Copyright 1995 - Haligonian Media ISSN 1203-5696 OS/2 e-Zine! November 30, 1995 Volume 1 Number 2 - THE online OS/2 magazine! CONTENTS Welcome back to the Internet's premiere site for news, reviews and information on everyone's favorite 4-byte operating system. We hope you enjoy our second issue. Departments: Opinions: Editorial The Rants. . . Chris' & Trevor's The Rave Heath's Helfpful Tips Linfield's Line The Beta File Why Warp isn't ready. . . Reviews: Feature Review: Object Desktop Pros - Christopher B. Wright Cons - Edward Crouser Other Alternatives - Steven Atchue Games: Galactic Civilizations v1.07 - Chris Wenham Star Emperor Advanced - Edward Crouser Card Games for OS/2 v2.7 - Mikael Engdah HTML Editors: HTML Wizard v1.51 - J.R. Link WebWriter/2 v1.01 - Heath Phillippi HTML Extensions for EPM v0.98 - Trevor Smith Books: OS/2 Warp for Dummies - Chris Wright Interview: Brad Wardell Articles: The Memory Issue - Chris Williams Developer's Connection CD ROM's - Stacy John Behrens. Using OS/2 as a Scientific Platform - Dr. Dirk Terrell Kali for OS/2? - Bernard B. Yoo Odds & Ends: Our Editorial Policy How to Subscribe to OS/2 e-Zine How YOU can Sponsor OS/2 e-Zine! Coming up in the next issue ******************** Back with a vengeance. . . - editorial Hello again. A lot of things have been happening since our last issue. First, as you have probably already noticed by looking at the table of contents, we have met our goal of doubling e-Zine!'s content for the second issue. It wasn't easy; in fact that's why this editorial is being written on the 30th and right now, at 11:30 am, we still haven't posted. Last minute details always take more than a minute. But I guess if you're reading this, it made its way onto the 'net, so no harm done. Second, of course, was the big scare (or was it so big?) over COMDEX. A lot of people, including myself, were more than a little nervous about what would be said - or not said - about OS/2 by Lou Gerstner and his associates. Honestly, I don't know if the speeches given aggravated or assuaged my fears. I guess in retrospect, it was a bit of a non-event, as the long predicted demise of OS/2 has always been. It seems that Big Blue still has plenty of development up their sleeves for our favourite underdog OS. By the way, thanks to everyone who wrote expressing their compliments and support after the first issue. I hope you find even more of what you like in this issue and maybe you'll even find the content somewhat improved. We have great plans for e-Zine!, and sometimes readers reminding us how far we've already come helps keep us motivated. In case anyone is wondering, response to the first issue was overwhelmingly positive. While some took exception to a few of our reviews, even these people remembered to compliment e-Zine! overall. We are now deep into the process of increasing awareness on the 'net and off. Someday, when our little publication isn't so little anymore, we will be able to reminisce fondly of the days when we (all of us, including all the contributors and readers) put the first issue together on nothing more than a credit card, passion and a lot of Coca Cola. To help get us to the point of not being so little anymore, we've tried a few new things with this issue and we hope you like them. New this time are a book review (OS/2 Warp for Dummies - what else?) and an interview with the one and only Brad Wardell of Stardock Systems. Both these features are scheduled to be permanent. We've also added more opinion pieces, reviews, and modified the layout slightly for better organization. As always, don't be afraid to let us know how you like the new sections or suggest ways to improve on what we are already doing. And finally, don't forget, even though we have had great response from people wanting to help out, we are still looking for contributors. The pay's not great :-) but the experience more than makes up for it. Now quit hangin' around here and go read the good stuff. ***** Heath's Tips: How to Warp a Hard Disk - by Heath Phillippi To everyone who read my column last month, welcome back to Heath's Helpful Hints and OS/2 e-Zine!. For all you new comers, thanks for stopping by. Last month we talked about finding information on OS/2. Hopefully you liked what you saw and switched (if you aren't already using OS/2). This month we will be discussing the options for setting up your hard disk with OS/2. Most computer users never think about what file system they are using. They format their hard drive or floppy and put files on it. Period. You get choices about word processors, not file systems. The use of OS/2, however, gives you a few very important new options for setting up hard drives. The most important being HPFS or High Performance File System versus DOS's old FAT file system. Also introduced is the ability to boot between two or more operating systems using the Boot Manager or Dual Boot options. Making a drive HPFS is easy. If you are installing OS/2 just choose to format the partition you plan to install OS/2 on and click the HPFS option button. Be sure to back up the partition if there is data you need on it! If you already have Warp installed and you want to try it on an extra drive or partition simply use the FORMAT /FS=HPFS (type HELP FORMAT from the command line for more options). Even with all the advantages HPFS has over FAT (see below), FAT still has a couple of uses. The first is when you are using a small hard drive (<200 meg or so) or you have limited system RAM (<6 meg); in these situations, FAT is still your best choice. The other place for FAT is if you have to use a Dual Boot setup. Boot Manager or Dual Boot? OS/2 users have the option to boot between more that one OS. This is done by one of two utilities, Boot Manager or Dual Boot. Although they both let you boot between at least two operating systems, they work very differently and have their own advantages and drawbacks. Dual Boot is the default install option for OS/2, and is the more basic of the two. It allows a user to boot either OS/2 or DOS (and therefore Windows 3.x or Win95), but OS/2 and DOS/Windows both reside on the same partition. Users have the ability to switch between the two by going into the \OS2 directory and typing the command "BOOT /OS2" or "BOOT /DOS". This is the only solution for installing OS/2 on a partition that already has DOS, and can't be backed up and re-partitioned. However, it also limits you to using FAT as your file system. Dual Boot also leaves room for mucking up the system. A common example of this occurs when users get a DOS upgrade. They boot off the install floppies, forgetting the OS/2 system files are in the boot sector if the hard drive, and overwrite them. While this isn't life threatening, it can be a hassle. Boot Manager, on the other hand, keeps operating systems separate and allows you to boot between multiple OS's (OS/2, DOS, Linux, etc.). The only down side is that you will have to set up separate partitions for Boot Manager and each OS you plan to run. This means a custom setup and a little planning ahead in order to install Boot Manager, but the effort is well worth it. Partitions For most Dual Boot setups, one large partition that takes up the entire drive is fine. But what about Boot Manager? How many partitions will you need? How big should they be? In my experience I have found a few truths about planning ahead and splitting your disks up based on your needs. 1. If you are planning DOS FAT partitions, keep them as small as possible. I try to stick to under 400 meg, because of the sector size inefficiencies. 2. If you need a data drive that all your OS's can get to, make them small (<200 meg) and make them FAT. 3. If you are using mostly OS/2 (or Win-OS/2), and you meet the minimum hardware requirements (8 meg RAM and >200 meg HD) for HPFS, use it. 4. If you have huge disks (1 gig+) and plan to play with different OS's or file systems, split them up into 500 meg partitions. While this is enough space for most OS's, it isn't too large to be impractical. Don't be afraid to experiment! These are just my opinions based on my experiences. Remember, OS/2 is a great OS that gives the user a great deal of control over how the system is set up. Make your system reflect the way you work. Create a different partition for every app you use. Add a new drive every time you want to play with a new OS (if you can afford it!). It's up to you. Warp the way you want to. **Just a note: Thanks to all the responses to my last column! Please feel free to E-mail me (heathp@athenet.net) any topics you feel should be covered, or any tips you may want to toss my way. If you send tips, tell me if you want me to credit you if I use them. Some people get touchy when you spread their E-mail address around. Go figure.** ----- Heath Phillippi (http://www.athenet.net/~heathp/) 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. ***** HPFS vs. FAT - by Heath Phillippi From the beginning, OS/2 was created as the next step after DOS. The original designers sat down and found all the faults and weaknesses in DOS, then looked at ways to improve these. One of the best results of this was HPFS. HPFS was built from the ground up with large hard disks, speed, and stability in mind. HPFS is an installable file system, just like a CD-ROM. It has a driver that loads and enables OS/2 to read and write to an HPFS volume. Because HPFS is an installable file system, many features are built in, instead of only being supported by third party utilities (like FAT). Some of these features include: resistance to fragmentation, built in caching, long file names (254 characters long), enhanced extended attribute support, and a Hot Fix feature. Because of the way HPFS stores files, it has a built in resistance to fragmentation. When you originally write a file to disk, HPFS assumes you will want to add more to it later. So it adds a little blank space at the end of the file for just such an occurrence. It also handles free space differently. In FAT, addresses for free space are located in a single list. HPFS makes a "map" of free space that can be searched much quicker. All files and directories on an HPFS drive are stored in a Binary Tree fashion, compared to FAT's flat file structure. Since FAT was originally designed for floppy disks with only a few files on them, it starts to loose efficiency on larger hard disks. HPFS, on the other hand, was designed for large disks and doesn't have this problem. Suppose you have a file cabinet with no labels on the drawers. When you create a new file, you stick it at the end of the last drawer. If you have to add to an old file, you stick a note with the original file telling it where to look for the rest of the file. Whenever you need a file, you start looking in the top drawer and keep looking, top down, until you find it. This is how FAT stores and finds files. While this may be alright for one or two drawers, what happens when you get four or eight? Or a hundred? HPFS is like putting labels on the drawers. When you create a new file, you leave a little extra room in the drawer for additions later. When searching for an old file, you no longer need to look through drawers one and two to get to three, you just jump there. When dealing with larger numbers of files, the advantages start adding up, the most important being SPEED. Another advantage of HPFS on large hard disks is a set sector size. No matter how big the drive, HPFS always has a sector size of 512 bytes. FAT's sectors, on the other hand, range anywhere from 512 bytes to 32000 bytes. On a 512 meg drive the sector size is around 8000 bytes, and on a 1 gig drive the sector size is 16000 bytes! This leads to major inefficiency and wasted space. Take a look at your current drive, how many files are under 16K or just slightly above? Each one is taking space in multiples of 16k, whereas on an HPFS partition these files are taking up space in multiples of 512 bytes, or 1/2K. One other bonus of HPFS is that it is resistant to most common virii. Because most virii exploit weaknesses in FAT, they simply fail when they try to infect an HPFS drive. Don't let this give you a false sense of security, though. Many new virii are created monthly, and you can bet some of them will eventually be HPFS aware. HPFS also automatically caches information being written and read from the hard drive. The line which starts the HPFS driver has a switch for cache size (/CACHE:xxxx). Standard HPFS has a maximum cache size of two meg. Since HPFS has caching built in, the designers decided to go one step further and added a Hot Fix feature. If, while writing data to the drive, HPFS detects a problem with a sector, it stores the data to an area set aside for just such an occasion. Then, upon the next boot up the sector is marked bad permanently. So instead of waiting until you can't read data from a bad sector (like FAT) HPFS never even writes data to it. Another downfall of fat is the 8.3 naming convention. HPFS allows file names up to 254 characters long, containing multiple periods, spaces, dashes, etc. One caveat, though: try to avoid spaces in names of any files you plan to access to from the command line. To specify a file with spaces from the command line you will have to put the name in quotes ("") in order for OS/2 to recognize it as one file and this can get a little tedious. One last major enhancement of HPFS is its handling of Extended Attributes. OS/2's Extended Attributes can store up to 64k of information about a file. This can be information about the file's icon, search keywords, or just about anything else you or the programmer want to store about the file. EA's are stored in a central database on a FAT partition, with a small pointer at the end of the file. All these pointers leave a lot of room for disaster if a something destroys the central database. HPFS on the other hand, stores the EA's on a per file basis. This means if one file's EA's get corrupted, all files are not necessarily affected. ----- By Heath Phillippi. ***** The Beta File Welcome back to the Beta File. As always, there is plenty of activity going on in native OS/2 application development. In fact, the list below represents only half of the people I targeted this month. Where are the other half? Too busy to write an E-mail in exchange for free publicity I guess. And of course, in the course of the month, I 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 drop me a note (editor@mail.isisnet.com)! So let's get into the good stuff. By the way, did you ever notice that software companies have a penchant for naming their products with two words strung together? Like SuperWidgit? Have a look below. ----- Have you ever looked at Web Explorer and thought, "Boy, this thing could really use a better hot list manager"? Well, it seems that we won't have to rely on the Web Ex team to find the time to fix this. Dave Peterson (davmp@schema.com) of Sine Qua Non, Inc. (http://www.schema.com/schema) is deep into a beta test of his new product, WebBook(TM). WebBook attaches itself to Web Ex and replaces the Quicklist so you can group, arrange, edit, and update your URLs. It provides a graphical, drag-drop, interface that is capable of interacting with Web Explorer URL objects. The program allows grouping of URLs into five hierarchical containers called pages, books, shelves, aisles and libraries. Everyone's got to reinvent the wheel, right? Still, it sounds useful. The price of this little miracle? A mere $10 (US) registration fee. I expect you all to do the honorable thing. In beta since August, Sine Qua Non currently has over 100 testers. Things seem to be on schedule for a December 18th general release of WebBook. You can find more info and screen shots of WebBook at their web site (http://www.schema.com/schema) but you should note that they are getting their own domain name soon. Look for the E-mail and web addresses to change to: davmp@sinequanon.com http://www.sinequanon.com/sinequanon ----- If you thought that no cutting edge Web stuff was going on in the OS/2 world, think