfere with normal moving, copying, dragging or dropping operations which are supervised by an individual application or by the WPS.) Some of DT's features with their corresponding icons and pointers are: *Automatic file creation* Lets say I just received an e-mail message, but all the good information was in just one paragraph. Before DT, I would highlight the paragraph, copy it to the clipboard, open a text editor, paste the contents into the editor and then go through the "save as" dialog, thinking up a good name and location for this new file. With DT, all I have to do is highlight the text and drop it on the Desktop! DT automatically creates a file _right there_ and names it based on the beginning of the text, making it easy to tell what it contains later on. Or, the dragged text can be dropped within any open folder or on any folder's icon (open or closed) to have the file created within that folder, instead of on the desktop. There are also flexible naming options, allowing your choice of the number of lines in the title and number of characters in each line. These files can display DT's "Text" icon or an icon of your own choosing and always open in your default text editor when double-clicked. DT files insert their contents when they are dropped into an entryfield or editor. This feature makes it easy to repeatedly enter bits of information. For example, I was in the process of selecting a new Internet provider, e-mail client and dialer, so I had DT create individual files with my modem initialization string, news servers, mail servers, phone numbers and the like, simply by highlighting, dragging and dropping. Any time I needed to enter any of these items, I just dragged the respective DT file to the corresponding entryfield. *Automatic WebExplorer URL creation* If I see a web address in someone's newsgroup post and want to keep it, with DT all I need to do is highlight it and drop it on the Desktop or even into a WWW bookmarks folder. DT automatically creates and names a URL object at the drop point. No more going to the templates folder or "Create another" for a blank URL object and no more transcription errors. Even if the http:// is missing, DT is smart enough to add it back in. Or, if your WebExplorer is running, you can just drop the address (complete or partial) right in to switch to it! *Path or contents* With DT, dropping a file or folder onto an entry field or editor enters the object's full path (no more typos or incorrect guesses at the path). This is great for all those dialogs that ask, "Where do you want this program installed?" or, "Enter the path to your editor." I use this feature when I assign associations via an associations editor. Instead of typing the path to the program I want to associate all my *.xyz files with, I just drop that program's icon into the entryfield and I'm done. It's also useful for modifying config.sys PATH, SET and DEVICE statements. For entryfields, there is even a toggle (and, of course, a different pointer icon) for overwriting the contents of the entryfield, instead of just adding to what's already there. To enter the contents of a file instead of its path, you can hold the "Alt" key while dropping. (Start dragging without it pressed, adding the "Alt" key after the drag operation has begun.) Don't worry, the icons tell you which result you'll end up with. Some editors have their own support for importing files via drag and drop but DT adds this capability to those that don't, without interfering with those that do. DT does not cause a new editor window to open; the dropped file's contents are simply inserted at the cursor point in the current document. Dropping a DT object (a file created with DT) into an editor automatically enters its contents, without the need for holding the "Alt" key. (Holding the "Alt" key while dropping a DT file enters its full path.) Dropped URLs (again, no "Alt" key) enter the web path to the site they contain, so you can easily include the web address in an e-mail message or other document. Confused by all these possibilities? Don't be--just watch the icons until it becomes second nature. *Make my editor(s) more like my word processor* DT makes it easy to copy or move text within an editor window too. Just highlight the text and drag it to the new location. Copying is the default action, holding the "Shift" key results in moving the text. Most word processors do this already, but DT adds this to editors which don't. But, that's not all! DT lets you drag text, not just inside _one_ window, but also _between_ windows. You can even drag between unrelated editors, entryfields, MLEs, settings notebooks and dialog boxes. No need to use the clipboard--just drag and drop. *Behind the scenes* When text has been highlighted and is about to be moved or copied to its new location, the mouse does not have to be over the highlighted area to drag it, nor does the highlighted area even need to be visible. This allows DT to be used when both the source and target locations of a document cannot be viewed together in the same screen. Just highlight the text you want to move or copy (but don't start dragging it yet), scroll the window to expose the target area, hold mouse button two down and drag from _anywhere_ within the window, position the I-beam portion of the pointer at the desired drop location and then release. This feature also functions when the source and the target areas are in different windows. *What did I just do?* DT also has an option which allows dropped text or filenames to remain highlighted. This feature is useful for repeated drops of the same text, or for identification of an inadvertently dropped item. *Static cling* Have you ever been faced with a dialog message you need to record for tech support? No more pen and paper with DT. Just start dragging from the face of the popup and drop the text onto the desktop or even directly into an e-mail. This also works for other static text, such as that on the face of a settings notebook or other dialogs. *Dir made easy* Have you ever wanted to record the contents of a folder? You can use a command line and save the results to a file, but DT has a different approach for command line phobics: drop the folder into an editor while holding down the "Alt" key and the information will be entered. Options exist for what headings and details will be included. *Exceptions to the rule* Not every application will allow DT to function with it. At the very least, the application must be an OS/2 PM application--Windows programs don't qualify. Walsh is working on adding support for command line windows and establishing a link with the clipboard, but these two features are not yet ready. There are only a few known OS/2 programs (three, at this time) which DT does not interact well with. These applications have already been entered in a very flexible "Disable list" in DT's settings notebook, so DT knows to suspend some or all of its actions when they are involved. Also, depending on how they are programmed, certain applications' windows are invisible to DT, so no DT functions are possible. Walsh is working on a way around this as well, so there will be fewer windows in this category in the future. *Settings, help and installation* DT has a very complete settings notebook which allows all its options to be modified to suit your desires. Besides having settings for all the options, a disable list and a status list, there is even a practice page for trying out most of DT's functions as they relate to the different possible types of PM windows. The help is very thorough and informative, describing some of the functionality of OS/2 as well as everything you would ever want to know about DT. Installation is smooth and straightforward, with ample help concerning the install options. If needed, an uninstall utility is also provided. For DT to install and work, OS/2 Warp must be running. To have DT change the icons during different operations, FixPak 8 or higher must be installed. (Most versions of Warp come only with FixPak 5 installed.) If DT is used with a stock Warp installation, all the various DT functions will still be available, but the icons will not change. *Not the first, just the best* DT is not the first or the only enabler of drag and drop text. Word processors have been doing it for years, but only within their own windows. OS/2's EPM editor and the current Mac OS allow highlighted text to be dropped on the desktop to create a file, but the name does not describe the contents. There are also a few entryfields that I have come across which allow a filename to be entered by dropping in a file, but they are rare. These are the only places where I've seen even a fraction of DT-like features in use. If you want all the functionality of DT, your only option is to get the real thing. *Run, don't walk* DragText is very sophisticated and has many thoughtful options. DragText's basic features (drag and drop text) are free and its extended features (file and URL creation) cost only $15 US ($18 via BMT Micro) and there is a free six week trial period to test the extended features. In short, DT lets Warp do things no other operating system can. OS/2 needs more freethinking, talented programmers like Rich Walsh! ***** * DragText v1.2 by (http://www.usacomputers.net/personal/rlwalsh/) Pond Street Computing REGISTRATION: US$15 ***** (sahag@ibm.net) Martin S. Hanoian is a dentist in private practice in Providence, RI and a long time supporter of OS/2. He and his wife are expecting their first child at the end of June, so he will have little time for hiking, biking, golf and computers this summer. (Except for when he gets his hands on a copy of Merlin, of course.) *********************************** Introducing OS/2 Warp 3.0J! - by Abe & Chieko Waranowitz Before you read any further, take a quick look at (http://www.ibm.co.jp/pspjinfo/warp_connect/) this web site. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to read that web page? With the Japanese versions of OS/2, you can! IBM has created Japanese versions of OS/2 Warp for Windows, Fullpack, Connect and LAN server. If you were impressed with the great features of OS/2, you'll be even more impressed with the flexibility of OS/2 Warp 3.0J (Warp J)! Warp J is simply OS/2 Warp with Japanese extensions. In fact, many of the OS/2 system files are exactly the same. Warp J uses the same utilities, libraries, and system configuration files the US version does, but in Japanese. This allows Warp J to run most OS/2, DOS and Windows software without any modifications. Support for DOS/V, IBM's Japanese version of PC-DOS, and Windows 3.1J is also available, giving you a few more Command Prompt combinations. Warp J provides all this with the help of the Double Byte Character Set, or DBCS, and Japanese TrueType and Adobe fonts. ASCII, our standard in North America, uses a Single Byte Character Set, SBCS, which is fine for the English 26 character alphabet, but written Japanese contains thousands of unique characters. The DBCS solves this problem by providing over 65,000 possible characters. There are a number of different DBCS standards, such as EUC, JIS, S-JIS, etc. See OS/2 Magazine, April 1996, page 48 for more details on DBCS support in OS/2. Japanese is entered by keying Romanized versions of your text. Your keystrokes are then "translated" into the closest Japanese words and characters. With a few more keystrokes, you can easily enter Japanese into almost any OS/2 program that allows font changes. Special Japanese keyboards are also supported. Warp J comes with Japanese versions of the BonusPak applications, and a number of Japanese specific utilities. (Note: Earlier releases of Warp J had English-Only versions of Ultimail. Upgrades are available through the IBM Japan Web/FTP sites.) The Internet Connection package for Warp J will allow you to access Japanese WWW pages, the fj. news groups, send and receive Japanese e-mail, ftp, etc. For those of you without Warp J, here's what the IBM Japan Home page should look like. Native Japanese OS/2 applications are also available (in Japan). Ichitaro, for example, is the Word Perfect of word processors in Japan, and is now 32bit. SimCity Classic was also ported to Warp J. Luckily for us, Warp J doesn't require any special hardware or software. It will run on any OS/2 capable PC. However, the differences in Warp J will require more from your machine than regular OS/2. Fonts, for example, will take up to 60MB on your hard disk, and will take up plenty of system RAM. Don't even think of running it on less than a fast 486 with 16 meg. And, because it was designed for the Japanese market, many of the drivers for American made peripherals are not available. HP, for example, makes Japanese versions of their printers. Printing to an American HP Deskjet caused a number of printing peculiarities. HP/GL and Postscript printers and drivers may solve these problems. Finding Warp J in the US can be difficult though, and often expensive. Your best bet is to actually buy it in Japan. Warp 3.0J CD for Windows was originally marked at 14,200 yen, which is about US$150, just to give you an idea. In short if you need the ability to multitask multilingual software (in Japanese), there's no operating system better than OS/2 Warp J! ***** * OS/2 Warp 3.0J by (http://www.ibm.com/) IBM MSRP: ~US$150 ***** (gromit@carroll.com) Abe Waranowitz is an RF Engineer for AT&T Wireless Services and is an avid OS/2 enthusiast. (gromit@carroll.com) Chieko Waranowitz is currently studying to become an international travel agent and uses OS/2 to surf Japanese sites and play Gal Civ 2. *********************************** IBM Secure WebExplorer v1.1 - by Larry Dreher and Dan Knight What is "Secure" WebExplorer? Secure WebExplorer (SWE) is a separate web browsing product for OS/2 available through IBM or your favorite OS/2 retailer like Indelible Blue. It is essentially the free WebExplorer v1.03 with the addition of features that support secure transactions over the Internet. SWE supports the two most common security protocols on the Internet, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (S-HTTP). The version number 1.1 assigned to this product often leads to confusion when compared to the non-secure WebExplorer. As stated above, it is based on the code of WebExplorer 1.03 so all those annoying 1.03 bugs and shortcomings are present in this browser as well, in spite of the 1.1 version number. The 1.1a version of non-secure WebExplorer that is available on the 'net is based on newer code than SWE. Installation SWE comes in a package with both a diskette and CD. This seems a bit unusual since they both seem to contain the same files. No differences are noted in the documentation. Installation is fairly straightforward. The user just inserts the disk or CD and types "install" from the command line. An install window is displayed allowing you to specify the install directory; the default is your existing TCPIP directory so it might be a good idea to back it up just in case. Installation went smoothly on two stand-alone Warp "Blue Spine" machines. During the install on a Warp Connect networked machine the files normally found in the x:\TCPIP\etc directory (explore.ini, mailcap, extmap, tcpos2.ini, etc.) were copied into the x:\MPTN\etc directory instead. The installation program creates an icon for Secure WebExplorer and Key Management in the "Internet Connection for OS/2" folder. All other icons are left untouched including any preexisting icons for Web Explorer you might have. Using Secure WebExplorer As you might expect, the interface of SWE is almost identical to that of WebExplorer. However, there are two new lock icons on the icon bar and a new item called "security" on the menu bar. The first place to go once you get SWE running is (https://www1.raleigh.ibm.com/tutorial/sslex.htm) https://www1.raleigh.ibm.com/tutorial/sslex.htm. This site allows you to play around in "Coffee Net" and test out the security features of the browser. You can also get there by selecting "WebExplorer Information" from the help pull down menu and following the links related to Secure Web Explorer. Using SSL As mentioned before, SWE supports two different types of security, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (S-HTTP). SSL is the most common form of security used on the 'net and is usually required at sites that ask you to enter credit card information for ordering merchandise. When entering a site that supports SSL, a closed lock icon appears in the lower left hand corner of the browser upon completing the secure link. SWE can also be configured to warn you when you are entering or leaving a secure page (this is the default). You might also note that secure pages start with "https://" instead of the common "http://". Using S-HTTP S-HTTP is a bit more involved than SSL because it requires that your client "prove itself" to the secure server. This requires the use of keys that are created for your client and issued by a trusted authority. To create keys, you can use the key management program that was installed along with SWE or you can download the Key Manager Smart Guide software from (http://www.raleigh.ibm.com/WebExplorer/websmart.htm) http://www.raleigh.ibm.com/WebExplorer/websmart.htm. The Smart Guide is easier to use and walks you through the necessary steps. However, it did encounter a problem when it attempted to e-mail the certificate request. If the Smart Guide fails in sending the e-mail, you can follow the instructions and manually e-mail the certificate request, though. Still, there are a few downsides to using the Smart Guide. The certificate is only valid for a period of one year and the certificate key is only 512 bytes long. The Key Manager software provided with the secure WebExplorer allows you to select the expiration date of the key (you can even set it to never expire) and choose a certificate key of up to 1024 bytes in length for additional security. Once you've created and installed your personal key, you can use sites requiring the S-HTTP protocol. These are likely to be banking sites or those requiring greater security than simple SSL. SWE in the real world. Not surprisingly, SWE works great on IBM's Coffee Net demo site when used from a stand-alone PPP connected machine. But how did it fare in some real world tests? When using SWE on a Warp Connect test machine sitting behind a Netscape Secure Proxy Server, the results are not encouraging. Linking to the IBM Secure WebExplorer SSL Coffee Net produced the message: "Proxy denies fulfilling the request". The same message occurs at other secure sites. Several other users on-site are able to access the same pages with Netscape 1.2, 2.0 and other secure compliant browsers without any problems. A problem has been opened with IBM regarding this error (IBM PRB #6X,580246) but at this time it is still unresolved. In testing stand-alone machines directly connected via the PPP dialer, the results are much better. Most simple sites that require SSL work well. Be warned though, there are some sites that look at the identifier of your browser and check for Netscape. If they don't see Netscape they assume your browser couldn't possibly support secure transactions and they won't allow you to proceed. If you find a site that doesn't work, you should contact the Web Administrator there to make sure the site isn't just checking for the Netscape ID. Some problems like checking for browser name are easy for a web master to fix while others are more difficult. Attempting to access the secure user area at (http://www.sfnb.com) Security First Network Bank causes SWE to abend with a SYS3175. After working with the bank and IBM's tech support, it was determined that the site was incompatible because it uses a feature called "cookies" that isn't yet supported in SWE. IBM stated that they were aware of the requirement to support cookies but they had not yet committed to a date for implementation in WebExplorer. It should be noted that this is not only really related to security, but to _any_ web site and can cause problems for _any_ version of WebExplorer. Conclusions If you have a specific site you would like to use that requires security you may want to give SWE a try. If you are not behind a proxy server, most secure sites should work fine. The documentation that comes with the product is good and IBM's web site provides more in depth details if they are desired. Don't look for anything fancy after you shell out your $39 for the product though. Newer versions of non-secure WebExplorer can be found for free on the web and they'll be more likely to support cool stuff like Java than SWE will. With all the different versions of WebExplorer running around, things are getting a little difficult to keep straight. Maybe it's too much to ask, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a base version of WebExplorer and extensions like Java or Security could be added simply by installing optional DLL's? As a final note, the authors would like to thank Jack Arnold from IBM WebExplorer support. Jack went the extra mile to help out with the problems that we encountered. Thanks Jack! ***** *Test Machines: Tri-Star 60Mhz Pentium PCI with 16MB memory - Warp Blue ARES 486/66 EISA/VESA 16MB memory - Warp Blue Dell 486/66ME EISA/VESA 64MB memory - Warp Connect ***** * IBM Secure WebExplorer v1.1 by (http://www.raleigh.ibm.com/wxs/wxsover.html) IBM MSRP: US$39 ***** (ldreher @execpc.com) Larry Dreher is a Lead Systems Analyst at MGIC Investment in Milwaukee Wisconsin. Larry's been using OS/2 and developing applications since the OS/2 1.1 days. (dknight@execpc.com) Dan Knight is a Project Manager in MGIC's Strategic Technologies department. Dan helped design the user interface to MGIC's first mission critical OS/2 application. *********************************** Surf'nRexx v1.1 - by Dr. Dirk Terrell I started using OS/2 when version 2.0 was released in the spring of 1992. OS/2 offered superior stability and multitasking, which were requirements for the work I was doing. As I learned more about OS/2, the depth of its power became more and more apparent. One of the powerful tools that OS/2 puts in your hands is REXX, the BASIC-like programming language built into the operating system. REXX is probably the most underrated part of OS/2. It is very easy to learn, and yet very powerful. Of course, like any programming language, it has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that its syntax is clean and simple, making for very readable programs. An example of this is the fact that all variables in REXX are strings. There are no variable type declarations (i.e., integer, real, etc.) to worry about. Another advantage is its ability to process text files in complex ways with very little programming. A disadvantage of REXX is that it is an interpreted language rather than a compiled one, making it much slower for intensive calculations. But, as a testament to the foresight of its designers, REXX can be extended very easily when you need to do something that its built-in functions can't handle or something that involves extensive calculations. Surf'nRexx v1.1 from InnoVal Systems Solutions, Inc. is a set of tools that gives you the ability to write powerful Internet utilities with REXX. The heart of the package is a dynamic link library (DLL) that has several functions, such as copying a file from an FTP or Web site, that you can call from within your REXX program. If you are even remotely familiar with typical Internet tasks, such as getting a file by FTP, you will know what most of these functions do without even reading the manual. For example, RxIpFtpGet() will get a specified file from an FTP server that you have logged into using RxIpConnect(). For those seeking more low-level functions, Surf'nRexx does not disappoint, giving you the ability to create and access socket connections, although the available features are not quite as extensive as the freely available rxSock library from IBM. Surf'nRexx comes with several example REXX programs that demonstrate the kinds of things that can be done with the library. Most of the time, programming tools come with silly demo code that illustrates how to use the tools, but isn't itself very useful. The Surf'nRexx example programs, on the other hand, are likely to stay on your hard disk and be used frequently. The following is a list of the programs that come with Surf'nRexx: FTPCOPY retrieves a file from an FTP site. FTPSEND sends a file to an FTP site. FTPNEW sends updated files to an FTP site. The program keeps track of files (in a list you specify) that have been modified since the last time the program was run. It then uploads the modified files to the FTP server. This tool is ideal for people who edit HTML files for a web site on their local machine, but have the web server running on a remote machine. GETMAIL connects to a POP mail server running on a remote machine and downloads any messages waiting to be read. MAILNEW retrieves the number of available messages from a POP mail server. NEWSPOST posts a message to one or more Usenet newsgroups. REUTERS is a very handy utility that retrieves news articles from the Reuters area on Yahoo. It retrieves articles (based on criteria you specify in a configuration file), and builds an HTML file which can, of course, be viewed with your favorite Web browser. SENDNOTE sends an e-mail message to one or more people. This tool is especially useful for people who use mailing lists. WEBCOPY retrieves a file from a Web site. For those times when you know when and where a file is, but are too impatient to wait for Web Explorer to start up, this is the tool you need. A very nice feature of this program is a switch that tells the program to download not only an HTML file, but the graphics that are referenced in it as well. With a little modification (i.e., combining it with the WEBCRAWL and WEBNEW programs below), I can imagine this program turning into a full-fledged Web site mirroring program. WEBNEW checks to see if a Web page has changed since the program was last run. The program generates an HTML file listing the status (new or old) of the Web page. WEBCRAWL implements a web crawler, a program that starts at a given Web page and then follows the links that it contains to a specified depth or until a specified number of pages have been searched. (If it starts on page A and follows a link therein to page B, then follows a link on page B to page C, the search would be three levels deep.) WEBINFO takes a list of pages and makes sure that they can be accessed. It also reports e-mail addresses on the pages as well as whether or not they contain graphics. HOBBNEW keeps an eye on the incoming directory of Hobbes, and retrieves the descriptions of files that have been uploaded since the program was last run. Version 1.1 is mostly a minor bug fix upgrade from v1.0. A few new features have been added, notably HOBBNEW and the documentation has been updated, but overall the new version is the same as the earlier release. Installation is still just a matter of unzipping and moving the surfrexx.dll to a directory in your LIBPATH statement. Surf'nRexx comes with tools that easily make it worth the US$39 asking price. It is true that you can find similar REXX libraries for free (namely the RxFTP and RxSock libraries from IBM), but the Surf'nRexx library has some capabilities not found in other libraries, and it comes with some very instructive and useful sample programs that can be easily modified to fit your specific needs. If you need to automate Internet tasks, REXX with Surf'nRexx is hard to beat. ***** * Surf'nRexx v1.1 by (http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) InnoVal Systems Solutions, Inc. MSRP: US$39 ***** (http://www.gnv.com/HTMLWizard/) Dr. Dirk Terrell is an astronomer at the University of Florida specializing in interacting binary stars. His hobbies include cave diving, martial arts, painting and writing OS/2 software such as HTML Wizard. *********************************** _____________________________________________________________________ Visit Indelible Blue's Web Page* - (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue is a mail order reseller specializing in state-of-the-art OS/2 software and hardware solutions for corporations and individuals. Corporate volume discounts available. _____________________________________________________________________ Reviews: Games This month we had a chance to speak with Jim Thomas of SoftPort, the company responsible for porting many of Maxis' simulation games to the OS/2 platform. Jim shared a few of his thoughts on OS/2 as a gaming platform in the article below entitled, "Games, Lies and OS/2". Speaking of Maxis, we also had a look at their _second_ attempt at a native OS/2 version of their popular Sim games to see if they got it right. Ethan Hall Beyer will set the record straight once and for all whether a city can be run on OS/2. And finally this month, we take a look at the _first_ attempt by a group of ex-IBMers to teach your children how to read. Our reviewer, Larry Bouthillier, takes a look at The Alphabet Zoo. ***** Reviews: * Games, Lies and OS/2 - Jim Thomas * SimCity 2000 for OS/2 - Ethan Hall Beyer * The Alphabet Zoo - Larry Bouthillier *********************************** Games, Lies, and OS/2 - by Jim Thomas Games... OS/2 is a wonderful platform for developing games and multimedia applications, despite some (rather blatant) limitations in the design and implementation of the multimedia and direct to video (DIVE) interfaces. Once overcome, these problems fade away and a fairly solid platform for games emerges. The history of games on OS/2 is interesting... First came the standard games like solitaire (klondike) and chess. Then came the third party games. SimCity Classic was the first of these, but had horrible performance problems because it used the OS/2 GPI (DIVE construction had not started yet). Galactic Civilizations, which used the standard OS/2 multimedia interface, got hit for its quirky interface and memory problems. DOOM for OS/2 was also being worked on during this period, and was the first game that really stressed the components of OS/2. It soon became clear that the multimedia subsystem of OS/2 had some major problems and that all of these problems would have to be addressed and either fixed or worked around if DOOM/2 was ever going to get released by IBM. Since then, more (and better) games have appeared such as Galactic Civilizations 2 from Stardock and SimCity 2000, SimTown, and Widget Workshop from MAXIS. These games are more performance oriented, and have their own direct screen and sound mixing interfaces. And there are more games in the works, both new development and ports (are there any golfers out there?). Lies and OS/2... First, they said games were the consumer focus... Now, the rumors are flying about the future of games on OS/2. IBM's recent announcements have put into question the future of OS/2 as a gaming platform. It is now very clear that if there is to be a future for games on OS/2, it will have to be resurrected by the game consumers, and the developers that believe in OS/2. So have fun and support games on OS/2! ***** (jimt@softport.com) Jim Thomas is President of SoftPort (formerly WinWare Corporation), which ports games and multimedia applications from/to most platforms and set top boxes. SoftPort ported the MAXIS games mentioned above to OS/2. Jim also ported DOOM and DOOMII. *********************************** SimCity 2000 for OS/2 - by Ethan Hall Beyer A perennial DOS favourite tests OS/2 waters Since 1993, Maxis' SimCity 2000 city simulation software has earned great praise from reviewers, and developed a loyal following among its devotees. Building upon the success of the original SimCity (now referred to as SimCity Classic), the appeal of SimCity 2000 is certainly not bound by what operating system the game player happens to use. Maxis has recognized this and, after releasing DOS, Windows, and Mac versions of SimCity 2000, now offers a version for OS/2 Warp users as well. What exactly is SimCity? For those of you unfamiliar with the "Simulator" series or games here, briefly, is what they are. In each Sim game Maxis has produced, the player assumes a somewhat divine control of a specific simulation environment (names such as SimCity, SimAnt, SimFarm are surely suggestive) and attempts to direct it so that everything goes well, the environment flourishes and, overall, everyone is happy. In SimCity 2000, you start off with unmarred landscape and attempt to build it into a prosperous city. You control most aspects of real city planning, such as water, road and power grid layout, crime, pollution, greenspace management, your citizens' quality of life, natural disasters, etc. Although you are given the tools necessary to monitor all these factors, it takes a surprising amount of skill to bring it all together. But trying is all the fun, and there isn't really any "wrong" way to play the game; with enough practice, the "perfect" city can be created. SimCity 2000 for OS/2? Yes, there *is* a SimCity 2000 version for Warp! If you didn't know, you should blame Maxis. The release, while eagerly anticipated, was very underwhelming. It seems that most of the Internet found out the product was available only after one usenet reader had called Maxis for an update, and was told the product was available, and posted this information on the Internet. But the product is indeed out, and SimCity 2000 for OS/2 is every bit as entertaining as its DOS and Windows counterparts. It is available from Maxis directly for US$29.95 (plus shipping and handling) or only $9.95 if you're upgrading from the DOS version; and it's also available from OS/2 friendly retailers and mail order companies. The program itself ships on three 1.44" diskettes (no CDROM version is available for OS/2) and includes an "OS/2 Warp Quick-Start Guide" but otherwise is identical to the packages available for other platforms. This OS/2 specific add-in covers the basics of installation, system requirements (see below) and some troubleshooting. It is sufficient for most conditions, but I think it could have been made more complete. The manual is well done and comprehensive, and includes a quick tutorial to get you going right away. System requirements and installation SimCity 2000 for OS/2 requires Warp. It claims to require a 486 66MHz or higher with 8 MB or RAM, but it performs quite healthily on my 33 MHz processor. It also requires a 256 colour video resolution, and MMPM/2 running with a 16bit soundcard. Approximate hard drive space required is 8 megs, and city files take more. The installation, while straightforward, could be better. Maxis makes use of the standard IBM installation program (as included with many IBM products) which is functional, but not the most intuitive. A SimCity program object and help object (the on-line help is in INF format) are created, and they can be run right away, with no need to reboot! Those disappointed with the DUX port of SimCity Classic, and anxious about the performance of SimCity 2000 for OS/2, need not worry. The two programs are worlds apart. While the classic version was slow and inept, SimCity 2000 is surprisingly snappy--you don't notice slowdowns and, unlike the classic version, not once has it hung on me. On startup, you can choose to play one of the supplied scenarios, or work on an existing or new city of your own design. From there, you go right into city editing mode, which is essentially identical to all other versions of SimCity 2000. From then on, you have fun and get to work on building your city. Problems? Yes, we've got problems You weren't expecting there not to problems, were you? Neither was I. One of the most significant problems some people may experience, is video support. SimCity 2000 for OS/2 uses DIVE technology and, if your video device doesn't support it, you're out of luck. Though most cards shouldn't have any problem, you should check with other OS/2 users if you want to be sure. (For example, I obtained my copy from someone whose Thinkpad video didn't work properly with the program). Further, there are rumours of memory leaks in the program; in fact, the programmers did indicate that they'd found one, but some players still report strange behaviour. Many others, including myself, find nothing abnormal. (Editor's note: Maxis has released an update/patch to SimCity 2000 for OS/2 which can be found on their (ftp://ftp.maxis.com/pub/maxis/simcity2000/2kos2fix.zip) ftp site.) There are a few minor glitches as well. A major disappointment to me is its 8.3 filename limitation. It would have been nice to see long filename support in this native OS/2 product. SimCity 2000 for OS/2 also aggressively uses different mouse pointers (to indicate different activities), and there are conflicts with other programs that change the pointer, such as the PopWatch program I use. Other users have reported similar problems when using a non-default mouse pointer collection, though I could not demonstrate that here. And I saw a few small nits here and there, such as failure to display the selected grid when applying zones as illustrated in the manual. Should I get it? If you know you like this sort of game, definitely. SimCity 2000 for OS/2 is a solid, well done version for Warp, of a product that is widely viewed as one of the better computer games available. Maxis is working on OS/2 versions of more of its products and has already released some such as SimTown and Widget Workshop. As far as OS/2 support goes, SimCity 2000 is an excellent start. ***** * SimCity 2000 for OS/2 by (http://www.maxis.com/) Maxis MSRP: US$29.95 ***** (eahallbe@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca) Ethan A. Hall-Beyer is a second year Math/Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo, currently on work term at IBM Canada. *********************************** The Alphabet Zoo - by Larry Bouthillier Since we all know that every child loves animals, and naturally, every child that's used OS/2 loves OS/2, it's only natural that one of the first commercial children's software titles for OS/2 is The Alphabet Zoo, by Second Story Productions or, as they prefer, 2SP. The Alphabet Zoo is a CD-ROM collection of