again. By the time you read this, Eagen Software (http://www.eagen.com) will be into beta with WarpSpace, an OS/2 VRML browser. VRML stands for Virtual Reality Modeling Language and next to Java it's the hippest buzzword on the 'net. Basically, it allows you to build 3D virtual worlds and navigate the WWW in 3D. David Eagen (info@eagen.com) assures me that the fully 32-bit multithreaded architecture will keep the program snappy. The user will also be able to control the level of detail they desire to change performance and rendering quality. Sounds good. WarpSpace uses OpenGL and DIVE for speed and will automatically direct non VRML links to Web Explorer and VRML links to WarpSpace. There will even be support for Virtual I/O's i-glasses - a hip new VR interface that you wear on your melon. As Eagen says, "The days of flat and boring HTML are quickly disappearing. VRML frees users to surf the Internet in immersive 3D virtual reality." Why would we ever want to come back? The Alpha test included 16 people and the beta will be open to all. Expect to see a shareware release sometime in December 1995. The price should come in under $50 (US) but may be nudged a little higher for the version supporting i-glasses. ----- Good news for those of you who have been pining to call your Aunt Louise in Fiji via the Internet. Jonathan Tew (jtew@revsoft.is.net) is finishing up InterCom, a complete telephone for the Internet. Some of the features include: Caller ID, Call Blocking, answering machine, and of course, person to person calling. No intermediate servers are required - this is strictly two person communications. InterCom had been in beta for a couple of weeks at the time this was posted and over a hundred users had signed up. A final shareware release should be available no later than January, but in the meantime, Tew is frequently updating the betas with new features. The registration price will be around $29.99 (US). Eventually, a commercial version may be available in stores. Let's hope! Unfortunately, as Tew puts it, "Internet phone [apps] like [InterCom] are still evolving," so both users need to use the same software. This means you won't be able to chat with Aunt Louise if she's using Windows (and a Windows Internet Telephone program) or even if she finds some alternative OS/2 program. This stuff is still strictly proprietary. The current beta is public and can be downloaded from the web page (http://revsoft2.is.net/ic/intercom.html). So go have a look. And give us a call when you get there. ----- And to satisfy the tech heads in the crowd, the next release of the Graham Utilities for OS/2 by WarpSpeed Computers (http://www.netins.net/showcase/spectre) is currently in beta testing. I can attest the amount of work being put into it as I'm part of the beta program and my mailbox is constantly stuffed with suggestions and comments. For those who don't know what the Graham Utilities do (where have you been hiding?), they are basically a drop in replacement for the Norton Utilities for DOS, and a competitor to the Gammatech Utilities. Chris Graham (100250.1645@CompuServe.Com) is the mastermind behind this suite of 68+ separate programs and modules specifically written for OS/2. This version includes a re-edited and expanded 324 page manual in both printed and .INF format. Shortly, the entire manual will be on-line as a web page! The list of new and enhanced features is so long that I wouldn't know where to begin. As Chris Graham says, "There are now over 68 apps! Where do I start? [They are] the only utils to have remote network diagnosis, the best HPFS support period. Runs under all versions of OS/2. . ." As always, pop over to the web site or E-mail for more info. There are over 70 people worldwide taking part in the beta and final delivery is expected in January or February of '96. Take note: this is a commercial release. Expect to find it for about $99.00 (US) on the shelves. ***** Chris' Rant - by Chris Wenham Holy War! Can you continue your petty bickering? I find it most intriguing. - Data, Star Trek - The Next Generation. In a way, operating systems are like cults. People don't use them, they follow them, just because they like the OS and want something to crusade for. One of the primary activities of these cults is to bash the 'other OS'. What may start out as petty bickering can actually blossom into intelligent, witty debate, or it can collapse into name calling. But y'know, whenever I've got into one, I've found it to be just plain fun. Man cannot thrive on tree-hugging alone, we need a bit of conflict, a cheerful punch on the other guy's nose, so have a good bash! This is a great way to let off steam, and y'know what else? It's educational too. Yeah, lets feel good for a change. No I don't want to hear about layoffs at IBM or yet another windows gadget, I wanna feel good. I wanna shout about how great my system is and all the cool things it does. What I also wanna do is say how crappy the other guys is. Heh heh! Yeah go on, throw your best punch, I can take it. Y'know what, I'm just gonna load up a new web page, UUDecode these alt.binaries groups, start an FTP transfer, print a document, format a floppy, and do my bi-monthly hard disk defrag in the background while you wait for your computer to finish swapping so you can type your feeble "Oh yeah! Well you just wait!" type reply in IRC. Oops, Connection Reset by Peer. Haw haw! Maybe next time, buddy. Thbbbbbbbt! It's a 'Tastes Great/Less Filling' shouting match for the 90's that's a few steps higher on the intellectual ladder. Learn something from it Didn't I say it was educational? It is, it really is. Look, when you've got a face to protect you're going to make sure your facts are up to date and correct, and guess what, so's the other guy. Once you get started you'll have your nose in the manuals, the magazines, the books. You're being driven by the animal instinct to get the better on your rival, and it is soooooo satisfying when you win. You end up finding out more about your side as well as the other guy's side, and vice versa. Some guy points out that his gizmo has the plonk feature, and you pleasantly discover that your gizmo has the plonk feature AND the whoopsie feature. Mwah-hah! Gotcha! Nyah-nee-nah-nee-nyah-hah! And of course you go back to work with a couple of extra features at your disposal that you never knew were there before. If you play the game smart you may learn more than just interesting facts about the products you use, you may also learn how to change yourself for the better. We're all human, so no matter how hard we try not to we're bound to make mistakes. A classic human flaw is the inability to take criticism, and having cold water splashed in your face is one way to correct that flaw. Learn how to admit that you're wrong, because in the long run you'll be a much stronger person. You'll also serve as a role model to others who see your strength and seek to emulate it. Imitation is the highest form of flattery after all. Moderation, Moderation, Moderation. But take it easy, wontcha? Some people I've seen aren't advocates, they're 'Freds'. Lemme tell you about Fred. Fred is my pet dog, a cross-breed/mongrel/mutt type woof. He's getting old now and his eyesight is really bad, not to mention his hearing. What Fred does, which is really funny to watch, is what I call 'clockwork woofing'. He starts barking, and as he does so he starts to slowly trot down the hill wagging his tail furiously. Wag-woof-wag-walk-wag-woof -bark-wag-walk-woof-wag on and on and on down the hill, his body swinging to-and-fro as his tail seems to wag him instead. He looks like a clockwork toy, slowly winding down. Eventually he gives up and meekly trots back to the house. Now I compare this to some operating system 'advocates'. They march through the newsgroups or IRC channels or wherever, chugging along barking "OS/2 Sucks! Win Rools!" and gradually winding down as they run out of steam. Chug-flame-shout-FUD-chug- woof-wag-bash-chug on and on and on. This isn't debate, this isn't argument or advocacy, it's clockwork woofing! Bah, ignore them, don't even reply and give them the satisfaction of being woofed back at. They just want acknowledgement and recognition from who they foolishly consider to be their 'peers'. They go away eventually when they get no response. Don't become a rabid fanatic either, they're no fun at all. Not everyone wants to know about what does or doesn't suck, or even cares that they could be working better. Take it to where it belongs Starting a holy war right where people are quietly trying to get information is not very polite. If something smells as if it's brewing, invite the interested parties to a separate newsgroup or channel or whatever. In the right kind of arena you can cultivate all the good things that go with debate - learning, unwinding, having fun, feeling good etc. etc. Feel Good That's really the point of it you see, to feel good. We feel good when we feel that our platform is secure and has a future. Well it does! You won't feel good if you let the other guy get to you though, so don't! Don't let him get to you. Remember that the battleground is even, each OS has its fair share of advantages and disadvantages. You chose yours because the advantages were important enough and the disadvantages unimportant enough. If you find that you can't carry on and still feel good about it, then get out! You don't have to be another soldier in the army of advocacy if you don't want to, you can go back to your work and relax and feel good in other ways. So let's get going boys and girls! Arm the cannons! Raise the bayonets! Windoze Sucks! OS/2 Rools! CHEEAAARRRRGGGGEEEE!!!! End of rant. ----- If you are still in the mood for Chris Wenham's (http://www.spectra.net/~fox) ranting, then check out his home page. ***** I've got two things to yell about this month, so hang on to your hats. Why is it you can't walk into a computer store and have someone service you instead of sermonize you? I just went for a walk and stopped into a new computer store in the neighbourhood. You should know, this wasn't a Business Depot, or Future Shop or CompUSA or what-have-you. This was a hole in the wall, nickel and dime clone shop. Still, I wasn't in there for two minutes before the Microsoft propaganda started. Before I go any further, this is not a Microsoft bashing so put your bats away. I'm sure whatever the trendy, over-marketed product of the day was, these people would have given me the same line. It just so happens that being in a near monopoly position, Microsoft has the trendy, over-marketed product of the day. Anyway, back to my gripe. They had a nifty little P90 machine with all kinds of gadgets (including Windows 95 and a slew of Microsoft CD's) coming in at around $2,000 Canadian (not a bad price). I sat down and started playing just as I was attacked by the sales person. As if I couldn't read the sign on top of the computer (or hadn't seen the lighted display outside) she commenced to tell me what came with the machine. OK, some folks need to have their hands held. We hadn't gotten too far when I asked, "Does it come with Windows 95 preloaded?" "You bet. That's what your using right now!" she said gesturing at the screen. Um, OK again. Maybe some people are so dumb they can't remember how little they know and need to be reminded once in a while. I was disappointed because I would hate to pay extra for an operating system I'll probably never use (even if it is only a dollar or two) and I would really hate to be added to the meaningless statistics of Windows 95 sales figures. I tried another angle. "Can you preload OS/2?" This puzzled her a bit. "If you buy it we could probably put it on for you," she said. This was obviously getting me nowhere. I tried to explain that I wasn't exactly the world's largest purchaser of Microsoft products but I don't think it sunk in. "You see, I'm not really keen on Windows," I said. "Oh, yeah, our tech support guy says that from the support side it can be a bit of a headache, but as far as ease of use goes Office (for Windows 95) is the best thing in the world!" "I take it you've never used a Mac," I said. See, I don't always maintain that OS/2 is the best solution. "Oh, well, no. All my machine's have been PC's." She might as well have said, "I grew up in Redmond and never did travel much." It was obvious she wasn't going to stop pushing Microsoft's wonders so I came out and told her, "You see, I publish an OS/2 magazine a-" I had more to say but she cut me off with, "Which you can do with Microsoft Publisher!" while rushing over to the shelf to point it out to me, as if I disbelieved its existence. I gave up and left it at, "That's not too likely." Even this couldn't be the last word, though. "Yes you can, why . . ." I stopped listening about there. I don't know what was going on here, but I suspect it was one of two things. Either she just wasn't listening to me (probable) or she was just plain stupid (also probable). I don't mean that she was stupid because she hadn't heard of this glorious publication, or because she didn't share my personal view on operating system superiority. I mean because she, like almost every other person in this industry, from sales grunt to editor-in-chief of certain magazines, opens her mouth and swallows whatever foul smelling propaganda overcharged marketing departments shovel into it. I don't want to be told what the latest and greatest thing that I absolutely *must* have is when I walk into a computer store. I want to *tell* the clerk what I *must* have. I don't care if it's hardware or software, from Redmond or Boca Raton. I want to be able to walk into a store and have a salesperson ask me what I want. Not tell me. At least they can pretend they're interested until they get my money. Enough about that. Let's change the subject before an artery explodes. I was playing with a nifty little utility called "Change Controls" by Matt Schellhaas (c2mxsche@fre.fsu.umd.edu) yesterday (you can find it at Hobbes somewhere: chg_ctls.zip), thanks to a tip from my colleague, Chris Wenham. This little gadget is so keen it warrants a rave of its own, but that spot is already filled this month and it's a little small anyway. What it does is just what it sounds like - it changes the control buttons (maximize, minimize, hide, system and scroll bar) in OS/2 windows. The new buttons are very similar to Object Desktop's defaults - so if you installed OD just for that, uninstall it - and even more similar to Windows 95's. They are nice, but not exactly what I prefer, so I played around and DREW MY OWN! That's right, with the simple instructions included in the zip file I drew my own buttons for my OS/2 windows. The author even included a replacement button for NPS WPS' exit button so it matches his colour scheme (although I changed the colour). If all this went right over your head, just believe me; Warp looks better with nicer buttons. It's so simple it makes me want to cry. And that's what I want to talk about. I'm assuming the author is not an IBM employee since he states in his readme file that he has no idea if his changes will work for versions of OS/2 earlier than Warp. What his program does is find the places in OS/2's PMMERGE.DLL file where the bitmaps of the buttons are stored, and change them. It's not rocket science. I'm no crackerjack programmer, but I doubt it's even difficult. This guy seems to have managed to do it from a reverse engineering viewpoint. So, why the heck is it, that in one year of comments that Warp isn't very pretty with the imminent release of the oh-so-slick Windows 95, that no one at IBM took 45 minutes to sit down and do this!?!? I'm so mad about this I could scream. The people at IBM, in my opinion, should have bought a full time design person, paid the additional $40,000/year it would have cost them (a drop in the bucket compared to OS/2's expense) and thanked their lucky stars that they could add so much value to their OS for such a small price. Prettier buttons and flashier icons go a long