multimedia programs that offer learning and entertainment, making use of audio narration, video segments, text, and graphics in an effective presentation. I had help with this review from an expert on children, my three year old son Alex. One thing that was clear right away is that he likes it. While some games offer more flash and complexity than The Alphabet Zoo, there's nothing quite like the glee in his eyes when he hears the game applaud him for getting a correct answer! First Impressions The Alphabet Zoo comes in a colorful package, which includes the CD-ROM, a brief printed installation guide for the included OS/2 and Windows 3.1 versions, and an animal coloring book for those times when Alex just can't get enough of the animals, but Daddy needs to use the computer for a while. While the program is attractive and graphically well-designed, it's clear that great attention was paid to the educational aspects of the game; with educational value given a higher priority than glitzy "eye candy". The Alphabet Zoo consists of five basic activities that entertain, teach, and give children the opportunity to use what they have learned about the alphabet. First are the three alphabet games; Alphabet Zoo, First Letter, and Concentration. Alphabet Zoo Launching AZ from its program object brings up a colorful full-screen graphical menu of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, hiding the desktop behind a black border. A nice configuration touch, of which there are many in this package, is that these can be arranged alphabetically or by QWERTY keyboard layout; the child can select letters either by mouse or by keyboard. Selecting a letter displays a page which includes a photograph of an animal whose name begins with that letter, the upper and lowercase version of the letter selected, and a movie window that usually plays a short video clip of the animal in action. A calm, low-key narration clearly pronounces the letter, the animal name, and gives a one line comment about the animal. From here, the child can browse through other letters in succession or go back to the alphabet menu display to choose another letter. While my son loves the pictures, the color, and the narration, I must confess to learning a little bit myself... for example, can _you_ think of an animal whose name begins with "X"? While the quality of the photographs provided is often stunning, the quality of the movies is often disappointing. The documentation notes that the movies are home videos taken at various zoos and animal parks around the US. In many scenes, the image consists of a motion picture of a sleeping or otherwise inactive animal. In some segments, the motion of the camera operator's unsteadiness is the only motion in the movie. When asked, a 2SP representative noted that the cost of licensing National Geographic video was prohibitive for the version 1.0 release. While future plans include changes to the movies, more of their attention is focused on further developing elements that have a greater direct educational value, like the audio descriptions of the animals. First Letter First Letter, like the remaining modules, runs in a PM window. This highly configurable game offers the child a chance to apply what he's learned in Alphabet Zoo. The game displays a letter and offers three animal photographs to choose from (but can also be set to display one animal and offer three letters to choose from). The game verbally asks the child "which animal starts with an 'X'?" and the child uses the mouse to choose the animal which begins with the letter pictured. After a choice, the narrator pronounces the letter name and animal name. In what's been a source of never-ending delight to my son, the game rewards a correct choice with the sound of applause. The game runs for five or ten letters, user selectable. The user can even choose which five or ten letters are used in the game or to use random letters. At the end of the game, a PM dialog displays a score card with a list showing the letters used and the number of attempts made to find the correct answer for each. Concentration This is an adaptation of the classic card-matching memory game. It also offers a great deal of configuration options, including selecting the number of cards displayed, which letters are used, the appearance of the card backs, and more. The game can be set to provide a variety of matching tasks, including matching upper case letters to lower case letters, and various combinations of upper and lower case letters to the animals whose names start with those letters. As in First Letter, the game pronounces the letters and animals as they are chosen, and gently tells the child when a choice is, "not a match." Again, the user can choose which letters are used in the game, making it easy for parents to have the game focus on letters that the child may not know as well. Movie Time Movie Time provides a way to directly view the over 100 movies that are included on the Alphabet Zoo CD. Here again, a colorful array of letters acts as a menu, with the individual movie titles available for the chosen letter appearing as icons in a scrolling window, along with their sometimes cryptic "8.3" character filenames. The movies, which vary from good to very poor in quality, play at 160x120 resolution. The interface is simple and attractive, although very young children may not understand the scroll bars, and will not be able to read the movie titles available. Silly Stories Silly Stories is well... a silly game for older children. The game provides a number of story templates, written with missing words throughout. The game prompts kids for words that fit a category--an object, a liquid, a name, a place, etc. In many cases, the choices include pictures as well as words. Of course, the kids are choosing words in the absence of any context. The game plugs the words into the story template, and displays the result. Silly? Usually! Funny? Sometimes! Sometimes the resulting stories make more sense than others, and sometimes they make no sense at all. As is customary in The Alphabet Zoo games, this game is extremely configurable. Kids can save complete stories to disk, edit the story templates, and control the font size and graphic size of the stories displayed. This program has the most "grown-up" user interface of the group. Although the choices and options are clearly spelled out by dialogs as you go, it uses standard PM File Selection dialogs for Open and Save operations, and it uses a conventional File menu for New Story, Open Story, etc. Sometimes the game will prompt the user for a lot of words and pictures--numbering in the teens. A counter on the screen displays which word or picture number you're selecting, but a display showing how many there are in total would also be helpful. Documentation Second Story Productions has included documentation in the form of a Manual.WRI file, and a manual in the form of a standard OS/2 .INF file. The manual is an excellent example of on-line documentation, including screen shots, graphics and logical navigation. The game settings are clearly explained, as are techniques parents might consider when using AZ as a teaching tool. Installation and Performance AZ's installation program offers two alternatives: running most files directly from the CD-ROM, which conserves hard disk space at the expense of performance; or installing all the files to hard disk, which takes a large amount of disk space, but runs faster. On my 486/66 16MB RAM test system, I used the leaner install, which installed about 5MB to my hard disk. With my 4x IDE CD-ROM, AZ ran acceptably well, drawing files from the CD-ROM as needed. The delay from mouse-click to audio or video response was noticeable, but not excessive. I did not have drive space to test the full installation, but I'd say if you have the space, that's the better alternative. If not, you're likely to still be satisfied. The installation program is a source of problems for users who have installed IBM's FixPak #17 for Warp. In my case, the install routine prompted me for a path to which to install the game, and then ignored my choice and installed to the root of the C: drive. It also failed to set the graphics paths correctly in the Silly Stories module. Other FixPak users have reported installation problems as well. 2SP acknowledges the problem, which is apparently related to the REXX runtime libraries updated in FP17. For now, 2SP officially does not support Warp with FixPaks, although I found them responsive and helpful when I had questions about my installation. Despite the install glitch, I've found no other problems with running the program under Warp with FixPak #17. Conclusions The Alphabet Zoo shows a great deal of careful design in many areas, and shows some "Version 1.0" characteristics in others. Some things made an immediate impression when I first ran the program. The quality of the graphic design is excellent and the program's attention to detail and configurability is impressive. However, I'd like to see improved movies, and an integrated full-screen interface for the whole program, like The Alphabet Zoo module, which prevents kids from accidentally removing focus from, or hiding, the program window. It would also allow younger kids to go from one game to the next without having to deal with the Workplace Shell. The design goal of the program is clearly education--fun education, but education nonetheless. Those looking for a "Disneyesque" game full of animated doo-dads and musical accompaniment will not be interested in The Alphabet Zoo. But those who are looking for a more practical, but colorful and fun children's product will be pleased by the direction AZ's authors have taken. I consider it $30 well spent (a special introductory promotion). This is 2SP's first commercial product, although 2SP's programmers are not new to OS/2 and OS/2 programming; everyone who worked on The Alphabet Zoo is a veteran of IBM's Boca Raton development site and the Windows 3.1 version on the CD is a port of the OS/2 version, not vice-versa. 2SP is currently working on enhancements to AZ, as well as a Windows 95 port of the program, and they hint at more titles to come in the future, including another edutainment title called US Geography. ***** * The Alphabet Zoo by (mike2sp@nconnect.net) 2nd Story Productions MSRP: US$45 ***** (larryb@argo.net) Larry Bouthillier is the father of a three-year-old expert on animals and letters. His son Alex occasionally lets him use the computer. *********************************** Super Shareware Support - by Bob Smith When things don't go right with your software, it is something you want dealt with *now*. And yet, sometimes it is almost impossible to get support for your favorite program, especially if it is shareware. Sometimes you send e-mail, which doesn't get answered; sometimes the answer doesn't reflect the problem; and sometimes you are stuck without any idea of where to send a yell for help. One shareware author that hasn't left his users out in left field for support is Nick Knight, developer of MR/2 Internet Cruiser Edition (MR/2 ICE). Knight has established a (mr2ice.list@secant.com) mailing list that currently has about 300 members, where problems, suggestions, gripes and a lot of education generate about 100 messages a day across the 'net. "My goal was to reduce the amount of time I personally spent supporting the product through one-on-one responses," Knight told e-Zine! recently. "With a mailing list, answering one user's question ends up getting read by everyone on the list." Knight also gets a lot of help in providing support. "I hoped that subscribers would also pitch in and share their knowledge, and they have," Knight explained. "It's worked out great!" Several members of the mailing list agree with Knight. (judithr@primnenet.com) Judith Russell, a history teacher with three years exposure to computers told e-Zine! how good she thinks the support is. "The support is fantastic. He [Knight] is clear about what he considers important now and what can wait a while. He makes no promises he doesn't mean to keep. Earlier, he said MIME and uudecode would have to wait and they did. But others posted some work-arounds. When someone sent me a file in binhex, a post meant for someone else with a similar problem showed me how to deal with it." Knight, a computer programmer with Secant Technologies in the Cleveland, Ohio area began MR/2 as a QWK reader for BBSes and when he got into OS/2 and involved in the Internet, expanded it into MR/2 ICE to deal with Internet mail reading. Support for new programs is always tough, but new beta shareware has to deal with not only "bugs" but also trying to firmly define the niche the product will fill and finding out what the users really want. "I was receiving literally THOUSANDS of emails a month," Knight said, "many that just couldn't be answered. Imagine the time [required] to answer each of those notes personally and in detail. I've always been careful about over-using the newsgroups for support purposes, so I decided to explore mailing list software. "I tried an existing package but couldn't get it to work. After receiving no response from its author, I started calculating how MR/2 ICE could manage such an application. It's pretty easy to do, after mixing in a little REXX," Knight explained. Mailing lists are not all that unusual on the Internet; in fact both of Knight's main competitors, InnoVal Systems Solutions, Inc. and SouthSide Software, maintain similar lists for interested users of their products. SouthSide Software, aside from maintaining a FAQ list for PMMail v1.5 questions on their WWW home page, also maintains an e-mail discussion list for its customers. Their list currently has about 130 subscribers and the authors are frequent contributors as well. Dan Porter, President of InnoVal, explained that their list is also popular, but the casual user often finds the traffic on such a list to be overwhelming. In a different strategy, InnoVal expects to have a searchable database which will answer most common questions about the Post Road Mailer available directly from it's web site by summer '96. And of course, both companies monitor usenet news groups and supply one-on-one technical support. Still, in the general realm of the 'net, Knight's list appears to be unusual in the volume of mail it has generated. The mail on the list is very focused on the quirks of MR/2 ICE (which should go to Version 1.0 on May 8th) and the way it works on the many varieties of computer machinery out there in the world. The mailing list has been an apparent success; literally worldwide response has been forthcoming. (daniel@mail.codalan.cz) Daniel Docekal, a Networking expert from Czechoslovakia told e-Zine! why he is a member. "MR/2 ICE is the only OS/2 Internet program which currently supports our character sets," he said. "It (the mailing list) is a valuable reference place, except people are sometimes a bit overreacting in some cases, but otherwise it's a valuable place. Before I had to send everything directly to Nick." It is the sense of community which surrounds the mailing list which seems to be its biggest attraction. All the messages go to all the members, unless they are specifically addressed to only one. Those who can explain solutions, or make suggestions or carp about perceived problems do so. Like a newsgroup (which Knight has also established to form an archive of all the message traffic in the mailing list), anyone can reply; Knight only interjects when he has the "straight skinny" or information on the progress of "bug fixes" or updates. I don't have a lot of experience with newsgroups, CompuServe groups, or other mail lists, so it's hard to compare Knight's list with other efforts at the same process. But, other lists notwithstanding, Knight's seems to work the way lists *should* work: helping users make the most of their software and perhaps learn more than a bit about their operating system in the process. And the stream of messages goes on, day and night, over 100 per day. Printing problems, setup confusion, multiple accounts, comparisons with other programs, and many other subjects crowd the list. Inexpensive software doesn't have to mean "cheap" support; Knight has proven that point with his superior use of a system available to everyone. ***** * (nick@secant.com) Nick Knight WWW: (http://nick.secant.com) http://nick.secant.com FTP: (ftp://nick.secant.com) ftp://nick.secant.com ***** (remmett@cris.com) Bob Smith is a 15 year veteran as a USAF pilot, retired from the Fire Service as an Arson Investigator and Fire Chief in a small city in California, USA. He is currently working as a photographer and computer consultant and has been using OS/2 since v2.0. *********************************** The IBM OS/2 Warp Teleseminar 2 - by Chris Wenham The second in a series of OS/2 Warp Teleseminars was designed to show both developers and customers that OS/2 is still an important and strategic platform for IBM. The main speaker was John W. Thompson, President of IBM's Personal Software Products division. He was joined by David Barnes (well known OS/2 advocate); Kevin Daly, General Manager of BFA Data Systems; and Anthony DeCristofaro, President and CEO of MGI Software Corp. Although live, the Teleseminar started with a taped presentation of OS/2 Warp's role in the upcoming 1996 Olympic Games. Everything from Warp Server to Warp Connect is being used at the Olympics to coordinate the hundreds of teams, reporters and athletes as well as to gather information from each event as it happens. Goodness knows there'd be havoc if the results of a record-breaking 100 meter dash were lost... because of a General Protection Fault! Keep in mind when you watch the games this summer that the world's most popular 32-bit operating system is being used to run the world's most popular sporting event. Fade to John W. Thompson. The Teleseminar was broadcast from what looks very much like a mix between a talk show studio and an infomercial studio. However, the cheering audience and wild camera swoops were all gone--this was a serious affair. In his speech, Thompson talked about the Internet and its importance to IBM and the OS/2 platform. OS/2 is for the "connected user", people on the move and connected to LANs, WANs and the Internet. Not just as a client though, but as a server too. Thompson reported that over 50,000 copies of Warp Server have been shipped so far, with the State of California, Dean Whitter and others being major customers. In his speech, Thompson mentioned that he'd recently come back from Japan where a major Japanese bank was making a major platform move. Since IBM's database software, DB2, is an important part of their network they compared DB2 running on OS/2 and other platforms (DB2 has been ported to Windows NT, for example). OS/2 came out as the clear performance leader, and thus was chosen for their entire operation. The seminar quickly moved on, and we were treated to something very special indeed... Merlin David Barnes gave an outstanding demonstration of Merlin (the codename for the next version of OS/2) at the