way in selling things to consumers - just ask Microsoft. But if they can't do that, then at least do what Matt Schellhaas did. My God, the guys at IBM wouldn't even need to guess what went where, they could just change the source and recompile. What's that? You can't give some people a snazzier version of Warp because it's not fair to those who have already received the plain vanilla version? Then write a small utility like Matt did and put it on the retrieve software updates and every other ftp site and bbs known to creation. What's that? You don't want people fiddling with their PMMERGE.DLL files, just in case? Then just update the file at IBM and offer an alternative PMMERGE.DLL on the ftp sites. What has to happen to these people to wake them up? If this was a major amount of work I would understand. I didn't choose to buy OS/2 because I wanted a prettier OS (although that was part of it - I was using Windows 3.1). I wanted a stable OS and I got it. And I wouldn't want the boys and girls in Boca Raton (or wherever they are madly working on Merlin) to sacrifice that stability and power for glitz. But this glitz doesn't take any significant time! Fine, don't redraw the entire screen, but we're talking about 24 18x18 pixel bitmaps here. Yes, 24! This is so insignificant a cosmetic fix that it's embarrassing to think that they haven't done it. I am embarrassed for them. If someone doesn't get their head out of wherever it is, and soon, I'm just going to give up on these guys. I had better stop now. I think I feel that artery pulsing again. ----- Trevor Smith (editor@mail.isisnet.com) is the editor of OS/2 e-Zine!. ***** The Rave: FileBar v2.05 - by Trevor Smith Welcome everyone. This is not another review column. You won't find a ton of facts or screen shots galore here. The purpose of this column, quite simply, is to discuss an OS/2 specific product that is so great that it just has to be raved about. For the first installment I could have chosen some fancy new application rich in the latest buzzwords or riding on any one of a dozen popular bandwagons. But I didn't. Instead I want to tell you about an old gem whose author finally pulled it out, recut and polished it - FileBar v2.05. Before you say, "Huh?" and dismiss me, read on - especially if you are running a memory-challenged OS/2 machine. In preparation for editing this month's Object Desktop reviews I was using OD as well as various applications being reviewed as alternatives to OD. While investigating MDesk, I found that it can be run as a WPS replacement saving a fair amount of RAM. It was nice and speeded my somewhat sluggish 8 meg test machine. But it wasn't something that I personally wanted to use for a long time. Then I tried FileBar. I had tried an earlier version (1.x) but dumped it because it seemed to crash a lot. Since this is a job *and* a hobby, I thought I should try the latest version just to be safe, so I went off to my favourite FTP site, grabbed v2.05, installed, read the instructions and made it my default shell (in that order). Wow. Things were noticeably faster with MDesk. Things are *incredibly* fast with FileBar and it's *incredibly* customizable. I was so amazed, I played with it until 1:00 am, just waiting for the catch. But there was none. OS/2 on my 8 meg machine now runs as fast (almost) as Windows 3.1 does. No joke. I have things tuned a bit and I have a 1 meg disk cache. Check out these numbers. If they don't impress you, you're not using an 8 meg machine. These tasks typically took 5 - 10 times longer using WPS because of disk swapping. Web Explorer now takes about 13 seconds to open completely. PMMail finally competes head to head with Eudora opening under Windows: 6 seconds to open completely. PMView: 4 seconds. Closing of most apps is almost instantaneous instead of the incessant grinding I was accustomed to. I even opened a dialer connection to my local Internet Service Provider and Neologic's news reader. Previously if I queued messages for auto-uudecoding there was noticeable swapping and performance suffered. Now the entire operation took place *almost entirely in memory!* Even with PMMail open at the same time! For those annoyed by the long boot time of OS/2 and the WPS, try a replacement shell. I go from choosing OS/2 (as opposed to DOS) to a fully booted FileBar in 1 minute 5 seconds. Every time. It's not the 35 seconds of Windows 3.1, but then it's not Windows 3.1. It's a rock solid, pressure tested, OS/2 machine. I can spare the extra 30 seconds once a day. The performance boost is not the end of the wonders of this little program. The menus are a breeze to set up and can have sub-menus. Everything is intuitive and if you are using it in conjunction with the WPS, you can even drag and drop objects to set up menu entries. If you don't like the order of a menu, no problem, just shift items up or down with one mouse click. Don't like the font or colour of the bar? Drag a new colour or font from the WPS palettes. Done. I'm just amazed. To top this, If you need the functionality of the WPS, you can click a FileBar menu and jump into it with no more of a footprint than if you had booted directly there. FileBar doesn't use objects, folders and all that other great stuff, so you might want to take advantage of this occasionally. Also, you'll want to get some kind of file/directory manager, but then the drives object isn't much of one anyway. Don't get me wrong - I love the WPS - but why didn't IBM provide this with Warp? If you want to claim that OS/2 runs in 4 meg (or even 8), *give people something like this* as an option to the WPS and Launchpad. Gone would be those shortsighted fools who complain about Warp's speed on an 8 meg machine. I was a little sad that I had to give up the one click exit button which I had previously been getting from NPS WPS enhancer. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that NPS WPS actually works even when using FileBar as a shell. I'm not quite sure who to kiss for this, NPS or FileBar, but I'm happy. Even if I were to come into sudden wealth and buy another 16 meg or so of ram, I think I like FileBar better than the launchpad so I'll probably keep it even if I don't need it as a shell. Eric A. Wolf is about to become $25 richer. Yep. That's the price of this little wonder. A great deal cheaper than 8 meg of RAM. Or 4 meg. The docs could stand some polishing but they are clear and informative. I, for one, am glad that Mr. Wolf spent his time coding instead of editing. It could also use an automatic installation for shell replacement and a deinstallation program, but if you are brave enough to replace the WPS, you probably don't need them. Still if they were there, those not brave enough might finally be able to have an incredibly stable, ripping-fast OS/2 box. All I have to say is thank you, Eric A. Wolf, for making Warp smoke on my 8 meg machine. And, wow. ----- FileBar v2.05 (233k) ftp.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/fileb205.zip Author(s): Eric A. Wolf (ericwolf@iquest.net) Format: Shareware Registration: US$ 25 ----- Trevor Smith (editor@mail.isisnet.com) is the editor and publisher of OS/2 e-Zine! and now he's a happy 8 meg user. ***** Linfield's Line - by Kevin Linfield OS/2 Users vs IBM The more time goes by, the more I realize that it is the users, not IBM who promote OS/2. We organize groups such as Team OS/2 and city "User Groups" to promote it to co-workers, friends, and even the general public. You can see volunteers at computer events such as COMDEX and ComputerFest, giving up their time to help promote their operating system, and in the plethora of newsgroups, defending OS/2's honour and assisting others with answers and helpful tips. How many of us started using OS/2 because of an IBM advertisement? Although there must be at least one person in the world, I'd bet that the total number would be very small. I'll use my own story as an example. I bought a new 486DX33 with 4 MB of RAM in February 1992, and on its 120 MB hard drive was good old DOS 5.0. Believe it or not, I actually bought Windows 3.0 based on the hype and hoopla. I soon became frustrated with Windows because a) I didn't have any Windows applications and b) it wouldn't run my DOS programs in a window. I figured that if I was going to task switch DOS programs, I might as well use DOSShell (a utility which came with DOS 5.0). Later that year, a friend at University told me about OS/2 2.0. To be brutally honest, I had never thought of OS/2 before this point (i.e. what advertising?). He gave me some propaganda and he was able to convince me to upgrade to 8 MB of RAM and buy OS/2 (on 5.25" disks no less). Since then, I have become somewhat of a fanatic and have tried to learn all I can about OS/2. I run it at home, on my notebook, at work, and even on my father's 386 with 4 MB of RAM (of course, with Program Commander/2 as a replacement shell.) I recommend it to my friends, participate in local computer events, and even helped organize the Toronto OS/2 User Group. And talk about advertising? Lately, all I've seen are the "nun" commercial, and the Warp Connect machine in the jungle. OS/2 2.1 ads involved a pool table. Boring. Even magazine ads are just plain dull. I strongly doubt that this kind of advertising is effective. No catchy jingle. No famous spokesperson. Not even its own infomercial. Even in retail stores OS/2 is not well known to the staff. With few pre-loads, there are few applications available on the shelves. And those that are on the shelf do not represent the wealth of OS/2 software available. One of the cries emanating from the vocal minority is that OS/2 has no applications. Have they ever checked out Indelible Blue, Below Zero, or House of Technology? These OS/2 stores sell more applications than you can shake a stick at. How did you get into OS/2? Did you install it yourself? I know of only a handful of people who successfully performed their own first install. Even I had my friend come over and assist me, and in turn I have assisted close to 100 people with their machines. So if it is so hard to install, and IBM doesn't promote it, why are OS/2 users so gung ho about their systems? I suspect that we feel that we've finally found an operating system that takes full advantage of our hardware. No more 640kb memory hassles. No more FAT file systems. The limitations of DOS are gone, but we still have the capability of running DOS and Windows software if the need arises. The rumours of OS/2 dying have been around since OS/2 was invented. But no matter what IBM does, OS/2 will never die as long as there are enthusiastic users who promote the system and provide support, whether in person, via the Internet, or even at computer shows and events. ----- Kevin Linfield is a Toronto based consultant and freelance writer. He can be reached via E-mail at ag883@torfree.net ***** Why OS/2 Warp isn't ready for prime time... yet - by Bernard B. Yoo Anyone who has been using OS/2 Warp knows that it is very stable, supports more applications than any other desktop operating system, and comes with powerful internet access utilities. Despite all these positive aspects of Warp, many computer users are unwilling to make the switch. There are reasons for this. First of all, OS/2 is not quite as easy to install and configure as it should be for the home market. Second, most users do not have enough RAM to realize the performance benefits of Warp. Third, there is a relative lack of "mainstream" applications and device driver support. Finally, there is the lack of publicity. For these reasons, OS/2 Warp, in its current form, is not ready for prime time. When I say OS/2 Warp is not ready for "prime time", what I mean is that Warp is not ready for the "average computer user" who bought a preassembled computer with Windows and a bunch of applications preinstalled. Computer aficionados like me have the patience, skills, and experience to prepare a computer for a new operating system, install the new system, and configure it. Computer aficionados can do whatever it takes to make the operating system work. The "average computer user", on the other hand, does not realize that it is better to put Warp in its own HPFS partition. Even if they did, they probably don't know how to repartition their drive. When they try, they may not realize that this results in a loss of all their data. Then they blame the loss of the data on OS/2. Perhaps realizing this, IBM made the default "easy installation" use the dual-boot option in which Warp is installed on a FAT partition alongside Windows. This, of course, has the unfortunate effect that the "average computer user" does not get the performance, reliability, and long filename support of HPFS. Once OS/2 is installed, the "average computer user" expects the device drivers for all his or her hardware to work. While computer aficionados know where to look for the latest device drivers, many "average computer users" may not even have internet access. Some device drivers don't quite work right. I am painfully aware of this problem because the driver for my video card does not work with Win-OS/2 sessions. Assuming the "average computer user" does manage to successfully install and configure Warp, their first impression will likely be that Warp is slower than their previous operating system. Anybody who has used Warp on an 8 meg machine, typical of the machines sold in the past year, knows that it requires a lot of disk swapping. While the computer aficionado will anticipate this and either get more memory or use a smaller shell, like FileBar, the "average computer user" will not be so objective about it. Their decision will be made. "OS/2 Warp on my machine is slower than my previous operating system". If the "average computer user" does have enough RAM to be happy with OS/2's speed, the next thing they will look for is applications. Sure, you can run Windows applications in OS/2. You can even do it seamlessly (if your video card driver supports it), but if you're going to be running Windows applications, why not just use Windows? Besides, Warp doesn't run Windows 95 applications and that seems to be the direction where application developers are heading. When the "average computer user" goes into a retail store, what they see is Windows applications, not OS/2 applications. OS/2 aficionados know about DeScribe and Mesa, but these are not "mainstream" enough for the "average computer user" to be comfortable with. Finally, there has not been enough publicity for OS/2. OS/2 is already disadvantaged because most computer vendors preload their systems with Windows. OS/2 doesn't have the name recognition that Windows has. Most hardware manufacturers advertise their products' Windows compatibility, not OS/2 compatibility. In the face of these obstacles, it is crucial that IBM engage in a massive, high-energy marketing effort to make OS/2 successful. Actually, considering the shortcomings I've just described, it's probably a good thing that there hasn't been much publicity. Can you imagine IBM pushing Warp on the average consumer? All the installation problems, configuration problems, device driver problems? As it is now, most OS/2 Warp users are computer aficionados, like me, who know what hardware is required to realize the benefits of OS/2, who know how to best configure OS/2, who know where to find new device drivers, etc. Knowing this, IBM may have intentionally limited its OS/2 Warp marketing effort, to attract only those people who are prepared to deal with these problems. OS/2 Warp is a very capable operating system, but for the reasons described above, it is simply not ready for prime time... yet. editor's note: Are you a little miffed by the preceding article? Do you have some dissenting thoughts? If so, send in your complaints. But more importantly, check back next time for Bernard's follow-up article discussing why Warp will eventually succeed. ----- Bernard Woo (bernie@owlnet.rice.edu) is a student of mechanical engineering and political science at Rice University. After using Windows 