Teleseminar. The copy he was showing was an Alpha version, but as Barnes said, "An Alpha version from IBM is like a Release version from anyone else!" You could not possibly watch this demo without being *very* impressed. Your voice is Merlin's Command The big "Wow!" feature of the demonstration was the _fully integrated voice navigation_. Barnes, wearing a headset with microphone, commanded the machine to, "Wake up," and, "Open System Editor." Up popped the System Editor and Barnes proceeded to dictate directly to the computer. "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System..." he started, and the audience watched as every word he spoke appeared in the VoiceType dictation window and was then pasted into the System Editor. But more than just dictation, the voice integration let him _navigate_ through, not only Merlin itself, but the Internet too. "Jump to my homepage" he commanded, and seconds later the integrated web browser was open and displaying his homepage. Interesting, too, about this web browser was the fact that he could drag hotlinks from a page to the desktop. (You can drag URLs from WebExplorer right now, but these were _links_ not yet visited.) To top it off he then opened the Settings notebook (which itself has been improved, as I'll describe later) and recorded himself saying, "Jump to someplace cool," instantly associating the phrase with the URL he had dragged to the desktop. Subsequently, saying "Jump to someplace cool" into the microphone would immediately open the URL object associated with that phrase. Now this is darn impressive in itself, but that wasn't the end of it! Barnes explained that this voice recognition technology required *NO TRAINING* at all (training the computer to recognize a person's voice has, until now, been necessary with most voice recognition technology). With this technology, a complete stranger could walk up to a machine and start giving it voice commands without having to train it. This was not specifically demonstrated, though, and Barnes noted that persons with strong accents may need to spend a short time training the computer to recognize them. IBM didn't just throw this voice technology on as an extra gadget, it is integrated with the SOM (System Object Model) giving each Workplace Shell object a "Speech Page". From this we gather (and it was implied) that any object on your desktop can be "Speech driven". The New Look Seen right away in the demo of Merlin was its new graphical look (see the cool screen shots in the incoming directory of Hobbes). IBM has enhanced the visuals with more "3D" effects and a much nicer looking tabbed notebook. In current versions of Warp, the settings notebooks have tabs down the side, and are somewhat plain. According to Barnes, "After [IBM] moved our developers from Boca, Florida to Austin, Texas, we discovered that there were more colors than just gray!" The tabs now appear at the _top_ of the notebook, plus they're color coded giving the humble Settings notebook a much brighter appearance. A somewhat familiar looking "Warp Center" bar ran along the top of the screen too. While watching the demo we gathered a sense of De Ja Vu from this new component, which had a button from which you could pull down a cascading menu of options to start up applications or System Objects. Yes, it looked like the Windows 95 "Start" button and icon bar. But "Warp Center" was different, it had a lot more built into it such as a CPU monitor and something described as "Trays" with which you could place objects by dragging-and-dropping. It looks to be a sort of supercharged Launchpad-meets-Win95 Start button. Barnes also pointed out that there is a new system font in Merlin, one that makes it easier to read on laptop computers with liquid-crystal displays. Want coffee with that? Not much was said regarding it, but according to John W. Thompson "Merlin completely integrates Java support." He claims that Merlin will be the first operating system _ever_ to do this. We don't know what was meant by, "completely integrated," but it certainly bodes well that Merlin will be an important player in the Internet arena. Indeed, the Internet was very much emphasised throughout Thompson's presentation. Merlin will be able to connect to any kind of server, Thompson claimed, and will be fitted with OpenDoc technology. Kevin Daly Kevin Daly, General Manager of BFA Data Systems, spoke on how BFA uses OS/2 to help their customers improve their business. He commented on the furious and saturated Windows market, where it is "impossible to get a competitive edge." Daly claims OS/2 is different though, and BFA uses it to give themselves an edge over their competitors. "We're seeing a 250% increase in OS/2 business year to year," he said, also citing that their average profits from Windows are only 15%, whereas with OS/2 they're nearly 30%. He enjoyed pointing out that one customer previously used Corel Draw 5 under Windows 3.11 and Novell Netware. A large file would take 20-30 minutes to load with this environment, yet when BFA switched the customer to Warp Connect and Warp Server the load time dropped down to only 5 minutes. An impressive feat. Were you one of those that never got too excited about the FaxWorks application bundled in the Warp BonusPak? Daly described a customer who experienced a 100% increase in sales thanks to the efficiency OS/2 gave them, keeping documents grouped in folders on the desktop and faxing information to the client while still talking on the phone. Daly said he expects to see active migration to IBM servers (including OS/2), citing how his customers have found OS/2 easy to grow with and use. Anthony DeCristofaro Anthony DeCristofaro is president and CEO of MGI Software Corp, makers of a product called PhotoWorks (an image management, cataloging and painting package). He opened a few eyes by describing their process of porting their Windows 3.11 application to Win32 (Windows 95 and Windows NT) and OS/2 Warp. In February of 1995 MGI began porting PhotoWorks from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. It took them 5 months, using 7 toolkits and 2.5 person-years. In August of 1995 they decided to port to OS/2 and settled on using DAPIE (The Developers API Extensions for OS/2, a package that implements over 800 of the Win32 API commands as native OS/2 code). It took them 5 _days_ and just one toolkit (DAPIE) to do the job. This was with about 200,000 lines of C++ code to port! The Commitment In this Teleseminar, John W. Thompson did an excellent job of showing that IBM is indeed behind OS/2 100%. You couldn't possibly come away from the presentation without feeling optimistic about Warp and its future. We didn't get the chance to have our questions answered during the Question-and-Answer session, which lasted for only 20 minutes, but we're sure there'll be many more opportunities to come later. IBM is holding a third Teleseminar in July of this year and we'll bring you coverage on that one too! Anyone can attend IBM's Teleseminars as they are free and open to the public. If you live near an IBM facility or have a satellite dish you can watch the video portion of the broadcast, and the audio-only portion can be heard simply by calling their special 1-800 number. Details about the IBM OS/2 Warp TeleSeminars, along with transcripts of previous TeleSeminars, can be found at (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/telesemi.html) their web site. ***** (http://www.spectra.net/~fox) Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company--(http://www.spectra.net/~pendulum/webworks) Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews. *********************************** Brad's IBM Technical Interchange Report - by Brad Wardell Editor's Note: The report of Technical Interchange activity below originally appeared on (http://www.stardock.com/) Stardock's WWW site. It has been reprinted here with permission from Stardock Systems, Inc. and has been edited for length and editorial reasons. ***** _Disclaimer: I work for an OS/2 ISV called "Stardock Systems". I believe this to be an objective report of the major events of the Technical Interchange but I feel that it is only right to mention that I do work for one of the participants._ PART I: INTRODUCTION TO THE 1996 IBM TECHNICAL INTERCHANGE Introduction Trade shows are great for getting to put faces to voices on the phone or text in an email. Because most developers work insanely long hours, much of our "social life" revolves around these trade shows. We get to make up months of lost social contact in just a week. Trade shows are split into two parts, the day part where each company tries to woo potential customers to buy their software AND the night part where everyone goes out and parties until the wee hours. Stardock was not at the 1995 Technical Interchange because we had no OS/2 software to really show then. This year, Stardock not only was there, but co-sponsored the entire show. At the dinners, you could see "Stardock" napkins everywhere. This particular event inspired Brent Bowlby, my good friend and President of CDS (makers of Back Again/2) to say "Hey Brad, here's what I think of your employer!" and blow his nose on the Stardock napkin. My only regret is that I hadn't thought of that joke first! The show lasts from Monday to Friday. The "big days" are Tuesday to Thursday since Monday and Friday are used for setting up and tearing down. ***** PART II: Tuesday at the 1996 IBM TECHNICAL INTERCHANGE Tuesday The first major session of the show was the unveiling of what was called "The Milamber Project". The new official name is "Object Desktop Professional v1.5". In front of around 600 people, ObjDesk Professional, Object Desktop 1.5, and Process Commander alpha were demonstrated for a good hour and 15 minutes. *Object Desktop v1.5* A powerful desktop environment that makes OS/2 more powerful, easier to use, more feature rich, and nicer to look at. Version 1.5 of Object Desktop adds the ability to "package" your desktop or desktop objects and distribute them across the world or for your personal use. A lot of corporations quickly jumped on to this feature because they are upgrading from either OS/2 2.11 to Warp or Warp to "Merlin". Object Package will allow users who want to upgrade to a new version of OS/2 to package their desktop into a single file and when they format, install the new version, they can unpackage their desktop and Object Package will not only restore all their objects, but register their classes for them. Anyone who has ever had to search through their hard drives for "createwps.cmd" type scripts to recreate their Cset objects, Internet objects, etc. can appreciate this. Other corporations were delighted that they could now reliably and easily standardize on a common desktop and distribute it across the enterprise. End users commented that they could finally set up their desktop in different ways and depending on their mood, choose the particular desktop they wanted. During my demonstration, I unpackaged "Quake" (a new game from ID). Because Object Package stores all the settings, icons and such for an object, users will be able to trade DOS objects with each other (or trade entire desktops). Version 1.5 also greatly improves the performance of the system, integrates Internet resources such as websites and email sites right into the workplace shell and provides a huge database of websites and email addresses to visit, and enhances most of the components of Object Desktop with features suggested by 1.0 (especially the Control Center and Object Navigator). One of the most significant changes from 1.0 to 1.5 from our internal development point of view is that Stardock hired on former IBM workplace shell developers to ensure that we no longer had to "reverse engineer" our features. Now we know how IBM does their magic and we can now better complement their efforts by integrating seamlessly into the operating system. After the Object Desktop 1.5 presentation, I moved on to showing "*Process Commander*". Process Commander does two things in particular. Its primary feature is the ability to thoroughly manage running processes. That is, you can keep track of everything that is loaded on your system right down to the semaphore and shared memory level in a nice easy to use GUI environment. The second and probably one of its most popular features is its ability to use the Ctrl+Alt+Del key combination to bring up a full screen session where you can usually get yourself out of a "hang" situation. Anyone who has ever experienced a hang (even with FixPak 17) can appreciate the feature of actually getting to do something about the hang instead of having to reboot (hitting Ctrl-Esc doesn't always take care of the problem). Finally, I introduced _Milamber_. Milamber was the project name to what we now call "*Object Desktop Professional*". I admitted that our most difficult marketing task ahead of us is to differentiate the two. (*Editor's Note:* We have removed a list from this space describing the features of the upcoming Object Desktop Professional. For the original list see the on-line version of this article at (http://www.stardock.com/) Stardock's WWW site. For more complete coverage of Object Desktop Professional watch future issues of e-Zine! for sneak peeks and official reviews!) That was pretty much it for that. I talked about how the OS/2 market has done great for us and that we believe that this show will demonstrate to anyone who doubts OS/2's future that OS/2 is alive, well and growing. Thankfully, IBM was able to prove us right the next day... ***** PART III: WEDNESDAY at the IBM TECHNICAL INTERCHANGE On Wednesday, IBM demonstrated *Merlin* for all to see. The press seemed very impressed and articles appeared during the week to suggest that OS/2 was "back and ready to kick some butt". With Windows95 clearly not cut out for corporate use, WindowsNT not being a good enterprise wide OS either (it's actually a GREAT stand alone power user OS but you put 3000 on a network and well, let's just say that the OS consultants will be able to buy that new house...), corporate America, and moreover the world corporate community really needs an OS that works reliably, can run most applications out there, and is well supported in the corporate market. Until this show, the feeling was, "Is IBM really committed to OS/2?". IBM execs have always said "Yes, we are committed" and actions speak louder than words. Fortunately, the actions came through on Wednesday. Not only did IBM discuss Merlin, which should ship in 3rd or 4th quarter, and not only did Lotus announce that SmartSuite would ship this year but they had also made up time from earlier delays, but IBM even discussed some features that will be in the release AFTER Merlin. When you already begin talking about features that will appear in the 1998 version of OS/2, it kind of kills the rumor that "Merlin will be the last version". *Features of Merlin:* *Voice control over OS/2*. Imagine being able to say "Computer, start a new document." Merlin will allow you to do this. Stardock plans to bring out products that complement this revolutionary OS technology. This sort of feature has been available as a separate product but now IBM plans to integrate voice into OS/2 in such a way that users will have the choice of mouse, keyboard, OR voice and they are very serious about making this work. Users will be able to say "Jump to Stardock's Web" and the new Web browser (not yet named) will take you to (http://www.stardock.com/) http://www.stardock.com/ (for example). *Warp Center* will replace the LaunchPad. While Object Desktop users will probably replace Warp Center with the Control Center because of its added features, Warp Center is truly a step forward for IBM's UI team. It also looks very slick! The *notebooks will be totally re-done*. The base OS notebooks will be horizontal instead of vertical and the system font is history. The new font (still unnamed) will look like Helv 8. and be much nicer to look at. IBM will address the *look and feel* of the title bar by making the min/max buttons look a little bit nicer--more motif-ish. After a lot of discussion, IBM finally agreed to put the close button where Stardock's Object Desktop puts it instead of putting it where Microsoft puts it. This new look works well with IBM's philosophy of trying to have some similarities between AIX and OS/2. IBM will also integrate URL's into Merlin which will make navigating the web much nicer. It will be compatible with Stardock's Internet shell which means you'll be able to use all the included website "short-cuts" to get to the Internet under Merlin. Merlin will also provide "*briefcase*"-like features to synchronize objects between laptops and desktops. One of my favorite new features of Merlin will be the easy to use *hardware "registry"*. I'll be able to set up all my hardware from an easy to use GUI environment instead of tweaking config.sys's. Plug and Play support for PCI devices is also scheduled to be included. IBM mentioned that they probably won't include PnP for ISA devices having learned from Microsoft's mistake in supporting that--possibly the #1 technical support problem with Windows95. Merlin will require a 486DX with 8 megs of ram to run so that the typical OS/2 user can take advantage of the new features and 486 specific performance features. However, in order to use the voice features, you'll need a Pentium with 16 megs minimum. There will be only ONE version of Merlin instead of the half dozen we have today. The networking and other features will be in base OS/2 Warp V4. There may not be a red box version in fact (still undecided) (i.e. WinOS2 WILL be included). Merlin will be heavily targeted at both *corporate* and *consumer* users, preferably those who are connected via the Internet, on-line services, or via a LAN. Stardock has already promised consumer products for Merlin that will offer multi-player play over a network (Trials of Battle was demonstrated at the TI where you can play over the net). There will be a significant retail push for Merlin but don't count on seeing a bunch of obnoxious TV commercials as they aren't cost effective. TV commercials won't be used so much because IBM isn't interested in mainstream users but more because Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars on TV commercials for Win95 and it has failed miserably (from a selling standpoint) outside the pre-load market (most agree that only a couple million Win95 have been sold in shrink-wrap form, the rest are preload sales that are still in the warehouses of Gateway, DELL, etc.). Better for Merlin to be pushed by promoting the retail and corporate channels. At this point, it doesn't look like the SIQ fix is going to be in. One item that was under NDA but InfoWorld reported this week is that Merlin will be supporting True Type fonts (which we pushed hard for). The new SmartSuite will also support TTF. Merlin will also have a lot of DART stuff in, improving the multimedia aspects of OS/2 (mainly in terms of sound). This should make writing good games for OS/2 much easier. All in all, the consensus is that they haven't seen IBM this much behind OS/2 since the late 1980's. ***** PART IV: THURSDAY at the IBM TECHNICAL INTERCHANGE Lots of announcements and impressive showings were on the show floor. CDS showed off Back Again/2 V4 and their new and yet more hilarious advertisement that will appear in the June issue of OS/2 Magazine. Hilgrave showed off both HyperAccess, OS/2's most popular terminal, and KopyKat, a program that allows you to remotely control other computers. Stardock had a rather large booth (being the co-sponsor) right next to Lotus and Indelible Blue. Object Desktop Professional v1.5, Object Desktop v1.5, Process Commander, OS/2 Essentials, and Trials of Battle were all demonstrated at the booth. Object Desktop 1.5 began shipping right at the TI while upgrades were began being shipped to existing users. Object Desktop Professional 1.5 will begin shipping later this quarter and Process Commander goes into wide-beta in late May. Galactic Civilizations 2 was shown in the IBM arcade outside the main area next to the huge display of Lotus Notes workstations. FAQ at the arcade was "When would Avarice: The final Saga" ship??? and the answer was "CSS promises it to us in May." Lotus, the other non-IBM sponsor of the show (though owned by IBM), showed off Word Pro, which will ship in May/June and looks great. It turns out that it is not by any means a "port" for the Windows95 version. It will be faster than the Windows95 version it appears and is already usable for a lot of functions. Buck Bohac, of Indelible Blue, was already using the beta as his main word processor. Freelance Graphics (the new one) looks very cool as well. I didn't get a chance to check out the other programs but I heard they also looked impressive. Pinnacle had probably one of the coolest booths there. The makers of the popular Desktop Observatory, brought in a very impressive wooden structure type thing that just plain looked nice. The 32bit Alliance (run by Brad Wardell (Stardock) and Brent Bowlby (CDS)) had a booth showing all the national advertisements made in the major magazines. These ads promote OS/2 and OS/2 software to a wide audience. Each of the members was ecstatic over the results of the ads. Not just because of increased end user sales but the presence in large mainstream magazines allowed them to close MAJOR deals with large corporations. The next phase of the 32bit alliance was announced, to promote OS/2 and OS/2 software via the retail channel. Devtech had a booth showing off Deskman/2, a favorite set of tools for developers interested in looking at the guts of WPS objects and tinkering with things on their systems. They had a nice booth and best of all, they had Dove Chocolate. Needless to say, I made sure I got in good with them to procure more Dove chocolate. APS, the new OS/2 reseller, was there and got their catalog included with every attendee's pack. They announced that thanks to OS/2 and the 32bit Alliance, that they actually get *MORE* sales from selling to the OS/2 market than they do from the Macintosh market and they just got into the OS/2 market a month ago. Quite a relevation! Indelible Blue had a great booth right next to Stardock's. Stardock announced that Indelible Blue's new "Einstein" series of computers will all come pre-loaded with Object Desktop cementing Object Desktop as the premiere environment for OS/2. Having a powerful, easy to use, and attractive environment to run the world's best operating system is certainly a competitive advantage. Indelible Blue was swamped with sales and reported that this was their best show ever for sales. Top sellers included (not official yet). *UN-Official Top Sellers of TI 96* 1. Object Desktop 1.5 2. System Commander 3. Neon Graphics Light 4. Partition Magic 5. Galactic Civilizations 2 Speaking of System Commander, V-Communications, a member of the 32bit Alliance has been selling a ton of product to OS/2 users who are finding that while Boot Manager is okay, System Commander is much, much nicer to have. They had a nice booth as well. SofTouch was there showing off their usual set of popular tools including the popular UniMaint and GammaTech Utilities. They had a new ad on the back of OS/2 Magazine which was quite nice (though it makes an incorrect claim that FileStar/2 is the most used OS/2 file manager, FM/2, DirMaster, and Object Navigator all have more users) and very professional looking. Anyone needing to defragment their hard drive or undelete a file should make sure they have the GammaTech Utilities. The main SofTouch marketing god, Felix Cruz was there showing off the impressive INI maintenance features of UniMaint, the premiere INI editing tool. Neon Graphics was demonstrated at the Indelible Blue booth. Now this is a great app. It goes head to head with the TrueSpace and Autodesk programs and in my opinion (in terms of first looks), Neon may have them both beat and it's native to OS/2 on top of it. While other companies have blindly followed the Microsoft prosperity myth, these guys have come out with what looks like a terrific product. It comes in two versions: Neon ~$790 and Neon Lite ~$70 The packaging of the more powerful of the two is amongst the best I have ever seen. It is a movie reel case and made me want to pick it up--and I will. By the way, the pricing on the full version of Neon is very competitive with other packages of this type. Speaking of impressive marketing, MSR had a nice booth and also put a small booth in the Indelible Blue area--very clever. They showed off the MicroLearn gamepack, a well done collection of OS/2 games that made me want to buy another copy! The gamepack sold very well at Indelible Blue. Any small developers out there should seriously consider calling Indelible Blue and ask them to let you rent part of their booth to show off your app (919-878-9700). Other Notes: There were lots of cool parties. On Wednesday night, we hung out with the guys from Pinnacle and Bill and Esther Schindler at this neat restaurant type place. The Stardock "gang" got one of those old-west pictures done, expect to see it on our (http://www.stardock.com) website next week. It's hilarious. Similarly, the Pinnacle group had their gang pictured and Bill and Esther, considered by many to be the fastest up-and coming journalists in the PC world had their pictures taken in the "old west" style. Esther did a long review of OS/2 utilities for PC Magazine and Bill just got a review of Visual Age C++ published in a Visual Development magazine--both great articles. If you want to know two people who are both highly objective, ethical and have done more to help OS/2 in the press than any other two people, the Schindler team are it. *PC Magazine also singled out Object Desktop 1.0 as the best OS/2 utility* product which was a wonderful way to start the show and launch 1.5 which improves upon 1.0 in many significant ways. Alexander Antoniades, assistant editor of OS/2 Magazine (Dateline OS/2 and the top 15 best selling list) announced that he was leaving OS/2 Magazine to join Stardock as Vice President of Marketing. We're confident that OS/2 Magazine will continue to thrive and meet with yet more success even without one of the best writers and most knowledgeable OS/2 journalists in the industry. Mr. Antoniades will help lead Stardock's marketing into the 21st century by working with Stardock's developers to develop better software for mainstream users, work with the media to make sure the Stardock and OS/2 message gets out into the mainstream press, and whip things into shape overall. The food was great and IBM did a terrific job of making everyone feel appreciated. I now have enough goodies to satisfy all my tradeshow needs for a long time to come! That's about it for this year! It was a great show and I look forward to next year's! ***** Brad Wardell is President of Stardock Systems Inc. (wardell@ibm.net for non-Stardock issues or bwardell@stardock.com to talk about stardock issues). Stardock can be reached at: Voice: (313) 453-0328 Fax: (313) 453-1480 Orders: (800) 672-2338 (weekdays 9 to 6 EST) email: (info@stardock.com) info@stardock.com WWW: (http://www.stardock.com/) http://www.stardock.com/ *********************************** A day in the life of a CyberMasochist - by Jonathan Reason I still fondly remember my first "real" computer and how proud of it I was. A real, True Blue, IBM AT with 256k RAM and a 10 Meg hard drive. I also remember how scared I was of delving into the secret world of DOS 3. Still, with a little help from my friends and a subsequent purchase of an all singing, all dancing 386, resplendent with MS Windows 3.0, I thought I had really arrived. I soon started playing and rapidly formed an opinion, which I still hold as a truism: You have to do something pretty bloody stupid to do any lasting harm to a computer. Hmmm. If only I'd stopped there. Soon I was doing things at the dear old command prompt that, only months before, I'd watched in awe as others performed such miracles. Later--via Windows 3.1 and WfWg, and a Pentium 100 with more RAM than I used to have hard disk--I got bored with Windows and so I started looking around for something else to take to pieces and put back together (and then count the number of screws left over). And so I stumbled across Warp, which I now love dearly. But soon (and I won't pretend I didn't know the moment would arrive some day) I found I could delve into the depths of OS/2's config.sys and twiddle and tweak without trepidation. And whilst I still had a lot to learn about Warp, I was generally unafraid of it. Then, and I rue the day, I saw a posting about FixPaks, a phrase which still sends shivers down my spine. But being basically brave (read: foolhardy) and remembering my trusty truism, I downloaded FixPak 16 and was ready to set about the install when I read about the problems with it and decided to wait another week until FixPak 17 was available. In retrospect I think this was an omen. One which I duly ignored. Cut to: One week later. Machine in front of me. Cup of coffee. Cigarette. Logged into Hobbes FTP site. I start the download. Having spied the self-extracting versions in .exe format I decided these were the ones to get, rather than the zipped ones. Mistake number one. The first three downloaded well, but slowly. Numbers four onwards steadfastly refused to come when called. Another cup of coffee. Another cigarette. OK, so download the others in zipped format. No problem. Mistake number two. Ten floppy disks worth of FixPak17 in one hand and a fresh mug of coffee in the other, I did a chkdsk/f on all drives before I started anything. All went well (another omen?). And so to the install--or so I thought. I read the read.me file (you see, some people do) and decided not to print the 72 pages. Mistake number three. I also decided, for some unknown reason, to install from the command line. Perhaps I felt a little safer there. All went well, but rather alarmingly the screen did some very strange things. The message boxes didn't line up with the text that I presume was meant to go in them. I started thinking, "Here comes another reinstall," but that holds no fear for me now. After the first three disks the computer came to a grinding halt. An internal processor error. But all was not lost. At this stage I could still boot to the old setup and retrieve the first three disks again, this time in the same zipped format as the others. More coffee. Re-read the read.me. Start again. This time, I decide to install from the PM install application that comes with the FixPak. Perhaps this _is_ safer after all. In go the kicker disks. In go the rest of the disks, one after the other. The text that was all over the screen before is now lined up in neat little boxes. I even managed to drink a cup of coffee, make a phone call and watch the install progress at the same time, proving I can multitask as well as Warp. I felt as if another milestone had been reached. But my feeling of well being was short-lived. For some reason disk 7 was not called for and so not used. At last a little box popped up informing me that the install was successful and I should now reboot. I did. It lied. Yes the boot time was quick, much quicker than it had been before. Unfortunately it only booted to a blank desktop and an error message (SYS 2070 WPPRINT -> PMSPL.616. Type help SYS 182 for more information). The problem was, I couldn't easily get to a command line to type "help SYS 182". Ah. Well there's always the Maintenance desktop, isn't there? No, not this time there wasn't. Just the same error message. Never mind, simply reboot to a command line, yes? No. My computer seems to dislike Alt-F1 boots. (I subsequently found out why--I was trying to press Alt and F1 at exactly the same time. You have to hold down Alt, then press F1, of course. I told you I still had a lot to learn. So much so, that during software upgrades the first thing I do is go to the Desktop Settings notebook and check the "Display recovery choices at each system start" checkbox.) Eventually I managed to get to a command line using rescue disks, but typing HELP SYS182 shed little, if any light on my problem. Time for more coffee. Oh well, never mind, just reinstall and start again I thought. Wrong again. Out came the trusty Warp CD and the install went smoothly (I'm getting almost as well practiced at installing Warp as I had become at reinstalling Windows). Reboot. Same blank desktop. Same error message. Time to buy shares in a coffee company. My OS/2 system is installed on drive D: which is an HPFS drive in order to keep it separate from DOS (Drive C:--FAT) and all the data and programs, etc. on drives E: and F:. So all I needed to do was to reformat drive D: and re-re-install Warp. Simple right? How can one averagely intelligent man be so consistently wrong? By now it was about 5 o'clock in the morning, but I would not be beaten. Not by a mere machine. After reformatting Drive D: and another install, I sat staring again at the same old familiar error message, lonely on a blank desktop, sipping coffee nervously. Had my truism been proved a falsehood? I discovered some time later that FixPak17 writes a file to the root directory of drive C: which tells subsequent installs the status of the current system level (even if you don't boot Warp from C:). Of course whatever I did to drive D: had no effect on this file. It was at this time that I was glad I didn't completely wipe DOS and Windows. After a brief bit of culture shock trying to get back into the swing of the antiquated ways Windows tries to do things (I was right clicking on "objects"--Doh!), the members of the OS/2 Support forum on CompuServe suggested a fix. It appears that I was not alone with my problems. Apparently there is a DLL on disk 4 of the FixPak which the install routine does not update. By now I was willing to try anything, so I did. I unpacked the relevant library and, holding my breath, rebooted. And, wonder of wonders, into life sprang Warp, well and truly FixPak'd! Do I like it? Yes. It's quicker. The SIQ fix doesn't seem to have solved the problem entirely, but it is an improvement. Was it worth the hassle? Well... By the way, last week I had reason to reinstall Warp yet again because my PMMERGE.DLL seemed to be causing odd and erratic crashes, so I had to reinstall FixPak17. No problem. Straight in, no hangs, no copying odd files manually, it even used disk 7 this time. Hmmmm. Who ever said these things were just machines? This one definitely has a mind of its own. Perhaps it wanted its own cup of coffee. Java, anyone? ***** (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jreason) Jonathan Reason is a full time professional actor and as such has plenty of time to play with his computer. Casting Directors feel free to e-mail. *********************************** How to Install/Uninstall Programs in OS/2 - by Paulo Mario Moraes -or- A Beginners Guide to the World of Shareware I've been using Warp for almost two years now, and I consider myself to be an experienced OS/2 user. I'm not a programmer, though; I can't even program in Basic. But I do know some things that happen under OS/2's hood. As I give support to other Warp users back in my hometown, and try to fix their mess (and mine), one thing I often note is that inadequate installation or configuration of OS/2 programs is somewhat common among new users. That's why I'm writing this article: I know how important it is to correctly install applications on your system. If you're new to OS/2, keep reading. If you already have some (or a great amount of) experience, excuse me if this is a little elementary. What I mean by Install First of all, let me give you my definition of "install". It's a procedure where your system gets configured so it can "see" the program being installed, and where your program is set up to work on your system. This means that, most of the time, installation is not just a question of copying files. It's much more than that. If you're using OS/2, chances are that you're using more shareware applications than commercial packages right now. Because these tiny little shareware (and freeware) programs don't use one standard installation process (like MS software, for example, although their installation programs aren't very straightforward either), the way you set them up may differ from one application to another. Some applications just require you to copy the unpacked files to a local directory. Others use their own installation program to do this for you. Of course, since you don't know which type of application you're dealing with before you uncompress a ZIP file and read the documentation, you should *always* unpack the program in an empty temporary directory, preferably on an HPFS drive. And if the archive uses the ZIP format, use Info-Zip's Unzip utility, if you have it. Unzip can deal with long filenames and extended attributes, which is sometimes vital information to a program. After unpacking the ZIP file's contents, *read* the documentation before any attempt to install the program. This should be obvious anyway, since you must agree with the shareware's (or freeware's) License Terms before using the application. The readme will usually give you some directions on how to install the product. If the program only requires you to copy files to a new directory, copy 'em and you're ready to go. If, besides copying the files, the program also requires you to modify your CONFIG.SYS file, do this and reboot *before* trying to use the program. Is there Anything Else? Of course, updating CONFIG.SYS is not the only modification to a system's configuration a program may require. There are two other things a program may change: the OS2.INI file and the Workplace Shell Classes. If a program requires changes in one or both of these places, don't worry: the installation program will take care of modifying them for you. A reboot is not necessary if the installation process only modifies your OS2.INI file, but *will* be required if your WPS Classes have been updated. More importantly, if an application does modify your OS2.INI or WPS Classes, you will have to make sure they get restored or "cleaned up" when and