3.1 for four years he finally started using OS/2 in October '95. ***** Object Desktop Orientation - by Christopher B. Wright Stardock Systems has turned more than a few heads lately: first, they came out with OS/2's first truly popular game, Galactic Civilizations. Then, they introduced OS/2 Essentials, a group of useful OS/2 utilities including a file manager and a "Trash Can" modeled after the Macintosh version. And now, finally, Stardock has introduced Object Desktop, an OS/2 GUI enhancement that integrates seamlessly into OS/2's Workplace Shell. Object Desktop is perhaps Stardock's greatest offering to the OS/2 market to date. With this product they have distinguished themselves as a sophisticated and thoughtful company that can create useful, innovative, and aesthetically-pleasing products. Installing Object Desktop The first reaction you'll probably have when you open your Object Desktop package is to exclaim, "but it's only two disks!" Actually, Object Desktop only takes up one disk: the other is labeled "SDS Extras" and comes with icons, bitmaps, and file archiving utilities as a bonus package. Stardock was able to squeeze all of Object Desktop onto one disk by relying heavily on IBM's SOM, the object-oriented tools and standards used in OS/2's Workplace Shell. Installation is, on the whole, very simple: the most difficult part is figuring out that you only need one disk. The first disk in the package is labeled "Object Desktop: Disk 1 of 2," and the second is labeled "SDS Extras," which is, of course, disk 2 of 2. When I opened my package, however, and saw "Disk 1 of 2" on the label, and no disk labeled "Disk 2 of 2" included, I was afraid that my package might be incomplete. Happily, I tried to install it anyway, and discovered my fears were unfounded. Still, I advise Stardock to remove that marking on the first disk in future releases. This would circumvent needless confusion. The installation, however, is quite simple and painless. Using Object Desktop After you've managed to recover from the shock of installing only one disk (and perhaps, at this point, you're a little disappointed - after all, a program that fits on one disk can't be terribly far-reaching, can it?) you'll be hit with another blow. Something has changed on your desktop. The old, familiar, somewhat homely OS/2 GUI has been altered, modified, and tweaked to the point where it's barely recognizable. In fact, the most common reaction for people is to exclaim, some in wonder, some in fear: "It looks like Windows 95!" Well, it doesn't look exactly like Windows 95, but the similarity is there. Legend has it that Stardock Systems would sit around quietly on the internet, listening to Windows 95 advocates brag about all the advantages that their GUI gave them, and how pretty it was, and why... then silently, gleefully, they would take those comments and put them into Object Desktop. Well, I'm not a big fan of Windows 95's interface (I think it looks a lot like a Nintendo arcade game) but I do think the Workplace Shell is very, very ugly. (Tack about seven more "very's" to that statement and you'll get close to how I feel about it). The changes Object Desktop makes to the Workplace Shell GUI are breathtakingly elegant without going too far into the dubious world of the Video Game Interface ("VGI"? Could I be the proud father of a new acronym?) Object Desktop changes the way your desktop looks, gives it extra features, and changes some of the ones you already have. It adds new kinds of objects into the OS/2 object hierarchy. It gives you a new, stunningly attractive file manager. It adds nifty, hi-tech button bars and virtual desktops to your desktop. And if you install the extras on disk two (SDS Extras) you get object-oriented archiving and un-archiving, bitmaps, and icons, allowing you to completely remake the face of your (previously somewhat homely) desktop. Object Desktop has its own folder on the Desktop, which allows you to modify all of its programs and settings. Most of the settings can be modified by clicking on the Object Desktop Master Setup icon, which opens the Object Desktop Master Setup notebook. In this notebook, you can modify, activate and deactivate the changes Object Desktop makes globally on your system. One of the things you might change, for example, is the way OS/2 displays dragging a window. Usually, when you choose to drag a window across the screen, OS/2 displays only the frames of the window until you let go of it, at which point the entire window suddenly "appears" at that location. Object Desktop allows you to see the entire window move as you drag. A good feature for those people, like myself, who are unreasonably anal about how windows are positioned on the desktop (don't get me started). Object Desktop also modifies a few visual elements of the Workplace Shell: the scrollbars and the minimize/maximize buttons are more sculpted, and it introduces a "close" button that will close an opened window with one click. Even more noticeable is a Status Bar, which appears at the bottom of most folders. The Status Bar displays how many items are in the folder, and how many bytes are being used to store the items. It gives folders more of a 3D feel, and can dramatically change the look of your desktop. And finally, when you press Alt+Tab to switch to different applications, a little box with the name of the application you're about to switch to appears on your screen - just like in Windows 3.1 (one of the few, meager advantages Windows ever had over OS/2). You can also change the appearance of how icons are displayed. You can specify whether you want icons to be displayed as "Workplace Shell Default," "Raised," or "Sunken." "Raised" icons are made to appear as if they were sculpted, 3D icons raised off the desktop or folder. "Sunken" icons are made to appear exactly that, sunk into the desktop. "Workplace Shell Default" means icons are displayed the way OS/2 normally displays them. These options are also available for the icon's accompanying text. Object Desktop can actually speed up the process of opening folders and viewing icons through the use of three features called HyperCache, HyperDrive, and Browse Mode. HyperCache actually stores the contents of some commonly used folders in RAM, allowing very fast access to their contents. This option is added to the Settings notebook of most objects, and the default setting is off because it uses RAM. A more conservative approach is HyperDrive, which speeds up folder access by "guessing" what an application is by associating programs with file icons. There is also a function called "icon read-behind" which can be activated to check these associations to make sure they're right. Finally, Browse mode causes a sub-folder to replace it's parent folder. In other words, the Drives folder would replace the OS/2 System folder, taking it's exact size and location. An arrow appears up in the top right-hand corner (beside the close, minimize and maximize buttons), allowing you to return to the previously opened folder. This cuts down on the amount of time it takes to draw and populate new folders, and prevents desktop clutter. This feature is especially useful for notebook computer users who don't want to deal with too many opened windows on a 9.5" screen. The Task Manager Object Desktop also modifies the Window List, altering its appearance and enhancing its functionality. The Window List is not well liked by many OS/2 users (and hated by some) but I've always been fond of it. I don't like seeing minimized icons at the bottom of the screen, and the idea of a minimized icon folder has always seemed illogical and awkward. To me, the Window List is a very useful utility that allows you to quickly get to a minimized application without taking up any desktop space. It is, however, a little plain, and hunting for an application by name is not always the fastest way of finding it. Object Desktop tweaks the Window List by displaying program icons with the names, making it easier to tell the applications apart. It also places a little button bar at the bottom of the task list, with some very useful features, not the least of which is the ability to issue command-line commands. The Heavy Hitters While all of these features are nice and quite useful in many situations, the most significant additions to the Workplace Shell are the Tab LaunchPad (and the similar Keyboard LaunchPad) the Control Center (with virtual desktops), and the Object Navigator, an object-oriented file manager for OS/2. These utilities are probably the most obvious, in-your-face enhancements to the Workplace Shell, and they alone can greatly enhance your productivity. The Tab Launchpad The Tab LaunchPad builds on the idea of Warp's LaunchPad and goes further. Instead of a button bar with "drawers" where other icons can be placed, the Tab LaunchPad is sort of like a multi-layered button bar. Each Tab on the LaunchPad is a specific layer of buttons that can be labeled however you want. On my Tab LaunchPad, for example, I have one layer of buttons labeled "OS/2", which lists all my OS/2 applications, and one layer of buttons labeled "Win-OS/2", which lists all the Windows programs I run in seamless sessions. I also have a "Comm" tab which holds my Internet, CompuServe, and BBS utilities. The Tab LaunchPad is drag-and-drop, so any application you drag onto the active tab will appear as a shadow. The only complaint I have about the Tab LaunchPad is that icons cannot be arranged after they are dragged onto it - they appear in the order they were dragged, and you can't move them around without dragging everything off and then dragging everything back on in the order you want. Other than that, it's a very organized, efficient way to keep track of your OS/2, DOS, and Windows applications. The Keyboard LaunchPad A counterpart to the Tab LaunchPad is the Keyboard LaunchPad, a utility that allows you to setup keystrokes as program launchers - sort of like launching macros in applications. The Keyboard LaunchPad, located in the Object Desktop folder, allows you to drag icons onto it, and then set up a keyboard combination for each icon in its list. After this, pressing that keyboard combination will launch whatever is associated with it until that association is changed. Both the Tab Launchpad and the Keyboard LaunchPad can be set to run automatically whenever you boot OS/2. The Control Center Another prominent addition to the OS/2 desktop is the Control Center. The Control Center comes with a plethora of interesting bells and whistles: a digital clock, a CPU monitor, various file and desktop management controls, and up to 16 virtual desktops (those big rectangles on the Control Center). The Digital clock is fairly standard. You can control the color (red, blue, or green) and appearance of the text, but other than that it just displays whatever time the OS/2 system clock displays. You cannot, by the way, change the time from the Control Center: you must use the OS/2 clock or a command prompt. Still, the Digital Clock is smaller and more convenient than the OS/2 clock and you can choose to remove it from the Command center if you wish. One of the icons on the control Center shows (via bar graph) how much of your hard drive's storage capacity is being used. Clicking on this icon will activate the Object Navigator, Object Desktop's object-oriented file manager. Some of the icons act in ways similar to Windows 95's "Start" button. For example, clicking on the "Desktop" button opens a list of every icon and folder sitting on the desktop. If the object in the list is a program, selecting that object will activate the program. If the object is a folder, there will be an arrow to the right of it. Selecting the arrow will show you another list, revealing the contents of that folder, and so on. Unlike Windows 95, these icons are shadows of the actual programs, so you can call up a settings folder and modify them right from the Control Center. One of the things I've done is to drag the templates folder on to my Control Center. That way, when I want to create a program object, all I need to do is click on the templates button, and drag the program template from my list onto my desktop. Virtual Desktops One of the most powerful tools the Control Center offers is the use of virtual desktops - up to sixteen virtual desktops at the same time. These virtual desktops are, basically, copies of your original desktop. If you open a folder in one virtual desktop and move to another, the folder is open only on the original desktop. Virtual desktops are useful when you are using more than one application at a time, and a boon for people who like to do a lot of multitasking. An example: as I write my article on virtual desktop 1 using Describe, I can move over to virtual desktop 2 to open settings folders, and generally play around with the features I'm describing. Meanwhile, on virtual desktop 3, I can have the OS/2 Web Explorer opened and downloading a file from a Hobbes virtual mirror site. Finally, on virtual desktop 4, I can have NewsReader/2 up and running, checking out the various and sundry newsgroups I like to lurk in. Moving from task to task is as simple as clicking on whatever virtual desktop it's sitting in. More Groovy Stuff These are only very brief descriptions of what Object Desktop can do, and I'm leaving out much more than I'm including. One of the most important things that almost slipped my mind was Object Desktop's object-oriented archiving and unarchiving features. The "SDS Extras" diskette comes with four archiving utilities, Zip, Zoo, Arj, and Lzh. When these are installed, four templates are added to your templates folder, one for each archiver. To archive one or more files, you can then drag the template of the utility you want to use, say Zip, wherever you want, then drag the files you want archived into the new Zip folder. Those files are now comfortably archived, and the folder can be renamed however you wish. If you wish to view the contents of the archived folder, just double click on its icon. You don't have to uncompress it to see what's in it. If you do want to uncompress the file, all you have to do is select that option from the object's Button 2 menu (that would be a right-click on the object for you right-handed folks, and a left-click on the object for you southpaws). Conclusion Object Desktop is an incredible enhancement to any OS/2 Desktop. It looks good. It gives you powerful file and object management tools. And, finally, it really works. I've been using Object Desktop for about a month and a half now, and I would not trade it for the world. Its power, customizability, and convenience can't be beat - and it makes your desktop look really, really good. Anyone who uses the OS/2 Workplace Shell should use Object Desktop. With it, your Workplace Shell becomes more graphically oriented than before, and it increases the power of the object-oriented work environment. Because everything in Object Desktop follows a strictly adhered to, consistent object-oriented design, any part of the Object Desktop interface (the Task Manager, the Command Center, the Object Navigator) allows you to modify any object it comes into contact with, allowing you to interact with the object at any time, from any perspective. Would I recommend this product? I certainly would. For a 1.0 release, it's incredibly stable. I've had a few problems, but the benefits far outweigh them and I fully expect Stardock to refine and polish their product as time goes on. Object Desktop gets an A+. ----- Review Machine: Cyrix 5x86/100 on a 486 PCI motherboard (with built-in 4-drive EIDE) 16 mb ram 540mb Maxtor (C:) 1260mb Maxtor (D:) 240mb Maxtor (E:) 1x CD Rom, Sony, Older Than Moses (F:) 4x CD Rom, Teac (G:) Miro video card (PCI, 2mb DRAM) AcerView 76i 17" monitor (currently displaying 1200 x 1040 x 256) Running on Win-OS/2 Warp (Blue Box), no fix packs. ----- Object Desktop v1.0 Suggested Retail Price: $89.95 Stardock Systems 13405 Addison Gibraltar MI, 48173 Voice: (313) 453-0328 BBS: (313) 