if you decide to uninstall that application. The OS2.INI file OS2.INI is a system file where OS/2 keeps important information about the current setup of the system, and where certain applications also keep some or all of their settings. It's not a text file like CONFIG.SYS, and it's only accessible (readable or editable) by means of special utilities, like IniMaint and the INI Viewer included in File Manager/2. The Workplace Shell Classes The WPS Classes are used to define all objects on your system. For example, there is a WPFolder Class, which is associated with all folder objects in the Workplace Shell. These folder objects are considered _instances_ of the WPFolder Class. An _instance_ of this class is created initially by the system as a template (the Folder object found in the Templates folder). As you drag the Folder template to the desktop, you are creating another _instance_ of this class. Programs most likely to register (create new) WPS Classes are those that create new templates, file types, special objects on your desktop, etc. (Black Hole, for instance, has its own WPS Class, which is registered upon installation). Also, some programs actually modify existing WPS Classes. Examples of these programs are some desktop and folder enhancers (like Extended Desktop, an IBM Employee Written Software product). Cleaning Things Up As important as the installation program is to set up an application, the uninstall program to remove the application from your system is just as important. In many cases, the uninstall routine is called from the same program used to install the application. The problem is, some installation/uninstallation programs which automatically copy files to another directory, actually don't put the install/uninstall program in the destination directory. Result: if you remove the archive contents from the temporary directory where you unpacked them, the uninstall program is gone. Because of this, and although it may sound a bit awkward, it's useful to have a copy of the ZIP file containing the application backed up somewhere so you can unpack it again in a temporary directory, execute the uninstall program, let it find the application on your hard drive and prompt you to remove it. If the application didn't come with an install/uninstall program, you will have to edit your CONFIG.SYS, removing any entries related to the application (if you remember which ones they are), shut down, reboot and then delete the files (and any program object(s) that were created). It is important to update the CONFIG.SYS file and reboot *before* trying to delete the application's files or directories, because OS/2 will complain when you try to delete certain files that are still in use by the system or another application. When you reboot with the updated CONFIG.SYS, (hopefully) those files will not be in use any more and can be deleted. A manual uninstall might also require you to clean up the OS2.INI file or the WPS Classes. The procedures to do this are explained below. Cleaning up the OS2.INI file Using one of the tools listed earlier, take a look at your OS2.INI file. Note that each record in the file has three sections: the application name, its keywords, and its data. When you install an application (or first use it), it may put a new record in OS2.INI. If you later decide to manually remove the application from your system, you should remove the application's related entries from the OS2.INI file as well (this should be done only after you have used the application for the last time). If you're using FM/2's INI Viewer, just select the appropriate application name and choose "Delete Application" from the "Entries" menu. But remember: OS2.INI is shared by lots of applications and by the system itself. *Don't remove or edit ANY entry if you don't know its meaning or purpose.* Cleaning up the Workplace Shell Classes If you want to remove a program which registered a WPS Class during its installation, and which didn't come with an uninstall facility (once again, Black Hole is an example of this type of program), you must manually deregister the WPS Class or Classes created. When you do this, you need to be sure that the class you're deregistering was the one created by the program; *never* mess with classes created by the system, or which existed before the program your are trying to uninstall was installed. Some tools that let you deregister WPS Classes are infoPM (a set of benchmark and system analysis tools) and (HaWi's) ClassBrowser. However, because WPS Classes are a critical point in the system, try to follow this guideline: avoid installing a program (especially if you know it'll modify the WPS Classes) that doesn't come with an uninstall option. Managing WPS Classes on your own can be very tricky and dangerous, and possibly leave your system in an inoperative state. Is Everything Clear Now? Well, I tried to make this article as basic as possible so new Warpers like you don't get scared away from OS/2. I cannot guarantee that the procedures mentioned above will work, of course, since there are thousands of OS/2 applications out there and I don't know everything about most of them. If you have any questions, complaints, or suggestions, please e-mail me. Also, I would like to thank Eric Slaats (author of (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/smalled/) Smalled--the small, high powered, intuitive OS/2 editor) for all the support he gave me for this article. ***** (pmario@iaccess.com.br) Paulo Mario dos Santos Dias de Moraes is a Brazilian student who loves OS/2 and Electronics. This is his first article ever. *********************************** GNU: OS/2's Hidden Treasure - Part 2 - by Murray Todd Williams For those of you just tuning in... This article is the second part of a series on GNU software for OS/2. The (../v1n6/gnu.html) original article describes GNU: a vast collection of free software written for a variety of platforms (operating systems and microprocessors) by some incredible programmers. In essence, the GNU system turns your OS/2 system into an OS/2-Unix hybrid, giving you the best of both worlds. In this article I will discuss the basic installation of two primary elements of the GNU system: the EMX runtime libraries and the GCC compiler. Once these are installed, you will be ready to explore the GNU world. But Wait, There's More!! I just can't go on without a bit of a product plug. I suggest anyone who hasn't already read last issue's article on (../v1n6/xfree.html) X-Windows for OS/2 do so now. A few weeks ago I got involved in the XFree86 project, *alpha-testing* the software. Getting X-windows up and running isn't for the weak of heart, but *this thing is incredible!* Here are some nice screen shots by (http://borneo.gmd.de/~veit/os2/screen1.gif) Holger Veit, (http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~larso/image/xcapture.jpg) Lars Olofsson, and (http://www.diku.dk/students/kimsh/scrdump.gif) Kim Steen Henriksen. Be warned that some of these screen shots are pretty huge. One spectacular thing you will probably notice here is that each screen shot looks vastly different--almost like the difference between a Macintosh and OS/2. This is due to the fact that an X-windows session is extremely customizable. I must confess, unless you know a) what X-windows is, b) how to make it work and c) why you would want it, chances are you should wait before diving into this one. If you work with Unix (on a network) as well as OS/2 then you'll know what I mean. In short, X-windows is to Unix what the Presentation Manager is to OS/2; it's a widely used GUI standard. What's unique to X-windows is that the X-windows program often runs on a different machine (the client) than the machine which displays the output (the server). With OS/2 (or Windows or Mac OS) the client and the server are always the same machine. Using X-windows however, we can run a Unix program on a Unix computer, but have its output routed to a computer running OS/2. Another way of describing it is a super-elaborate TELNET session, but graphical instead of text-based. Presently, if your workplace has some Unix machines on the network, you can turn OS/2 into an X-windows "dumb terminal". If you want to run X-windows software directly on your OS/2 machine, wait a little longer until the best of the GNU X-windows software is ported. If you have no experience with X-windows, Unix, or TCPIP, I suggest you wait at least until the software is "beta level" code and the instructions are a bit more pedantic. Be assured you will hear more about XFree86 for OS/2 in the near future... Getting Back to EMX and GCC Before you can enjoy the GNU universe, you need to install some programs and dynamic link libraries (DLLs) so that OS/2 can provide "Unix-ish" emulation. The most basic component of this is called EMX which consists of a couple DLLs (EMX.DLL in particular). Once you have installed EMX, you can run almost any GNU software that has been ported to OS/2. The second component, GCC, is a GNU compatible compiler that produces executables for OS/2. Most of the GNU software you find will include its original source code (something rarely seen with most programs). In fact, where you find EMX and GCC, you will also find their original source code. This means the GCC compiler (and EMX system) *can compile itself!* GCC compiles programs written in C, C++ and Objective C. (C++ and Objective C are two independent approaches to object-oriented programming with C. Although C++ is now the de facto standard, Objective C is not without its advantages. Objective C was the variant used with the NeXT Step operating system.) System Requirements EMX/GCC is surprisingly flexible with system requirements (hard disk space). For a minimum installation (EMX components only) you only need a few Meg at most. For a normal installation of EMX and GCC you need about 50 Meg. If you also want to install all the original source code, you need significantly more space. Although HPFS is not required, it is highly recommended. Quite often included source code expects long filenames, and some of the standard C++ header files require names that don't fit the 8.3 standard. Let me reiterate: you *can* use FAT (8.3 filenames) but you will have to use some nonstandard C++ header names and you will have difficulty with other people's source code. Also if you want to run things like Emacs or XFree86, I would suggest you bite the bullet and use HPFS. The first step you should take is to figure out where you will put the main EMX directory. I suggest you place it directly off the root directory of one of your drives. This is not mandatory, but let's face it: EMX is like a miniature operating system in itself. Finding the GNU Distribution There are a few places to find GNU. One of the more popular archives is Hobbes. Before you go the Hobbes link though, I suggest you use one of the (http://www.columbia.edu/~chs11/hvm.html) Hobbes Virtual Mirrors. They reduce the traffic to the Hobbes FTP site and provide nice file descriptions. Once you've found the archive, go to the /os2/unix/emx09b directory. This is a repository for all of the GNU-OS/2 software from which you'll find the basic EMX and GCC distribution. There are many files here but the most important ones are INSTALL.DOC and emxrt.zip. Go ahead and grab these files. While you're at it, go to the parent directory (/os2/unix) and get the gnused.zip file if you are going to use EMX with an HPFS partition. Now save yourself a huge headache and print out INSTALL.DOC. It will take you step by step through the EMX installation. Once you've figured out where you are going to put EMX, go to that directory and unzip the file emxrt.zip. Add the following lines to your CONFIG.SYS and then reboot: PATH= ... ;D:\EMX\BIN LIBPATH= ... ;D:\EMX\DLL This example assumes you are placing EMX off the root directory of the D: drive. *WARNING!* You should be careful about something or you are likely to encounter some unpredictable results: you need to have only one copy of the EMX.DLL file on your computer (in the LIBPATH) and it should be the one you just unpacked from the emxrt.zip file. If you have installed GNU software in the past, it will likely have included a copy of EMX.DLL which could be out of date. In fact, all of the DLL files you unpacked from emxrt.zip should be unique within your LIBPATH. One thing you can do is move the \EMX\DLL path to the front of the LIBPATH= statement in your CONFIG.SYS, thus assuring that the system will find the newer files first. Or you can check your drives for old versions of EMX.DLL (i.e.: DIR C:\EMX.DLL /S), delete them and then move on. Now unzip the gnused.zip file into a temporary directory. Move sed.exe into the \EMX\BIN directory (which was created when you unzipped emxrt.zip) and start following the instructions in INSTALL.DOC. You will now have to decide which files you want to install. The bare minimum installation is the emxrt.zip file which you already installed. (To make it work right, you will need to make some modifications to CONFIG.SYS as described in INSTALL.DOC.) To install the GCC system, you will want to install (unzip) these files: emxdev.zip Files required for developing programs with emx gnudev1.zip The GNU C compiler, the GNU debugger, and other tools gnudev2.zip gppdev.zip Additional files for GCC required for compiling C++ programs gobjcdev.zip Additional files for GCC required for compiling programs written in the Objective C language (Optional) I suggest you also install the following files which contain a lot of documentation and some other useful components: emxview.zip emx documentation in OS/2 .inf format emxample.zip Sample programs emxtest.zip Test programs (used for testing emx and the libraries) gnuview.zip emxgnu.inf (emxgnu.doc in OS/2 .inf format) gnudoc.zip Documentation for GNU programs (texinfo sources etc.) gnuinfo.zip GNU texinfo (includes info file browser) bsddev.zip BSD programs (gprof) and libraries (curses etc.) bsddoc.zip Documentation for BSD libraries If you want to throw in the kitchen sink (and don't care about disk space) go ahead and install all the *original source code for EMX/GCC*. Note: You will probably not need these files! emxsrcd.zip Source for emx development tools emxsrcr.zip Source for the emx runtime package gnupat.zip patches for GNU sources gnusrc.zip Patched GNU sources (info, termcap, GPPDEMID) gbinusrc.zip Patched GNU sources (ld, ar, nm, size, strip, objdump, gprof) gccsrc1.zip Patched GNU sources (GCC 2.7.2, part 1) gccsrc2.zip Patched GNU sources (GCC 2.7.2, part 2) gccsrc3.zip Patched GNU sources (GCC 2.7.2, part 3) gdbsrc1.zip Patched GNU sources (GDB 4.15, part 1) gdbsrc2.zip Patched GNU sources (GDB 4.15, part 2) gppsrc.zip Patched sources of libg++ 2.7.1 bsdsrc.zip Source for BSD libraries Finally, you will want any fixes that are available. Read EMXFIX01.DOC and unzip the emxfix01.zip file. If you _don't_ unzip the fix last, some of the updated files will get overwritten with the old (buggy) files. With that done (and assuming you go slowly through all the instructions in INSTALL.DOC) you should be ready to roll. Those instructions will lead you to compile and run a sample C program, install icons for the EMX/GCC manuals, and a couple other things that should start you on the journey. Welcome! Stay tuned for next month's article: "Emacs *is* the kitchen sink!" This is guaranteed to be a fun article to write. Emacs is (almost) a text-editor-turned-operating-system. Yes, it can edit files. It can also read Internet newsgroups, go through your mail, demonstrate the "Towers of Hanoi" logic puzzle, and be your therapist too. You don't believe me? Stay tuned for next month! ***** (http://lamar.colostate.edu/~murray) Murray Todd Williams is a student at Colorado State University, working on a M.S. in Statistics. He is also a member of Team OS/2. *********************************** How to Rescue a Damaged Desktop - by Jim Little OS/2's Workplace Shell, or WPS, is a powerful program for organizing and manipulating data. The WPS is responsible for displaying your computer's files and other objects on the OS/2 desktop. Unfortunately, the power of the WPS comes at a price: the .INI files your desktop is stored in are extremely complex, and somewhat fragile. If these files are damaged--by an unexpected power outage, or a poorly-programmed WPS extension, for example--your OS/2 desktop will start behaving strangely. Symptoms include disappearing objects, inexplicable hangs, or WPS crashes. A common indicator of corrupted .INI files is a message telling you that a folder "has stopped responding to the system" when you press Ctrl-Esc. The common remedy for a misbehaving desktop is to re-create the desktop .INI files. This is a less than optimal solution, since it means that all the customizations you've made are erased. Another solution is to restore the .INI files from a backup. This method is preferable to re-creating the desktop and starting over, but is still not perfect. Since the desktop can be corrupted long before any symptoms occur, it is difficult to know which backup to restore. In addition, the desktop keeps close track of files on your hard drive. An old copy of the desktop .INI files is unlikely to match your current configuration, and thus is itself a potential cause of desktop corruption. A better solution is to try to repair the damaged files. The best way I've yet found is to use (2:280/801.339@fidonet.org) Henk Kelder's CheckINI. CheckINI is part of the freeware WPTools package, which is available at (ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/textutil/wptool18.zip) Hobbes. Although CheckINI doesn't fix all desktop problems, I've found it to be effective in most cases. Even if you don't have any problems with your desktop, you may still wish to use CheckINI. Over time, the desktop .INI files tend to grow in size. Since the WPS .INI files are stored in memory while OS/2 is running, this can result in a substantial performance hit. CheckINI will prune any unnecessary data in the .INI files and free that wasted memory for programs. Preparation If you haven't already downloaded and unzipped the WPTools package from the URL mentioned above, do so now. The instructions in this article are based on CheckINI v1.993 as used with OS/2 2.x or OS/2 Warp. If you have a different version of CheckINI or OS/2, *carefully read the CHECKINI.TXT and DANGER.TXT files* in the WPTools directory before proceeding. To check the version number of CheckINI, open an OS/2 command prompt and switch to your WPTools directory. Type CHECKINI /?. The version number will be the first line displayed. Before using any diagnostic or maintenance tool, including CheckINI, you should run CheckDisk on your hard drive. This ensures that any problems with your file system won't be aggravated by the maintenance tool. Since OS/2 keeps the boot partition locked while it is running, you must boot OS/2 from floppy disks to check all partitions. See Table 1 for detailed instructions. Occasionally, your desktop will be so badly corrupted that the WPS won't be able to locate it. Instead of displaying the desktop when you boot OS/2, the WPS will display an error and then give you a windowed command prompt. If this is the case, add the line "SET DESKTOP=x:\DESKTOP" to your CONFIG.SYS, where "x:" is your boot drive (see Table 2 for instructions). After you do so, shut down and reboot your computer. It's possible that your desktop still won't appear even after you've added this line; if so, don't worry. CheckINI may still be able to repair the damage. Checklist 1. Checking Partitions Insert OS/2 installation disk. Shut down. - Desktop windows will close and a message telling you to press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot will appear. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del. - Computer will reboot and start loading from the OS/2 installation disk. Computer will prompt you to insert "Disk One". Insert disk one when prompted. - Computer will continue loading OS/2. Installation screen will appear. Press F3 when installation screen appears. - OS/2 command prompt will appear. Type CHKDSK x: /F for each FAT partition, where x: is the FAT partition drive letter. For example, if partitions C: and E: were FAT, you would type: CHKDSK C: /F CHKDSK E: /F Repeat this step until no more damage is reported. - OS/2 will check each partition and repair any damage. Type CHKDSK x: /F:2 for each HPFS partition, where x: is the HPFS partition drive letter. For example, if partition D: was HPFS, you would type: CHKDSK D: /F:2 Repeat this step until no more damage is reported. - OS/2 will check each partition and repair any damage. Remove the OS/2 disk from the floppy drive. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del. - The computer will reboot and load OS/2 from the hard drive. Checklist 2. Modifying CONFIG.SYS Type TEDIT x:\CONFIG.SYS. Replace the x: with the letter of your boot drive. For example, if you boot OS/2 from drive C:, type: TEDIT C:\CONFIG.SYS - The IBM text editor will be displayed. Press Esc. - The cursor will move to the main editing window. Press Insert. - The cursor will change from a bar to a small block. Press Enter. - A blank line will be added near the top of the file. Type SET DESKTOP=x:\DESKTOP. Replace the x: with the letter of your boot drive. For example, if you boot OS/2 from drive C:, type: SET DESKTOP=C:\DESKTOP - The text will appear as you type it. Press F4. - The revised file will be saved and the program will exit to the command prompt. Running CheckINI Once all the preparations are complete, you can run CheckINI. Make sure that your normal network connections are available before proceeding. Then close any open windows and open a command prompt. At the command prompt, switch to the WPTools directory and type CHECKINI /C to start the program. If you omit the "/C" CheckINI will not actually change your .INI files. After the program starts, press any key to start the tests. While the program is running, you may press Ctrl-Break any time before saving to safely cancel your changes, except for classes deregistered during the WPS Classes test. CheckINI performs a wide variety of tests. Before running each test, CheckINI will display a box in the center of the window that describes the upcoming test. The name of the test is displayed at the bottom of the screen between two lines of equal signs. As errors are encountered, CheckINI displays your options for dealing with the error in the center of the screen, and adds a detailed description of the error to the bottom of the screen. The following list describes each of the tests CheckINI performs and some of the errors that can occur. Each section starts with a short description of the test in *boldface*, followed by the CheckINI name for the test in a monospaced font. Below that is an extended description of the test. There may be some cases that aren't covered; if an error is displayed that you don't understand, it's usually safest to delete or fix the problem instead of leaving it in place. CheckINI won't cause damage to your .INI files--at worst, you will lose some customizations or objects. Checklist 3. CheckINI Tests *WPS Classes* PM_Objects:ClassTable Checks if all the programs registered with the WPS are actually available on your hard drive. On many machines, CheckINI will ask, "Deregister class WPCmpnp because WPCMPNP cannot be loaded?" Answer "NO" to this question. WPCmpnp is a standard part of the WPS, but the supporting file is not installed unless you install plug-and-play PCMCIA support. You should answer "YES" to any other classes, however. If you see any other class names starting with "WP" listed, it is possible that essential parts of the WPS have been deleted from your system. If this is the case, and the desktop continues to have severe problems after you finish using CheckINI, then you will probably have to reinstall OS/2 to resolve the problems. *Abstract Objects* PM_Abstract:Objects & PM_Abstract:FldrContents Checks the abstract objects on your desktop. Abstract objects are any permanent non-file objects, such as shadows, programs, and the Launchpad. This test also checks if shadow and program objects are pointing to a file that really exists. You should usually remove or fix any abstract object with errors, with the following exception: If you have a shadow or program object that points to an object that isn't currently accessible (for example, on a CD-ROM, or on an inaccessible network drive), this test will think the object has errors. Watch for the name of such objects and don't delete them. Even if you do, however, all you will lose is the objects that point to removable or network drives. *Orphaned Icons* PM_Abstract:Icons Looks for icons that belonged to deleted abstract objects. Remove any that are found. *Program Associations* PMWP_ASSOC_FILTER PMWP_ASSOC_TYPE Both of these tests check your program associations. Remove or fix any invalid associations. Doing so may result in a few program associations disappearing after CheckINI is finished. *Checksums* PMWP_ASSOC_CHECKSUM The WPS stores checksums for its objects. This test checks to make sure that the objects that the checksums refer to still exist. Remove any invalid checksums. *Positions* PM_Workplace:FolderPos PM_PrintObject:JobCnrPos PM_Workplace:PalettePos PM_Workplace:StatusPos The WPS stores the position and size for every folder, printer, palette, and power status object, but never removes these values. Therefore, the .INI files are usually full of entries for deleted folders and folders on removable media like CD-ROMs. These four tests check for and remove the extraneous data. Since the first test (PM_Workplace:FolderPos) typically finds several hundred invalid folder settings, CheckINI will ask you if you want to confirm each error. Answer "NO" to this question. You'll save a considerable amount of time, and even if the parameters for a valid folder are somehow removed, all you'll lose are the position and size information for the folder in question. For the remaining tests, just remove any settings that CheckINI encounters. Again, the most you'll lose is position and size information. *Print Jobs* PM_PrintObject The WPS occasionally forgets to remove the .INI settings for a print job after it's finished. This test allows you to remove any print jobs that have been left in the .INI files. *Startup Folders* PM_Workplace:Startup Checks that all the startup folders listed in the .INI files actually exist and are really startup folders. Remove any invalid listings. *Object Desktop users:* Object Desktop registers some of its objects as startup folders. CheckINI does not recognize these objects as valid startup folders and will ask you to delete them. Unfortunately, its hard to tell which object the errors in this test refer to, so you have two choices: Either skip this test entirely, or delete all startup folders that CheckINI reports. If you delete all the startup folders, the Object Desktop window list and Keyboard Launchpad will not autostart properly when you reboot. Simply opening the Object Desktop folder will fix this problem until you next run CheckINI. *Templates* PM_Workplace:Templates Checks the internal list of templates to ensure that all the templates listed really exist. This test often displays templates that look like they should be saved, but in fact are obsolete. Remove any templates that are displayed. Even if you somehow remove a valid template, all system templates (not the ones you created yourself, though) are re-created when you open the Templates folder. *Object ID's* PM_Workplace:Location Checks that all objects with an object ID, such as , actually exist where they are supposed to. Remove any incorrect location records. *Object Desktop users:* If you ran Object Desktop's SETUPTLP.CMD batch file, Object Desktop changed the object ID of the Tab Launchpad to that of the regular Launchpad. CheckINI will generate an error if this is the case. The error is OBJECT (pathname) CLAIMS TO HAVE ID ''!. Do not answer yes when asked if you want to delete this location record, or the Tab Launchpad won't pop up when you double-click a folder background. *Work Areas* FolderWorkareaRunningObjects The WPS keeps a list of the objects that were still opened when the work area folders containing them were closed. If you rename or delete a work area folder, it is not always removed from this list. This test checks the .INI files for old work area folders. Many of the work areas displayed will look familiar, especially if you've renamed a work area recently. Delete any work areas that are found--chances are good that the work area you think is valid is in fact an older copy of the real work area. Even if you accidently delete a work area, the associated work area folder will simply "forget" which objects you last had open. *Object Handles* PM_Workplace:Handles1 The WPS stores a list which correlates object handles with their pathnames, even after the pathname is no longer valid. This test allows you to remove the invalid pathnames. Be careful not to remove pathnames to valid drives that are not currently connected (for example, a temporarily unavailable network drive). You should delete the pathnames for removable media such as floppies or CD-ROM's, however. This test usually finds a lot of errors. After all the tests are complete, CheckINI will ask you if you want to write the changes. The following steps must be performed quickly, or the WPS will overwrite the changes CheckINI makes to the .INI files. Answer "Yes" then press a key to dismiss the information box that follows. At the command prompt, type RESETWPS and answer "Yes" when asked if you're sure. Your desktop will disappear, then reappear after several seconds of hard drive access. If you performed these steps before the WPS updated its files, the new .INI files will have been loaded. ResetWPS has a few unusual side effects that are due to bugs in the WPS. Occasionally, the WPS will crash with a SYS3175 after you run ResetWPS. On some machines, system sounds will stop functioning. Frequently, the OS/2 or DOS command prompt icons become blank. All these symptoms are normal and shouldn't cause alarm. They will go away once you reboot. You should run CheckINI /C again to make sure that you reset the WPS in time. Continue to run CheckINI, followed by ResetWPS, until CheckINI no longer reports errors (except for the WPCmpnp and Tab Launchpad errors). There are a few situations in which CheckINI will report an error and seem to fix it, only to report the error again when re-run. If you run CheckINI and ResetWPS several times and a few errors still persist, they probably cannot be resolved. If these errors are referencing a particular object, you can try to solve the problem by finding the offending object and deleting it. Once you're finished with CheckINI, shut down and reboot. Your desktop should come up without problems. It is possible, however, for a desktop to be so badly damaged that after running CheckINI and rebooting, the WPS reports that it couldn't find the desktop, even if it previously did load it. If this occurs, add SET DESKTOP=x:\DESKTOP to your CONFIG.SYS as described in the "preparation" section and run CheckINI again. There may be times when your desktop is corrupted beyond hope. If the above procedure simply doesn't work for you, you have no choice but to recreate your desktop or restore from backup. If you restore from a backup, I recommend running CheckINI afterwards to ensure that the backup itself doesn't have problems. If you don't have any backups, then your only alternative is to recreate the desktop. This procedure is outlined under the heading "Rebuilding the Desktop" on page 219 of the OS/2 Warp manual and on page 433 of the OS/2 2.1 manual. Conclusions The Workplace Shell can be a pleasure to use, but if your desktop becomes corrupted, it can cause severe problems within your OS/2 environment. With the procedures outlined here, I hope you'll be able to quickly and easily combat problems with your OS/2 desktop. ***** (jiml@teleport.com) Jim Little is a budding OS/2 developer. While waiting for his programs to compile, he amuses himself by finding new and unusual ways to corrupt the WPS. *********************************** Chris's ColorWorks Power Tips - by Chris Wenham The purpose of this new monthly column is to help anyone with SPG's ColorWorks product (any version) learn how to be more creative. Creativity is a resource that we all have, but the way to get it out of the soup that swims in our heads and into the real world is by using the right tools. And any complex and powerful tool needs to be learned properly if one is to get the best results. ColorWorks is often a whole new paradigm when it comes to creating artwork on the computer screen. In fact, most of its techniques have been in use by artists using traditional media for years, but it hasn't been until ColorWorks that the same methods have been implemented so gracefully on the computer. The tips found in this column will come from a number of sources. Some of them will be from us, others will come from the guys at SPG themselves, and the rest will come from you--the reader. We plan on answering any questions you may have about ColorWorks and how to create certain effects with ColorWorks in these pages, as well as publishing any tips _you_ have found and would like to share. Any tips and questions should be sent to (editor@haligonian.com) the editor (he'll forward them to me like all good editors do). A note about versions: Some tips will only be of use to users of ColorWorks V2 because the techniques can only be applied with the features found in this version. Users of ColorWorks v1+ needn't worry, we'll have plenty of tips that you can use too! The tips in this issue have only been tested with ColorWorks V2, however, since a copy of 1.0+ was not available at the time of writing. A note about terms: Text marked in *Bold* represents menus, menu options, radio buttons and checkboxes. Menu options are dot-notated, so for example, to save a file you'd pick *File.Save*. As we go on, we'll start to assume you're getting the hang of ColorWorks' menu structures and controls and these helpers will be mentioned less often. And, of course, you'll always be able to refer back to past installments of this column since back issues of OS/2 e-Zine! remain on-line and off-line copies are always freely available. Let's roll... To get the ball rolling we need a ball to roll. ;-) You can make a sphere or ball of any size by using the new gradient tool of ColorWorks 2.0. The trick is to simulate a light source shining on a spherical object. If you were to look at the silhouette of a sphere you'd see that it is just a black circle, but when light is added to the front of the ball, you perceive depth. To start, create a new file (*File.New*), make sure no effects are in use (*Effects.Clear All Effects* if it isn't greyed out), then use the circle tool to draw a filled circle in the middle of the new canvas. Make it about half the diameter of the window. Now open the *Gradients* effects box (*Effects.Gradients...*). Pick the *Radial* gradient (since the object is circular, the light shining on it will spread out in a circular pattern) and make sure _only_ the *Invert Gradient* and *Opacity* boxes are checked (make sure *Palette Colors* is unchecked). Now click on *OK* and pick a white color from the palette box. Still using the circle tool, draw a circle starting from the top-leftish corner of the first circle and draw the radius out until it encompasses the original. After you release the mouse button, ColorWorks will draw a radial gradient in white while decreasing the opacity steadily outwards. Voila, an instant sphere! This gradient simulates a light source to create a reflection on the sphere slightly offset from the center, fooling the eye into perceiving a third dimension that isn't really there. Tips for improving... o To make the gradient smoother, try adding a little *Noise* to the gradient from the gradient dialog box. A value of 6% is usually enough. o Use a different color for the light, try yellow or bright red. o If you're adding a sphere to an existing picture or to a canvas that has a background other than white (or other than the color you're using as a light source) you should protect the rest of the canvas with a protection mask. You'll probably need to have a protection mask every time you make a sphere, I only failed to mention it in the example above to help make your first attempt easier. To create the protection mask (after drawing the circle, but before applying the gradient): 1. Put ColorWorks into Mask mode (click on the mask button in the toolbar) 2. Pick the floodfill tool from the toolbar and fill the circle 3. Select *Edit.Mask Edit Options.Invert Mask* to invert the mask 4. Select *Edit.Save Mask.Protection Mask* 5. Make sure *Options.Protection Mask* is checked 6. Right-click on the mask button on the toolbar to put ColorWorks back into paint mode This assumes you're drawing the sphere to an existing picture, but if you're drawing to a blank canvas you can just floodfill the _outside_ of the sphere instead of step 2 and skip step 3. o Try adding more than one light source. Simply draw another circle with the gradient effect on somewhere away from where the first was drawn (still offset from the center). o To make a light source appear closer, draw the gradient effect with a smaller circle and use the "DECEL.GRM" gradient map to "decelerate" the gradient. o Switch off the gradient and set the *Effects.Drawing Merge Control...Blend Filled Edges* to 5. Now pick a black color and use the ellipse tool to draw a shadow for the sphere. You should start drawing the ellipse (using the *Diameter* method, double-click on the ellipse tool and verify that this option is checked) at the base of the sphere, moved a little away from where the light source is (if you put the light-source in the top-left you should start drawing the ellipse on the bottom right, outside of the sphere's perimeter). Let the shadow protrude a little bit in front of the sphere like a "lip", since the curvature of the ball would cast a shadow there. Q&A Center In the coming months we'll be answering your letters and helping