453-1845 WEB Site: http://oeonline.com/~stardock/ CompuServe: GO STARDOCK Internet: stardock95@aol.com IBMLink: Stardock CFORUM ----- Christoper B. Wright (brennanw@richmond.infi.net) is a technical writer in the Northern Virginia/D.C. area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95. He is a recent member of Team OS/2. ***** The Problems with Object Desktop - Edward Crouser Object Desktop adds a new level of functionality to the OS/2 Workplace Shell. However, along with these enhancements come several performance hits which users should be aware of before they purchase the product. The end user should carefully look over what they expect from it and how it will perform on their system. I installed Object Desktop on several different systems for this review, a 486DLC-25, a 486DX-66 (both with 8 meg of RAM) and a Pentium with 16 meg of RAM. Lockups Every system that I installed Object Desktop on started to experience lockups that didn't happen before the instal. Stardock claimed that much of these problems were due to a bug with running DOS or WinOS2 sessions. Since many lockups occurred when I was using only OS/2 software, I was a little wary of this explanation. Still, Stardock promised a fix and quickly delivered upon it. The fix, which by the time you read this should have made its way into the manufacturing line, quickly solved all of the lockup problems that I experienced. Since installing the fix on the different machines, I haven't experience any lockups with any mixture of applications that I've thrown at it. You can download the fix from Stardock's homepage or through their new FTP site. Speaking with other Object Desktop users, they reported to me that they still experience some lockups when trying to access certain network drives. It is important to note that I have not been able to duplicate this problem. Performance Stardock Systems recommends at least a 486DX-33 with 8 meg of RAM for using Object Desktop. Through my trials however, I found that the cpu speed has little to do with the overall performance, with memory being the main constraining factor. I first installed Object Desktop on the 486DLC-25 with all options installed. When it first came up, I was very impressed with all of the features that are included. However, I was disappointed by the amount of swapping that took place. It seemed that whatever I did, loading a program, or simple file management took an enormous toll on the system. Using the IBM Internet Access Kit became practically unbearable, due to the constant swapping. Several Object Desktop users were quick to point out that this was probably due to the Control Center, which seemed to eat cpu cycles because of the constant updating of the cpu meter and system clock. Stardock was nice enough to include a setting for the Control Center that allows you to set the priority level of the screen painting. However, setting the priority to low had no effect on the swapping on the 8 meg systems. So I disabled the cpu meter, system clock and virtual desktops. This did help somewhat, but I still experienced too much swapping. Whenever I clicked any folder on the Control Center, to bring up a list of the objects within it (much like the Windows 95 task bar) it still swapped and was too slow for my use. I then decided to not use the Control Center; even though I love the functionality, on the 8 meg systems it did not seem to be usable, no matter what the cpu speed or features I disabled. The Tab Launchpad also seemed rather slow on bootup on the 486DLC-25 and the Launchpad that comes with OS/2 Warp, was much faster. This, however, changed from system to system, as the cpu speed did seem to have a lot to do with it. The Object Browser also seemed to run too slowly at high resolutions on the 8 meg machines, but this changed as I took the resolution down to 640x480. It was still somewhat slow, but usable if you feel that it increases your productivity. I have never been a big a fan of file maintenance through a GUI; I prefer to stick with the good old OS/2 command line. This will vary according to your taste. The story of performance, however, differs on the Pentium with 16 meg of RAM. Object Desktop's swapping was nowhere near as bad as on the 8 meg machines and the added user productivity enhancements made it the perfect companion to this type of machine. When I applied the fix to the Pentium machine, all problems were solved in terms of lockups, so there was no reason I couldn't keep it on the machine full time with all of the features enabled. Uninstall Routine Once I came to the realization that I wasn't going to be able to run the full featured Object Desktop on my main machine with only 8 meg of RAM, I decided to uninstall some of the components. I loaded the "Installation Program" from the Object Desktop folder on my desktop and proceeded to click on every module that I wanted to uninstall and then clicked "uninstall". It seemed the logical thing to do. To my surprise, it uninstalled every single component of Object Desktop, taking with it things that I wanted to keep and didn't select from the installation menu. So, I headed straight to the manual. Page 2-2 reads, "You may choose to use a manual uninstall procedure if you find that the automated uninstall doesn't work, or if you want more control over your system." At this point I decided simply to reinstall with only certain items: folder enhancements, Task Manager, archive templates, and the WPS replacement classes. This second installation caused the install program to crash. I then shutdown my computer and rebooted and to my surprise it had seemed to install fine. The problem stemmed from the README.TXT file on the disk, since that is where the install crashed, I haven't had a chance to trace the problem and find out exactly what was causing it. Things I'd Like to See In moving from Windows to OS/2, the first thing that some users miss is the loss of the ALT-TAB key. The Task Manager fixes this problem as it allows the ALT-TAB key to be used on the OS/2 desktop with the same functionality as the Windows counterpart. The only thing that was missed however was full screen DOS and OS/2 sessions. If you are working in a full screen DOS or OS/2 sessions you cannot ALT-TAB switch out to another task, which is a drawback and something I hope that can be implemented in a future release. The Folder HyperCache also didn't work the way I expected. I had expect some type of memory cache to simply speed up the access to all folders, but what I found was that you must enable it across every folder you wish to be cached. Not only this, but all the HyperCache seems to do is open the folder and hide it in the background, thus allowing quick access to it, but also eating up memory by having the entire folder opened at all times. I also wish that it would have placed an object on the desktop for the Stardock Editor so that you may have quick access to jot down notes. I know that there is a way to do it, but I feel that Stardock should have put it in the install. Conclusion Object Desktop packs a lot of punch in terms of usability updates to the OS/2 Workplace Shell. But, there are certain trade-offs when running in low memory situations. If you have 16 meg of RAM, Object Desktop is worth every penny. But if you only have 8 meg of RAM, you need to evaluate exactly what it is about Object Desktop that you can't live without and be sure that you are able to work with it under usable conditions. Even past this though, I found Object Desktop to be indispensible for any of the machines that I tried it on, whether or not I was able to use the full features of the program on each of them. Hopefully Stardock will release a less memory hungry program with more speed, so that those of us who only have 8 meg of RAM may use everything, including the Control Center. ----- Object Desktop v1.0 SRP: $89.95 Stardock Systems 13405 Addison Gibraltar MI, 48173 Voice: (313) 453-0328 BBS: (313) 453-1845 WEB Site: http://oeonline.com/~stardock/ CompuServe: GO STARDOCK Internet: stardock95@aol.com IBMLink: Stardock CFORUM ----- Edward Crouser (edwardc@ibm.net) is a shareware author and contract programmer who specializes in OS/2 related material. He is a member of Team OS/2 and has been using OS/2 since the 2.0 beta. ***** Object Desktop and Beyond - by Steven Atchue OS/2. The Workplace Shell. Wasn't everything supposed to be in there? I don't know if that was IBM's original plan or not but ever since personal computers were invented there has never been an "ideal" user interface. IBM has probably come the closest for the PC with OS/2, or maybe Microsoft with Windows 95. Still, as operating systems have evolved, so have enhancements to them (yes - even to OS/2 and Windows 95). Warp's interface is new, it's slick and it's clean. But can it be improved? Well, with the explosion of Warp's popularity it seems many people think that it's worth trying. There are hundreds of new programs to do just this. The Hobbes FTP site is jammed with new uploads: shareware, freeware, and even commercial software is coming to market. Aggressive ISV's have been feverishly working to develop new products to enhance OS/2's interface. Stardock Systems has added the newest commercial entry to Warp's list of "enhancement applications", with Object Desktop v1.0 (released 10/02/95). Stardock has recognized that every user does not have the same requirements of his or her interface. According to SDS (Stardock), Object Desktop is sophisticated enough for professional users yet is so easy to learn home users will love it too. Hmm . . . Well how does it stack up to the competition? While there are no competing products as ambitious as Object Desktop there are many that compete on a "feature" basis. Let's compare it to a few of these. The Control Center: The Control Center and Tab Launchpad are two anchors in OD's offerings. Both instantly add productivity to your desktop. In fact, the Control Center offers an unequaled integration of features so let's start there. The Contenders: MDesk, FileBar and Deskman/2 each have some similar offerings. MDesk v1.1 is a Workplace Shell add-on/replacement. It offers similar features to Object Desktop's Control Center but also adds others like a full-featured screen saver with password protection. Used as a shell replacement, it provides the necessary functions you would expect. In addition, due to its small size, this option offers performance gains that would be unimaginable with Object Desktop. The main interface of MDesk, the InfoBar, also provides a live status bar at the bottom of screen with details of swap file size, free disk space and other system information. FileBar v2.05, used in its simplest form, is a menubar for your desktop. Like MDesk's infobar, FileBar Spans across the top or bottom of your desktop and gives you quick and easy access to your most used applications through pull down menus. While very configurable, FileBar offers very little of the advanced features available from OD's Control Center. Also like MDesk, FileBar can act as a replacement shell, again, with exceptional performance gains. DeskMan/2 v1.51 is a more robust Workplace Shell Manager. Included in Deskman/2 are VUEMan/2, a virtual desktop and window manager; the DeskMan/2 Workplace Shell Extensions; and the DM/2 Image Configuration Snapshot Facility. Deskman/2 allows you to manage, secure and manipulate Workplace Shell Objects. It also allows you to create personal and customized desktops and to backup and restore desktops. Deskman/2 is more of a hidden hero than any of the others, as it does not have a snappy interface. It does, however, provide a wealth of features that make it a competitor to the Control Center. However, these programs still do not have the usability that OD possesses. For example, cascading menus in the Control Center reduce screen clutter. FileBar comes close, boasting space saving cascading menus as well; MDesk compares worse having no cascading menus but does provide access to some options more readily. Both MDesk and FileBar use text menu choices that do not include icons and, therefore, their performance when used as shell replacements is far superior to that of OD. The only thing is, I don't know how much stability and crash protection I am willing to sacrifice. Using shell replacements may be a valid option for some people. . . but I just can't bring myself to do it on a regular basis. Virtual Desktops: OD's virtual desktops are located on the Control Center and basic functionality is solid. DeskMan/2 also includes a virtual desktop facility through VUEMan/2, providing the ability to access between one and eighty-one virtual desktops (far more than OD's 16). Configuration layouts include a single huge desktop or the Workplace Shell desktop can be cloned onto each virtual desktop. Capabilities include: drag & drop support for opening objects on selected virtual desktops, hot key support and enhanced layout capabilities for window positioning and sizing. VUEMan/2 also provides extensive layout and protection and security features making it a superior alternative to those who need extensive virtual workspaces. FileBar supports nine virtual desktops accessible by a button box or menu choice. FileBar's access to virtual desktops is pretty simple as are its abilities. Customizing options include a desktop 3x3 in area or a row of desktops. OD's and FileBar's virtual desktops will fit most users needs, but Vueman/2 is clearly an alternative for power users. LaunchPads: The Tab LaunchPad improves IBM's LaunchPad by leaps and bounds. I use maybe 25-30 programs so it's nice to be able to just click and start. IBM made this a reality. Object Desktop makes it better. The only real complaint I have about the Tab launch is the task section; it's not very convenient. I would suggest an option in the settings that would allow for a task bar, like in the program Taskbar v2.62 (not to be confused with FileBar). Taskbar provides a pop-up icon bar containing a list of all running programs on the system and allows rapid switching between them. The Taskbar is activated by moving the mouse cursor to a user definable edge of the screen. The desired task can then be selected by clicking on the appropriate icon. One of the less publicized features of Object Desktop is the Keyboard LaunchPad. It provides a fast way to configure keys on the keyboard for opening objects and applications. Graphical user interfaces have revolutionized the way we work, however, many users still prefer to execute applications and commands via the keyboard. Object Desktop, FileBar and MDesk all solve this problem by providing "Hot Keys". OD provides far superior setup and implementation of hot keys than the other two. It allows you to drag and drop an object into a container and assign it a hot key. You can also give any object hot key support. MDesk currently only allows programs (not folders) to be accessed via hot keys. OD will also allow you to open multiple objects with one hot key while FileBar only supports hotkeying to spots on your virtual desktop and task list. In this area, Object Desktop is far superior to anything I have looked at so far. File Manipulation: Objects are objects are objec. . . what? Did you ever try copying lots of files around in folders? It is dreadful! Plainly put, this is one thing that IBM forgot: a decent file manager. To address this, Object Desktop provides the Object Navigator. Object Navigator, a full-blown file/object browser, is what I have been waiting for. Its style somewhat copies the old windows file manager, although it adds additional functionality. Does it add usability? Yes. Nevertheless, it does lack some features. While there are many third party file and directory managers to compare the Object Navigator to, I'll focus on File Manager/2. File Manager/2 v2.37 is a shareware 32-bit file, directory and archive maintenance utility. FM/2 is something between a Drives object and a more traditional file manager. And its file management is much richer than Object Navigator's. The interface