to solve your creativity problems with ColorWorks. Trying to create a certain special effect? Want to know if ColorWorks can do the job you're looking for? Send a (editor@haligonian.com) letter to the editor describing your problem and we'll put our heads together to solve it. We'll print selected letters and their solutions here. "My old paint program, MegaBrush, had a 'bitmap fill' feature that let me floodfill any area using a bitmap as the source. How can I do this with ColorWorks?" - Joe Anybody, Somewhere, Idano. Joe, in ColorWorks you'd use the *Effects.Clone* effect and then paint with the floodfill tool. Open the bitmap you wish to use as a source (using *File.Open*), make sure the new window is active, pick the *Effects.Clone* effect and when the dialog comes up, click on *Ok* (you don't need to worry if it's *Aligned* or *Non Aligned*). Now pick the floodfill tool and go to the window you want to paint to. Point the cursor to the area you want to fill and click the left mouse button. ColorWorks will fill the area using the bitmap as the source. Note that you can also use any of the other filled tools to draw an object filled with the source image too. (Joe Anybody doesn't really want to be the only person appearing on these pages, so please start sending us your questions!) Readers Tips Readers who've discovered their own neat tips and want to share them with others should (editor@haligonian.com) send them in to be published here. Download Depot The Download Depot is where we'll be posting a whole slew of stuff you can download and use with ColorWorks. Textures, Pixel Displacement Maps, Graphics States, Gradient Maps, Plug-Ins and any other ColorWorks related file that may be of use to you. (See the on-line copy of OS/2 e-Zine! for the Download Depot!) ColorWorks Culture This section is about humorous, strange and interesting things that we discover about ColorWorks. For me I found reviewing ColorWorks V2 to be a very spooky experience. In my review of ColorWorks v1.0, I changed a blue car to green to demonstrate the use of the Channel Swap effect. In The ColorWorks V2 Manual, on page 475, SPG demonstrates the use of the Channel Swap effect by changing a blue car... to green. Ooer. (Okay guys, changing it to pink too didn't fool me.) SPG News SPG's own (http://www.spg-net.com) website usually has something new to read or download (or both). The most recent addition is the Killer Text Effects Volume 1 which describes some pretty nifty tricks for making your letters stand out. Metallic effects, glass effects, neon effects and more. The file is a hefty 6 megabytes to download and is in .INF format (use VIEW.EXE, which comes with OS/2), plus it comes with the ColorWorks files you'll need to create the effects shown in the tutorial. More tips to come next month. ***** (http://www.spectra.net/~fox) Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company--(http://www.spectra.net/~pendulum/webworks) Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and will work for tips. *********************************** Answers from e-Zine! Welcome to a brand new place to get answers to the OS/2 questions that are nagging you! Each month we'll bring you tips, tricks, questions and answers from our readers and contributors relating to common (and some not so common) OS/2 problems and questions. If you've got a question or tip you would like to share with us, (editor@haligonian.com) send it in and we'll make you famous! Now, for this month's questions and tips... - I only have one floppy disk drive, yet OS/2 puts a "Drive A" and a "Drive B" icon in my Drives folder. How can I get rid of the "Drive B" icon? I know when I first started using OS/2 Warp at work, I was frustrated by the "B:" drive icon. I have two floppies at home (where I started with OS/2), so I had never encountered this before. Remembering that OS/2 is object oriented, and with a bit of research, I found an answer. These instructions are for OS/2 Warp, but the theory should be sound for OS/2 2.1+. To get rid of the "B:" drive icon (remember, this just gets rid of the icon from the drives folder, if you have a "B:" drive, you'll still be able to access it via a command line): 1. Right click on the "Drives" icon 2. Choose "Settings" 3. Select the "Include" tab 4. Select the "Add" button 5. Delete the * (in the "Comparison value" field) and type *drive b* in its place 6. Change the radio button from "Include" to "Exclude" 7. Click on the "Add" button 8. Close the "Settings" notebook Now, when you open the drives icon, you won't have a "B:" drive! - (wizzywig@jumpnet.com) Stacy King ***** - I have been using Warp for some time with only 8 meg of RAM and I recently upgraded to 32 meg. As soon as I swapped the new memory for the old, OS/2 would not boot, giving a TRAP error before it loaded the WPS and mentioning something about the SINGLEQ$ driver. I'm positive the memory is the proper speed, parity, etc. and all BIOS settings are optimal. What could be wrong? With a problem so vague, there are a number of things that could be wrong but one thing to watch out for when getting errors related to SINGLEQ$ is possible conflicts between the video driver and parts of the system. As unlikely as it seems, try backing out to normal VGA and see if this clears up the problem. To do this: 1. Reboot 2. Press Alt-F1 when the small white square appears in the top left corner of the screen 3. Press V to reset your system to a normal VGA display 4. Continue booting normally In some cases this may solve the problem and the WPS will appear. If it does, you can then reinstall your card's normal video drivers (either with selective install or with the install routine that came with your video card's OS/2 driver) and see if they continue to cause problems or if all is well. In some cases, the drivers just need to be re-installed after all hardware and memory is in the system. - (eahallbe@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca) Ethan Hall Beyer ***** - I run both Warp and Win95 on my 486dx2-66 9-meg machine. In order to take advantage of HPFS, I've got each on a separate partition, Warp on an HPFS and Win95 on a FAT. I downloaded Just Add OS/2 Warp a while ago after seeing something in its documentation about allowing you to access/use Windows 95's long filenames in addition to Warp's HPFS long filenames. After searching long through JAOW's docs, though, I came to the unpleasant conclusion that the only way this could be done was if both OSes were on the same partition, running under dual-boot (and therefore no use of HPFS possible). My question is this: Is there _any_ way to use JAOW to access Windows 95's long filenames when Warp is on its own HPFS partition? The short answer is no. The utility in the JAOW package will create a LFN Extended Attribute for the VFAT filenames on your FAT partition. However, _very_ few OS/2 programs can make use of these. The Workplace Shell and Stardock's Object Navigator are notable exceptions. However, unless you are content to only manipulate these files with the WPS, you gain no practical benefit from running the JAOW program (as the majority of OS/2 programs will have no idea how to use the LFN EA on the FAT drive). One of the rumored features of the upcoming release of OS/2 (codename Merlin) is native support for VFAT LFN entries. We'll see... - (kwilas@uiuc.edu) Kris Kwilas ***** - A couple months ago I saw a television add for the Macintosh. This kid was sleeping, and he was awakened by his computer playing some sort of multimedia file, a montage of scenes he presumably recorded and put together with some cacophonic accompaniment. Wow, I thought, that's pretty cool. Using your computer as a multimedia alarm clock. I bet OS/2 can do that. My question is this. How can I rig up OS/2 to play a given track on my CD-ROM at a given time? I have figured out how to command OS/2 to launch an application (CDPM.EXE) at a certain time through Planner, but I don't know how I can tell my system to play a specific track (besides track one). I imagine this would be an elementary thing to do under REXX, but the on-line documentation doesn't help me out. Any ideas? There is a PLAY.CMD REXX program that comes with MMOS2. Use this command line, assuming you have your CD hooked up as cdaudio01 (look in the "Parameters" box in the "Settings" notebook of the PM CD player program to be sure). PLAY DEV=CDAUDIO01 TIMEFMT=MS FROM=800000 TO=1017000 This example is for a time format in milliseconds (1000 ms per second) and is for track 4 on one of my CDs which begins at 13:20 (800,000 ms) and ends at 16:57 (1,017,000 ms). You must convert the times to milliseconds by multiplying seconds by 1000 and inserting the numbers as above. For more info on REXX see _The REXX Cookbook_ (e-mail for more info). - (callaway@indirect.com) Merrill Callaway ***** That's it for this month. If you have a tip or question that you don't see covered here, don't hesitate to (editor@haligonian.com) send them in! *********************************** The Chronicles of John Ominor - by John Ominor, The Inhuman OS/2 e-Zine! has provided a remarkable service in the brief amount of time that it has existed. It has quickly moved from a series of vague references to a new OS/2 electronic magazine to an upstart challenger of more conventional forms of media. Now, after six issues, OS/2 e-Zine! has matured into a rich repository of information, a credible publication in its own right. However, the editors, writers, and staff critics of OS/2 e-Zine! are but mortal, with all the fallacies, weakness, and illogic implied therein. Because of this, OS/2 e-Zine! has reached its evolutionary ceiling. After all, homo sapien can advance but so far in a millennium, let alone the six months e-Zine! has existed. This is unacceptable. OS/2 e-Zine! must advance. It is important to the future plans of The Inhuman. However, there is nothing its only human contributors can do. Until now. Someone has been quietly observing, patiently waiting and finally, he is here, prepared to usher in a new era in OS/2 electronic media innovation. Greetings. I am John Ominor, The Inhuman. Welcome to my Chronicles. Being The Inhuman, Ominor can perceive the rather enormous quantities of interrogatives that threaten to split your craniums like so many ripened melons. Namely, "Why did The Inhuman wait so long? Why does he deprive us of his wisdom and his enlightenment? Why does he give us so much and ask so little in return?" The answer is simple. It is the Will of The Inhuman. An answer that confounds many and renders a pitifully small few irretrievably, hopeless bedlamite. Those so afflicted with dementia represent a small band of humans with the insight, the vision to discern Ominor for what he his. Trevor Smith, editor of OS/2 e-Zine!, is such a mortal. He, Cory Hamasaki, and others of their ilk are insane beyond the most fevered dreams of Picasso and da Vinci. They and others like them will provide the core, the nucleus, if you will, of the legions of John Ominor, my Servitors. They are granted this lionization that billions of lesser sentients are denied simply because my servitors are able to "see." They perceive Ominor for what he is, merely a vanguard, one who will shepherd all into the next century via one of the most powerful vehicles ever to come into existence, without The Inhuman's presence somewhere in the vicinity. This conveyance is, of course, OS/2 Warp. "The Chronicles of John Ominor" is a rhadamanthine title because here is where Ominor will ponder issues that concern all of you, his loyal followers. He will provide you with answers and challenge your intellectual limitations--and know this, you do have many failings. He will overwhelm the very core of your being. You must learn from Ominor. Is that not why you are here? You seek to understand OS/2, its strengths and weaknesses. Ominor will explain them. You desire knowledge about shareware, past, present, and future. By his leave, The Inhuman will grant you this and more. Will the available and rapidly growing amounts of commercial OS/2 software offerings satisfy your darkest appetites, thoughts buried so deep that only The Inhuman, one who dwells in shadow, knows them for what they truly are? Again, Ominor will provide you with such information. You long to comprehend the incomprehensible actions of International Business Machines, themselves. The Inhuman will be your source of such comprehension. You quest. You thirst. You seek. You lust. YOU. NEED. OMINOR. His insight, his lore, his praise, and finally, his approval. Your wishes are granted. John Ominor agrees to aid you. John Ominor, The Inhuman is here. Now, let the games... begin. ***** The origins and current plans of (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor are known only to Ominor. He is indeed a mystery to all. Save The Inhuman. *********************************** April's Top Selling Commercial Applications *Note:* The following list represents only the top selling OS/2 applications. OS/2 Warp and OS/2 Warp Connect are not included in the rankings. This Last Product Company Month Month 1 1 Partition Magic v2 Personal Ed. PowerQuest 2 6 IBM AntiVirus v2.4 Desktop Ed. IBM 3 2 Object Desktop Stardock Systems 4 3 DeScribe Voyager CD DeScribe 5 4 Backmaster v2.0 MSR Development 6 8 System Commander v2.2 V Communications 7 9 UniMaint SofTouch Systems 8 5 Hobbes CDROM Archive Walnut Creek 9 - DeskMan/2 Productivity Bundle Dev. Technologies 10 - GammaTech Utilities SofTouch Systems Compiled by (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue, Inc. - Your Single Source for OS/2 Solutions. - March 1996 *********************************** April's Top Selling Shareware This Last Product Company Month Month 1 1 PMMail SouthSide Software 2 4 iLink/2 Craig Pommer 3 2 Xit CodeSmith Software 4 3 ScreenSaver Siegfried Hanish 5 9 Neologic Network Suite NeoLogic 6 6 PMView Peter Neilsen 7 8 MR/2 ICE Nick Knight 8 7 Blanker Peter Wansch 9 10 ZOC EmTec 10 5 Intercom Revolutionary Software ***** Compiled by (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro) BMT Micro - Your Source for Over 75 Quality OS/2 Shareware Applications. - March 1996 *********************************** How to Subscribe for FREE * Subscribe to be notified - FREE! 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For more information please e-mail or phone *(902) 461-2266*. * Readers can sponsor too! If you feel OS/2 e-Zine! is useful, entertaining or educational, please send whatever 12 issues are worth to you. *Even sponsorship of a few dollars is appreciated.* Individuals sponsoring US$ 10 (or CDN$ 15) or more will be listed in our Sponsors Page with an optional link to their home page (this listing is voluntary). Please send: o cash, cheque or money order (International or Canadian--payable to Haligonian Media), o a note stating that it is for OS/2 e-Zine! sponsorship, o your name, o address (city, state/province & country), o e-mail address, and o web url if applicable. Alternatively, you may choose to sponsor OS/2 e-Zine! through BMT Micro by cash, cheque, money order, *Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express or Diner's Club*. Just call: o (800) 414-4268 (Voice) 9:00am - 7:00pm EST, o (910) 350-2937 (Fax) 24 hours a day, o (910) 350-8061 (Modem) 10 lines, all 14.4K, or o (910) 799-0923 (Modem) Direct 28.8K line. Any amount is appreciated and whether you choose to sponsor or not, you will still be able to enjoy every issue of OS/2 e-Zine! on the WWW! For more information or any other questions please e-mail us or contact us at: Haligonian Media 7 Pleasant St., Suite B Dartmouth, N.S. CANADA B2Y 3P1 (902) 461-2266 *********************************** Our Sponsors: BMT Micro (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/) Your complete source for over 75 of the best OS/2 shareware applications available. Drop by today and check out our WWW catalog or download the .INF version. ChipChat Technology Group (http://www.ChipChat.com/home00.html) ChipChat produces excellent 32-bit OS/2 software for wireless text paging and state-of-the-art multimedia Sound Cards for Micro Channel PS/2 computers. EmTec Innovative Software (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/zoc/) EmTec Innovative Software produces state-of-the-art OS/2 ISDN, modem and telnet communications software. OS/2 Magazine and Inside OS/2 1995 award winner. Indelible Blue (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue, a mail order company, provides OS/2 software and hardware solutions to customers worldwide. Post Road Mailer (http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) The Post Road Mailer is a high performance, 32-bit, email program with drag and drop filing, printing, shredding, word wrap and multiple MIME attachments. Surf'nRexx (http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) Use REXX to build powerful Internet utilities using our DLLs. Package also includes 10 utilities as samples. Mt. Baker Software (http://www.Mount-Baker.com/) Developers of "Money Tree", a full featured personal financial package for OS/2. ScheduPerformance, Inc. (http://www.prioritymaster.com/) Patented priority scanning logic and visual priority identification give you performance and control. Shenandoah Equipment Co. (http://www.cfw.com/~shenan/) Providers of lifetime warrantied name brand simms, laptop and printer memory at competitive prices. SPG Inc. (http://www.spg-net.com/) Creators of ColorWorks for OS/2 - The Artist's Ultimate Power Program! ColorWorks has earned both the 1995 OS/2 Magazine Editor's Choice & the 1995 OS/2 Professional Magazine Best New Product Awards. * Readers Who Have Sponsored: The entire staff of OS/2 e-Zine! would like to extend special thanks to the following readers who have made significant contributions. Dr. Ronald E. Wyllys David Busby Stephen Boileau Quentin Z. Whiplinger Gregory Mobley Ian W. MacKee Christopher A. King Michel Slivitzky Dennis J. Tuchler Robert Griswold Wm. Bradley Read II R. Edgar Scrutton Mike Quinn Ralph Cohen Robert D. Miller Jan Schatz Michael Shillingford J. McMillan Vicky Stables Dennis Hayes Scott Allen Craig Sawers Axel Webers *CLC Innovative Designs Ltd.* *********************************** Coming up next time - on the Web May 31, 1996 * Reviews! Neologic Network Suite v4.5 - The long awaited update to the popular OS/2 Internet suite is here. Find out if it was worth the wait. Post Road News Reader - We take a look at one of InnoVal Systems Solutions' most recent Internet software products. WebBook - A look at Sine Qua Non's WebBook as an alternative to WebEx's limited hot list feature * Features! OS/2 Answers - Get your OS/2 questions answered or benefit from others' problems. Our experts answer readers' questions and share their professional tips and tricks with you. ColorWorks Tips! - Chris Wenham continues his column with more cool techniques for ColorWorks. And readers' tips too! * All the Regular Stuff the Rants the Beta File the Rave the REXX Column Linfield's Line Heath's Tips the Warped SOHO Interviews Game Reviews AND MUCH MORE! ******************************** Copyright 1996 - Haligonian Media ISSN 1203-5696