is much more developed and compact. Because of this, many more features are included in a smaller workspace. FM/2 allows any possible file manipulation option imaginable, and then some. Its power is pretty much unparalleled. In file managers, speed is power. Object Navigator is speedy but sometimes lacks what I would consider acceptable performance. Some of the dialog boxes Object Navigator uses are actually OS/2 common dialogs with the title bar renamed. This type of WPS utilization actually hurts the Object Navigator's usability. FM/2 on the other hand, creates replacements for OS/2's common dialogs. For example, FM/2 uses its own text like dialogs (which it calls walking) to select destinations. FM/2's use of this "walking" feature when copying or moving files speeds operations dramatically. The archive folder in Object Desktop is also a great idea. After using it though, I have found that in some instances it can be extremely slow. While not having the same simple manipulation of Zipped files, FM/2 maintains respectable response when zipping and unzipping files. I have also been using Zipman for some time and have found that it is very reliable. RPF Zip control is another contender that I have briefly looked at. RPF looks as if it may out due Zipman, FM/2 and OD's archive folder. Aesthetic Stuff: Folder enhancing seems to be a trend recently. Quick close (X) buttons have become a de facto standard in most enhancers, including Object Desktop. Notable apps which add this exit button to OS/2 windows are Xit, MDesk and NPS WPS Enhancer (reviewed in our Oct. issue). OD also allows for "browsing" of folders' contents. This means that double-clicking on a folder within a folder doesn't cause a new window to be opened; instead the contents of the current folder are replaced with the contents of the selected one. Deskman/2 also adds this feature. However, its folder view options are much more refined than OD's, allowing you not only to open parent windows, but open and close whole chains and views. You also have the ability in OD to alter the appearance of icons and the text below them. Or you can change the maximize, minimize, system and scroll buttons. The enhanced folder even includes a chiseled status bar indicating number of objects, number selected and size of these objects. A few of these (replacing buttons) are either addressed or planned to be addressed in upcoming products but overall they are unmatched by any other WPS enhancers. At the High End: As good as Object Desktop claims to be and is, it lacks some power features necessary for the corporate environment. Being able to standardize and control desktops is a fundamental corporate necessity. Currently, Deskman/2 has the ability to do this and more. Deskman/2 allows duplication (portable or distributable) of desktops and control of all the objects on your desktop. You can password protect or prevent deletion of any object. You can also make icons or folders unmovable so they cannot be mistakenly lost. Deskman/2 also provides a group of extensions that enhances dragging files. Instead of using mouse and key combinations when dragging files to a different location, DeskMan pops up a menu and asks whether to copy, move or shadow. This eliminates accidentally moving whole directories or other objects. For IS managers and system administrators these features probably outweigh anything offered by OD. So What Am I Saying? Bottom line is. . . Object Desktop, it's worth every penny! For sheer range of enhancements and slick presentation, there is nothing that beats Object Desktop. It is much more ambitious than any similar or competing products and it's affordable. If you are the type of user who needs absolute customization in a certain area, or have a less powerful (legacy) computer, some of the alternatives mentioned here (or not mentioned here) may be what you're looking for. And keep in mind many products have not been mentioned here (because of time and space constraints). Many, if not most of the other products reviewed, work alone or in conjunction with others attempting to parallel OD's robustness. However, the cost of just a couple of these products together can easily exceed Object Desktop's and you still will not have the vastness of features nestled in OD. ----- Object Desktop v1.0 SRP: $89.95 Stardock Systems 13405 Addison Gibraltar MI, 48173 Voice: (313) 453-0328 BBS: (313) 453-1845 WEB Site: http://oeonline.com/~stardock/ CompuServe: GO STARDOCK Internet: stardock95@aol.com IBMLink: Stardock CFORUM ----- Steven Atchue (satchue@ultranet.com) has been doing computer consulting for the past four years. He has been in the computer industry since the birth of the AT. Currently, he is doing product reviews, freelance writing and for fun he is building his own house. Steve can be reached on CompuServe as 75250,3726. ***** Galactic Civilizations v1.07 - by Chris Wenham. Galactic Civilizations is a game that marks OS/2's entrance into the arena of complex and technically advanced multimedia games. While most game makers are producing heavily bloated games that run only in DOS (and then often only after creating a special 'boot disk') Stardock Systems has put together a dazzling demonstration of what can be done with a solid multitasking and multithreading operating system like OS/2. Galactic Civilizations is a strategy game based in a remote galaxy where you lead a fledgeling human civilization to domination, destruction, harmony or evolution depending on which path you choose. You compete with alien races that can be benevolent, evil, or somewhere in between. In Galactic Civilizations you can just as easily forge alliances and peace with the other races as you can wage war and annihilate them. Along the way you must colonize new planets and star systems, develop new technologies, build a military for offence and defence, and try to keep your population happy by building social improvements for your planets. The game isn't simple, but marvelously complex with an abundance of depth and detail. While it does take a while to learn the controls and the tricks for survival, once mastered it draws you in with compelling addictiveness. When you start a game you're treated to a raytraced animation of your first colony wagon, the "Santa Maria", as it is flung through a wormhole and thrust into this new uncharted galaxy. You're given a brief outline of what you must do and then you're left to your own devices. The first thing to do is find a planet to settle on, controlling your colony wagon with the mouse and moving around until you spot something promising. Once established on a planet you can start to really build. Some of the first things you'll want to do will be to construct scout ships and find more suitable planets (and by that I imply that there are many UNsuitable planets) plus build more colony wagons to populate those you do find. Other necessities are building up your planet with schools and universities and putting together a navy for defence. Depending on how large you set the galaxy (at the beginning of the game) you're likely to bump into your neighbors soon. Technology is a very important part of Galactic Civilizations. When you first start the game you are asked which breakthrough your scientists will strive for. At first, development goes extremely slowly, but as you build more research facilities like schools, universities, info-networks (some, like the info-networks, not being available until you develop the technology behind them), breakthroughs come faster. The technologies that become available also depend on whatever your political bent is, since the game can tell if you're playing to be evil, good or neutral. Every time you complete the development of a new technology it presents a news-bulletin type report that describes the technology and the new improvements/techs that come with it. Some of these reports are highly amusing to read with tongue-in-cheek humor. You'll get a kick out of "Advanced Artificial Intelligence" and "Advanced Surveillance" technologies for example. As you develop your technological base you'll see a wide range of ships and planet improvements open up before you. In many ways it is technology that gives you the greatest edge over your opponents in this game, not just military might. You can actually trade technologies with other civilizations if you're on good enough terms with them and you have something they want in exchange. When playing, I'm often tempted to adjust the financing and give the lion's share of my civilization's income to research just to see what cool new gizmos I get to play with once invented. Under the Hood Galactic Civilizations stands just as well on it's technical merits as it does on game play. Designed from the ground up to take full advantage of OS/2's powerful multithreading and multimedia capabilities, this game is fast, responsive, chock full of high quality graphics and sound, and a joy to play even on a modest machine (mine is a 486/66 with 8 meg of RAM). Galactic Civilizations also does what very few other games will do, and that's scale the graphics and color depth to match your system's capabilities. I'll admit I can't hear the sounds or music (I have no sound card) but upon cursory glance at the game directory there's no dearth of .wav or .mid files either. If the sound is as good as the graphics then I can describe it easily: Rich. The AI's that control your opponents are all run on separate threads and as a result you'll rarely notice any delays between turns. With this level of multithreading Galactic Civilizations is one of the few games that lends itself well to SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing - more than one CPU). Run this on a dual-pentium box and you'll need more than a six-pack of Jolt to keep up. The code behind the AI's themselves is fiendishly cruel, but tameable. If you're a beginner you can set your opponents to 'Braindead' and enjoy an easy paced game. Masochists and those out to make a name for themselves may wish to try 'Incredible!', the rest of us can settle for any of the 6 levels in between. Stardock Systems even claims that if you can beat the game at its hardest level (five alien civilizations, all set to 'Incredible!', and 'Evil') they will rewrite the AI to beat you at your own strategy and provide an update for free. This is something I don't think is available with DOOM. Galactic Civilizations isn't a game that limits you to just a destroy/be-destroyed outcome. There are several different ways to win, any of which is determined purely by what the player wishes to strive for. The game is intelligent enough to tell where you're going and end the game when you've accomplished your goal. Don't get this game if you're an arcade freak; this is not a shoot-em-up, but it does contain a lot of heavy military. This game is very satisfying when you get what you want (after you build your first BattleStar class warship and take a look at it's stats, you'll probably exclaim, "Ooohh hoo hoo hoo hoo! Coooooooool!") and infuriating when you don't (many a time I've wanted to go to war with an alien civilization because their colony ship reached that juicy 'Excellent' class planet one parsec before mine did). DOOM players who start their game by typing an "ID. . ." code, or SimTower players that meddle with their savefiles to get infinite cash will be pleased to know there IS a cheat available for Galactic Civilizations that gives you unlimited funds. Stardock Systems has also released a program called Shipyards for those who like to customize their navy. Shipyards will let you design new battleships that incorporate different combinations of features, for example a ship with extremely high speed but mediocre weapons. To keep the balance Shipyards won't let you create super-vessels that you can deploy right at the start of the game. If you're familiar with the game VGA Planets you've already got a good idea of what Galactic Civilizations is about. But just like you couldn't really describe a game like Descent by comparing it to Wolfenstein 3D, you can't do the same for Galactic Civilizations. I do confess that the lack of modem/network play is disappointing, though. Perhaps Stardock ought to consider that for a later version. Installation Installing Galactic Civilizations is a happily simple task. The installation program gives you the opportunity of specifying which drive and directory to use, and whether you want the multimedia install or the normal install. A full install takes roughly 13 meg of space. Conclusions Galactic Civilizations is a 'must get' game to be sure. It's the first game to *really* show off OS/2's multimedia potential as well as its underlying power. But don't buy it just to show off, buy it to *play* too. Galactic Civilizations is just so-much-dang-fun. ----- Galactic Civilizations v1.07 SRP: US$ 49.95 (for GC v2.0 pre-registration) Stardock Systems, Inc. Gibraltar, MI, 48173 Phone: (313)453-0328 Fax: (313)453-1480 E-mail: wardell@ibm.net Web: http://www.oeonline.com/~stardock ----- For an even deeper look into Chris Wenham, check out his home page (http://www.spectra.net/~fox). It changes regularly and there is plenty of OS/2 related info. ***** Star Emperor Advanced Review - by Edward Crouser It was a time of tranquility in the galaxy, where independent star systems existed in peace for centuries. Now chaos has begun to spread. . . In Star Emperor Advanced, Stardock System's latest game release, the player must ally as many star systems as time allows and prepare for a war that will decide the fate of the galaxy. Installation and Requirements Star Emperor requires a minimum of OS/2 Warp or higher, 6 megs of hard drive space, at least an 800x600 resolution (you may download a patch from the Stardock System WEB page or FTP site to play Star Emperor in 640x480) and a CD-ROM drive. MMPM/2 is recommended. The game may be played from the actual CD or from your hard drive, but no provision is made for making install disks from the CD. The only advantage to running Star Emperor from the CD is the space that you save on your hard drive. The CD also comes packed with additional bitmaps and promotional sound files for other Stardock Systems' products. Installation is easy thanks to Stardock Systems' excellent install program. It copies the files to the hard drive and creates Star Emperor objects on the desktop; no changes are required to your CONFIG.SYS. I encountered no problems with installation on the different systems. I tested it on 486DLC-25, 486DX-33 and a 486DX-66 (all equipped with 8 megs of RAM). Packaging While the actual Star Emperor box is a step above the Galactic Civilizations box, it's still nowhere near as nice as the packaging for Object Desktop or the proposed box artwork for Galactic Civilizations v2 on the Stardock Systems' homepage. The manual included with Star Emperor is rather short at only twelve pages, but does provide the necessary game basics and controls. It is a dramatic improvement over Galactic Civilizations which contained no hard copy documentation to speak of. It also contains no mention of the installation program, but since the installation is self-explanatory, there was really no need. Finally, it would have been much more useful if it expanded the discussion of strategy, technology and deeper gameplay elements. The Game It is important to note that Star Emperor is not the sequel to Galactic Civilizations. While many aspects of the game play remain much like Galactic Civilizations, the focus is very different. In Star Emperor the game play is much quicker; a full game can usually be played in one sitting. Galactic Civilizations users will feel right at home, though, since the controls remain very much the same. In Star Emperor, there are no social programs nor any popularity to deal with. It's purely a technology and military driven game. When you start a new game you are presented with the amount of players to have in the universe, the difficulty level and the name of your empire. You cannot, however, change the alignment of the players (good, neutral, evil), their names or the size of the galaxy. Because of this loss of flexibility and the fact that Star Emperor doesn't deal with as many statistics as Galactic Civilizations, one of the first things you may notice is the speed of Star Emperor. The dialog boxes display extremely fast and once you get into the game the disk swapping is very minimal, even on a low end machine. Running Star Emperor on a 486DLC-25 with only 8 meg proved this. One of the more unique aspects of the game is the ability of different planets to have different technology. A planet that recently joined your empire may simply give you more technology, or may be able to produce starships that no other planet can. So, instead of actually having to research technology, you get more technology by simply bringing more planets into your empire. The heart of Star Emperor uses the highly acclaimed SDS AI engine, an artificial intelligence that makes your computer opponents play by the same rules as you, no cheating involved, unless you specify the "unfair" difficulty level. This level allows the computer to cheat by having an unlimited supply of money which makes for a much more difficult game. Also new to Star Emperor is the ability to play the game in real time. This is obviously a step towards the ability to have multi-players which is promised for Galactic Civilizations v2 (not out of the box, but with a third party add in). Once the game begins you start to align neutral planets. Usually, once all of the planets in the galaxy are aligned to the various players, the wars of the galaxy begin. There is no way around this as alliances are only short term, no provision is made for a long term peace strategy with other empires. You interact throughout the game with other alien civilizations through a control center. You are given a list of choices of matters to discuss and predefined choice responses. Once you start to take over other planets by force, there is no "battle". The AI determines who wins and either lets you take over the planet, or not. This is actually a nice change from Galactic Civilizations in which the battles were fought with a number generator with a probability factor built in. With Star Emperor, there is no guesswork, the AI does it all for you. It is also important to note that the graphics and sound are based on Galactic Civilizations with only extremely minor changes. They are nice, but with the screenshots of Galactic Civilizations 2 making their rounds on the Internet, they look rather old. Problems Star Emperor, like all software, is not without its problems. Sometimes the planet production dialog box and the planet renaming dialog box will overlap each other. If you aren't careful, you may lose the opportunity to set the planet's production. Whenever you view a sector it includes the name of the starship underneath the icon of the starship. Unfortunately, when you move the starship, it doesn't erase the entire name and you are left with garbage on the screen. I thought that the latest fixpack for Star Emperor might correct these glitches, but to my surprise after applying it, I was wrong. Also, Stardock ships Star Emperor to default to play in a 800x600 mode, while many people still use a 640x480 mode. I experimented to see (before applying the fix) what exactly would happen if you did try to run it, out of the box at 640x480. Everything downsized to 640x480 fine, other than the dialog box that comes up after you have allied another neutral planet to your empire. Basically what happens is a dialog box will pop up telling you how happy the people are to join your empire and what technology they have that they are willing to share with you. At the bottom of this dialog box it will ask you to rename the planet. In 640x480 resolution, you cannot see this part, so it can be really confusing for a first time player who is trying to play at 640x480, until they apply the patch. This bug can easily be overcome by pressing ENTER whenever the dialog box pops up. Stardock includes a notice in the manual about this and the box lists Star Emperor's requirements as VGA with SVGA being "recommend". This leads me to the question, "Why would they ship it if they knew about the bug?" A large amount of people still run at a 640x480 resolution. The only thing I can assume is that this bug with the dialog box slipped into the CD production and it was too late to fix before they already had a large amount of discs pressed. Conclusion Should you buy this game? Keep in mind this is not a game of civilization development, it's a game of war. If you are a Galactic Civilization player who loves the aspect of war, the answer is a definite, "Yes!" If you are more concerned with uniting the galaxy in a peaceful way, the development of social programs, trade and the objective of staying away from war at all costs, then this game will probably not suit you. If you have never played Galactic Civilizations and are a great fan of science fiction or simply love to kick a little alien butt every now and then, I highly recommend picking up a copy. While the packaging itself isn't first rate and the manual could use a bit more depth, the game play makes up for it all. Star Emperor is another excellent creation from Stardock Systems. Bring on the Drengi! ----- Star Emperor Advanced on CD-ROM SRP: $44.95 Stardock Systems 13405 Addison Gibraltar MI, 48173 Voice: (313) 453-0328 BBS: (313) 453-1845 WEB Site: http://oeonline.com/~stardock/ CompuServe: GO STARDOCK Internet: stardock95@aol.com IBMLink: Stardock CFORUM ----- Edward Crouser (edwardc@ibm.net) is a shareware author and contract programmer who specializes in OS/2 related material. He is a member of Team OS/2 and has been using OS/2 since the 2.0 beta. ***** Card Games for OS/2 - by Mikael Engdahl One category that, until rather recently, has suffered from a lack of commercial OS/2 software is entertainment and games. To make up for this there have always been a lot of nifty shareware games available; Card Games for OS/2 is one of them. Card games is, as you can imagine, a collection of card games (solitaire) for OS/2. In fact, there are nine of them. It is a very simple (and small) game, but still very addictive. The installation is relatively simple, just unpack the game files in a directory and run the installation program by typing "setup". If you, for some reason, prefer to install it manually you can also copy the game files where you want them and create a desktop object. This is just what the installation program does. The nine games included are Astra, Scrooge, TidyUp, Elevens, Shift, Towers, King & Ace, Calculation and Klondike. Since there are so many of them, you can really play a lot without getting bored. Card Games doesn't contain any fancy high-res graphics, sounds or other multimedia features. They aren't needed; that's not the point of the game. There are quite a few options and settings you can change to make the game and tableau look nicer (different deck patterns, different background colors, etc.). There is also a time counter and a high score list. Other nice functions include undo, redo (undoes the last undo) and cheat if you happen to get stuck. Card movement is simple; just drag it with the right mouse button to where you want it. An alternate way is to click on the card with the left mouse button, and if there is a valid move the card will automatically be moved. You can choose to use either a single or double click from the options menu. In most games though, when a card can be moved to more than one place you have to drag it. The game also has fairly good help files. It is quite a small game and a major help system isn't needed. I found the existing one sufficient. Card Games for OS/2 is shareware and after a trial period of 30 days you have to register it, though the evaluation copy is fully functional. The registration fee is $28. The author of the game is German and therefore both English and German language support is included. Card Games for OS/2 is easy to start off with, fast, and is an overall pleasant game. I wasn't too impressed with it when I started playing, but a few hours later, I somewhat reluctantly realized I had changed my mind. My only complaint is that I thought some of the games were a little too similar. Still, it's the kind of game that you intend to play for just a couple of minutes before you get on with your work. And after playing for a couple of minutes you decide to quit, but you need just "one more go", you just need to reach the high score list. Then a couple of hours later you're still sitting there, intending to play just, "one more time. . ." It's not the game that will revolutionize the gaming industry, or turn OS/2 into the leading games platform, but if you're already stuck with the OS of the future it sure is worth a try. ----- Card Games for OS/2 v2.7 (hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/games/fmcrd27.zip) Author(s): Felix Maschek (100120.1370@compuserve.com) (http://www.svea.de/~pro/maschek.html) Format: Shareware Registration: US$ 28 ----- Mikael Engdahl (engdahl@algonet.se) has been an OS/2 enthusiast since v2.0. In his spare time, when not studying, he likes playing (OS/2) games. ***** HTML Wizard v1.51 - by J.R. Link HTML Wizard v1.51 is a native HTML editor which enables the OS/2 user to simplify the task of creating, testing, modifying and saving HTML documents. HTML Wizard is an HTML editor and does not generate HTML documents from your ASCII text as do several Windows programs. However, a number of aids such as query boxes and a document template ease the task of HTML document creation. HTML tags appear on the screen and text can be entered as appropriate for the tag. This means that the user will have to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of HTML to use this editor. Installation Installation is easy although no installation program is provided. The user unzips the distribution files into the directory in which they will be used. A small REXX program is provided to create an HTML Wizard object on the desktop. The main program is written in VX-REXX and therefore requires the presence of VROBJ.DLL (supplied with the distribution package) in the LIBPATH. If VROBJ.DLL is not placed in a directory already in the LIBPATH (such as C:\OS2\DLL), then the config.sys must be modified to add the location of VROBJ.DLL to the LIBPATH. The distribution package requires about 900K of disk space excluding VROBJ.DLL which requires another 900K additional disk space. Features of HTML Wizard The program is executed by dropping an HTML object on the HTML Wizard icon or by double-clicking the icon. However, you cannot drop an HTML object on the open HTML Wizard window. Once running, you must use the "File-Open" dialog to open a file. When run by double-clicking the HTML Wizard icon, the program will be initiated with an HTML skeleton document template in the edit window. The contents of this template are defined in the DEFAULT.HTM file and this template may be modified to support your needs. The DEFAULT.HTM template is also reloaded whenever the current document is closed with the "File-Close" dialog. Using It HTML tags may be inserted from the "Tags" menu or by clicking a "Floating Tagbar" button. This Tagbar provides 27 common and 12 user definable tags. Buttons are identified with abbreviated names but display "Hint" text (the tags' full name) when passed over by the mouse pointer. Clicking on a Tagbar button or on a "Tags" menu item will insert the tag at the cursor position in the edit window; text may then be inserted manually at the appropriate position. A much easier method is to type the text into the edit window, select it and then press the desired tag. The selected text will be automatically and properly inserted into the tag. The 12 user-defined Tagbar buttons are programmed by right-clicking on the button and entering the tag and a description for the "Hint" text query box. The "Options" menu allows you to select a vertical, horizontal or hidden Tagbar. The "Characters" menu provides a large selection special characters and symbols that may be easily inserted in your text. Included are registered, copyright, currency, manuscript, math, and many others. Other useful features enable users of non-English code pages to type HTML documents with special characters directly from the keyboard without having to use the "Characters" menu or multiple keystrokes; and simplified list, table and form making tools. Text may even be imported with paragraph tags automatically inserted. Many menu options have associated hot keys to speed operations. In addition, the hot key will repeat insertion of the last tag. Checking Your Documents There are a couple ways to check your work. If you have an active network connection, you can check your document for syntax errors by connecting to the WebLint web site (www.unipress.com). Or documents may be previewed in Web Explorer by selecting "Preview Document" from the "File" menu. If Web Explorer is already running, you may also preview a document by dragging the little (unmarked) square at the bottom right of the HTML Wizard screen and dropping it on the Web Explorer window. And, of course, concise on-line help for program operation is available. Technical Support The author provides excellent technical support and solicits program suggestions via E-mail. An all new C++ version 2.0 of HTML Wizard is in progress and promises faster speed, portability and new features. No release date is available for version 2.0. Problems Encountered HTML Wizard was tested on three dissimilar clone-based computers running OS/2 WARP Connect and Netware Client. One computer has an Intel DX2-66 with 24 MB RAM and a Spider Graphics 64 video card, running at 1024x768x64K. The other two have Intel DX4-100's with 16 MB RAM and #9GXE64 Pro video at 800x600x64K. No hardware problems were encountered during installation or running HTML Wizard on any of the three computers. A software problem has surfaced, however, with the v1.51 release of HTML Wizard in late October 1995. The new splash screen added at the opening of the program causes a SYS3175 error upon running HTML Wizard on all three computers. (editor's note: this problem was not reproducible on our machines.) In addition, query boxes for the "Font Size" and "Background Image" have entry boxes without sufficient entry space. A discussion with the HTML Wizard author revealed that the problem occurs with VX-REXX programs when some of the later FixPaks (FixPak10 in my case) have been installed. This problem will have to be resolved by IBM and/or Watcom, the makers of VX-REXX. Summary HTML Wizard is an excellent native OS/2 application for the creation and editing of HTML documents. The author continues to actively develop the program and provides excellent technical support. I highly recommend HTML Wizard. ----- HTML Wizard v1.51 (822k) Available at: ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/editors/htmlwiz.zip Author(s): Dr. Dirk Terrell Format: Shareware Registration: US$ 20 ----- J.R. Link (jlink@best.com) is a retired engineer and Netware LAN manager and has actively used OS/2 since the first v2.0 beta. He is a member of Team OS/2. ***** Web Writer/2 v1.01 - by Heath Phillippi When it comes to Web page creation, there are many firmly entrenched camps. Some believe that anyone writing a Web page should know HTML codes by heart. Others see the Web as a place everyone should have access to, and therefore, Web creation should be as simple as word processing. Personally, I fall somewhere in between the two camps, and so does WebWriter/2. WebWriter/2 gracefully straddles itself between the extremities of VI and a Web publishing service for Web authoring. It is perfect for the user who wants to turn out good, consistent Web pages with a minimum of hassle, and still keep a feel for the underlying HTML code going into the page. While maybe not the easiest package to use for beginners, it may just be one of the more powerful available (especially for the meager registration price of $30). The easiest way to tell the intent of a software package is to look at it features. And WebWriter is packed. Some features, listed in the documentation, include: Open and edit multiple documents simultaneously Quick preview by dragging to Web Explorer View HTML source by dragging from Web Explorer Character manager for full ISO-Latin-1 character entity support Accelerator keys for easy conversion of letters to non-English character entities Accelerator keys for commonly used tags Tag manager for user defined tags and quick access to tags Printing of HTML documents Specify a document to use as a template Some key features that should catch your eye are user definable tags and a default document as a template. Even with a feature list, though, you still don't get a good idea of the raw power until you use WebWriter/2. If you have ever written just a few pages of HTML you will realize the importance of these two features. With the ever changing status of the HTML standard, the ability to set new tags becomes invaluable. Set up the syntax once and you are done. Sharp eyed readers will also realize the benefit of changing or modifying old tags. Just imagine editing your body tag so you always get a gray background, red text and green links (or whatever your standard is). Default documents are also very nice if you have more than one page and you want to keep a certain feel running through all your various links. This feature alone is invaluable for Webmasters who want to streamline their page creation, or for sites administered by more than one person. The little features also make WebWriter/2 a joy to use. Being a true WPS aware app makes working a breeze. Too lazy to go all the way up to the menu bar to select something? Just right click and you will get a pop-up menu. Need to add a certain tag often? There is probably a keyboard shortcut. Need to preview the document you are working on? Just configure WebWriter/2 to load your favorite Web browsers for previewing, or just right click in the WW/2 window and drag it to Web Explorer. You can also drag HTML files to the WW/2 windows to preview them. Be warned though, this does not update the file name. If you have a file open to begin with, you may potentially overwrite it with another HTML. Even with all this power, WW/2 is very easy to use. A very basic understanding of HTML is all one needs to be able to understand the menus and create their own Web pages. The menus are well thought out, easy to understand, and very usable. Settings are easy to find and understand. Tag creation and modification is easy and straightforward. Online documentation, while complete for defining features, could be a little better. It would be nice if there were whole example pages. Sample text or more thorough explanations for common tags would also be well received. Installation is a breeze. The only requirement is that REXX support be installed and that VROBJ.DLL is in a directory in your libpath. Simply unzip the program files to a temp directory, and run install. If VROBJ.DLL isn't on your machine, you can install it during the WW/2 install. While initial loading is somewhat slow, there is little graphical overhead with WW/2 so expect good performance on just about any machine that runs the OS/2 System Editor well. Scrolling and highlighting is fast (even with my old 1 meg ISA video card). Document loading is also very close to System Editor's times. The foundation is laid for a very powerful Web authoring tool in WW/2. Some power features I would like to see in future releases are CGI support and MAP support for graphics. I would even be happy if these were add-in modules that cost extra. You are already guaranteed your $30 worth with WW/2. WW/2 is a very robust package that delivers more than enough features to make it a worthwhile addition to anyone's Web utility toolbox. Even if you use other packages for some of your more specialized Web authoring requirements, you will find use in WW/2. The ability to crank out multiple pages easily and uniformly is very worthwhile. And at $30, what more could you ask for? ----- Web Writer/2 v1.01 (717k) Available at: ftp.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/ww2_101.zip Author(s): John Blumel Format: Shareware Registration: US$ 30 ----- Heath Phillippi (http://www.athenet.net/~heathp/) 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. ***** HTML Extensions for EPM v0.98 - by Trevor Smith One of the often overlooked solutions to many editing needs is the EPM. Whether you're using the version that came in the box when you got Warp (or an earlier version of OS/2) or v6.03, this versatile editor allows you to address many of your HTML needs. What we're talking about here isn't just EPM though. The beautiful thing about EPM is that it can utilize add in modules written in the EPM macro language. I don't know anything about writing these modules and you don't have to either, because the freeware HTML extensions for EPM v0.98 can be found at Hobbes and other FTP sites on the Internet. Installation Setting up the EPM to have HTML tags is not terribly difficult. There are instructions included with the zip file that explain it quite well. In fact all there is to it is unzipping and copying one file to the directory where you keep EPM. Then, like you would do to link any macro module to EPM, you just click on 'command', type 'link htmltags' and press enter. Suddenly you have an HTML menu on your menu bar. What can you do with them? These 'tags' aren't as ambitious as some of the stand alone shareware applications that we've reviewed this issue but all the basic functions are there. There is also support for many advanced features such as forms and tables and a fair list of special characters ready for insertion. Also included is rudimentary support for previewing files in Web Explorer, although the program only opens Web Ex. You then have to drag your HTML file onto it. The interface is pretty much like any other menu driven program for inserting HTML codes. Beware, though, there is no fancy button bar here. Also, like other HTML editing programs, a reasonable amount of HTML knowledge is required to use these extensions. If you don't have it when you start, you'll end up with it. Ironically, it seems that learning to use HTML editors frequently teaches people so much about HTML that they no longer need to use the editors. Pros and Cons The extensions are pretty solid for the most part. No bugs manifested themselves during testing but there are some inconsistencies in the interface. The documentation is also a little sparse; beginners are not likely to be reassured by it. It almost seems likely that anyone bold enough to try the HTML extensions for EPM might not need any help entering his or her tags. Also, although not recently, I tried to contact the author (to compliment him, actually) and never received a reply to various E-mails. This is a bare bones solution to your HTML editing needs. On the up side, though, this means that it has the speed of a bare bones application. Although EPM doesn't load as fast as the system editor, it's still a lot faster than any of the various applications written in VX-REXX. Because you are only adding a small file (16k) to an already fast editor, the end result is blazing speed compared to its peers. And of course, it's free. Overall, for the price and speed, if you need to do casual HTML editing, you can't go wrong with the HTML extensions for EPM. They provide just the right amount of power without sacrificing any of the inherent speed of EPM. By the way, if you're wondering what HTML editor I use, the answer is - none. I originally settled on EPM with the extensions over its very slow competitors, but over time found I was hand-entering most codes anyway. Now I save myself the extra few seconds and just open the system editor. ----- Trevor Smith (editor@mail.isisnet.com) is the editor of OS/2 e-Zine!. In his spare time he designs corduroy evening wear. ***** _OS/2 Warp for Dummies (2nd Edition)_ - by Chris Williams _OS/2 Warp for Dummies_ is yet another in the popular series of "Dummies" computer books spanning the range of PC based operating systems and applications. Unfortunately, it, like OS/2 Warp, also appears to be one of the rarest PC related items you can find. Once you do find a copy, this book lives up to the tradition of all the books in its series. It's informative, well organized, and above all, written in a language most nontechnical computer users can understand - plain English! When I began preparing to review this book, I decided to go about it the way a nontechnical person would view it. For me, that meant studying a book that, up until now, I had only glanced over a couple of times. It also meant going out to locate a copy for my very own. I soon learned that finding a copy of this book is probably the most challenging part of using it. I decided to start my search at the bookstores of my local shopping mall. My first target: Waldenbooks on the upper level. I knew I was in trouble right away when I saw the big picture poster advertising "The Nation's Next Best Seller" - Bill Gates' new book is coming soon! Sure enough, this store's PC section was chock full of Windows 95 material and propaganda, including the recently released _Windows 95 for Dummies_. Of the 75 or so PC books on the shelf, about 75% were Windows 95 related. There were two OS/2 books. Both were technical and one was outdated. Asking about _Warp for Dummies_ produced a series of funny looks and a polite offer to order it. I went on to the next store - B. Dalton's. This store had many more OS/2 books (and Colin Powell instead of Bill Gates in front) including _OS2/Warp Programming for Dummies_. Alas, the book I sought remained elusively absent. The store clerk here couldn't even find it on his inventory system and suggested that perhaps the book didn't exist! I remained undaunted. Finally, a call across town to the Barnes & Noble store revealed several copies in stock. They were happy to hold one for me. People wonder why OS/2 Warp users are so dedicated. After this experience, I think I understand better than ever. You have to be dedicated to use OS/2 Warp, even as a beginning computer user. Any true newcomer to computers would have given up on this search and gone with something else long ago. Book in hand, I could finally settle down to the task of evaluating. _OS/2 Warp for Dummies_ delivers on it promise, "A Reference for the Rest of Us!", in classic fashion. A reference is not the type of book you read cover to cover. Right up front, the book lets you know this, along with advice on the best way to read and use it. Follow the advice! I have yet to find a computer reference that can keep me, someone who can watch blinking Christmas lights for hours at a time, entertained long enough to start at one end and finish it. This book, despite its humor, is no exception. An OS/2 Warp "Cheat Sheet", printed on heavy paper and perforated so it can be easily torn out, sits just inside the front cover. On it you will find quick instructions covering most of the essentials needed for navigating Warp, broken down into easy to understand categories like "Everyday Stuff", "Fixing Mistakes", and "When OS/2 Screws Up. . ." Areas on the Cheat Sheet that provide instructions use a two column format with a "To Do This" heading the left column and a "Do This" heading the right. Quick and simple. Getting further inside, the book is broken down into an introduction followed by six sections covering broad topics about life with OS/2 Warp. Titles for these sections range from "Bare Bones Stuff" to "OS/2 Applications (Those Free Programs)" to "Help!". Each section contains three or more chapters covering more detailed topics that relate to a given section. This was meant to allow you to quickly locate the section of the book most important to you at any given time. Each chapter can stand more or less on its own. When a chapter suggests you get more information, it tells you where to go to find it. Everyone should read the introduction on pages 1 through 6. Then decide what they need to read next. All of the chapters are filled to the brim with loads of instructions for getting things done and tidbits of trivia about OS/2 Warp. Pictures highlight the way things should look when you're doing something. All of this is lightly sprinkled with the well known, slightly off color sense of humor that makes this series of books so successful. What's most impressive is the way this book explains technical and abstract concepts meant for the most geekish in a manner that Grandma, who thought a mouse was something you kept a good cat around for, could understand. It's really that good. Along the way, it points out things to remember, neat little tips, and stuff that DOS and Windows users will relate to, using easy to spot icons printed in the margins. My favorite is the little bomb icon marking areas of the book that tell you what NOT to do. These can really keep you out of trouble. It also warns you when you're about to get into some of that "technical drivel" so you can skip that part if you like. Overall, this book presents OS/2 Warp in a positive light. The answer to the question "Why bother with OS/2 Warp?" is fair minded and logical though not emotionally inspiring. Each of the BonusPak applications are also reviewed and assigned "IQ levels" for ease of configuration and usability. Comedy runs throughout. For example, most people understand why IBM would make it more difficult to use a competing Internet Service Provider than to use IBM's own Internet service through Advantis. IBM makes more money if you use Advantis. The IQ rating for configuring the Internet Connection application reflects this. It's 80 for Advantis and 160 for other providers. The author is positive about most of the BonusPak applications and Warp itself. The only big exception to this is chapter 3: "Installing OS/2 on Your Computer without Crying". Warp for Dummies is very tough on OS/2's installation program as being poorly thought out and filled with pitfalls that can lead you and your computer down the path of despair. Installing OS/2 Warp isn't for someone with a weak stomach, but I don't think it's quite that bad. Unless you're installing it from 5 1/4 inch floppies. As someone with lots of OS/2 experience, there was little new information for me to learn from this book. It is clearly evident, however, that a beginner would find this reference a valuable source of information they can use to improve their productivity. If you are a new OS/2 Warp user, or you know someone who is, OS/2 Warp for Dummies is a reference they shouldn't be without. It's definitely worth looking for. ----- _OS/2 Warp for Dummies_, 2nd edition SRP: US$19.99 Author: Rathbone Publisher: Gage ISBN: 1 5688 4205 8 ----- Chris Williams (http://www.henge.com/~chrisw) has been actively involved with OS/2 systems for the past six years. A former IBM employee, OS/2 Ambassador, and long time member of Team OS/2, he is currently a PC and network specialist for Perot Systems Corporation. ***** Interview - Brad Wardell Brad Wardell is the founder and CEO of Stardock Systems, one of the most aggressive and progressive OS/2 ISV's in the world. At the tender age of 24, he and his associates have managed to make the rest of the OS/2 world sit up and take notice. With such commercial hits as Galactic Civilizations and OS/2 Essentials under his belt and the apparent success of the newly released Object Desktop, it looks like a good year for Stardock and Brad Wardell. Thinking that a lot of people would like to pick his brain I took the initiative and whipped up a few questions. I spoke to Brad earlier this month, just before COMDEX. ----- e-Zine!: OK, to jump right in, how long has Stardock been in business? BW: Since 1992. e-Zine!: And the OS/2 business? BW: We started going with [Galactic Civilizations] in June of '93. e-Zine!: So a couple of years. Why did you originally start developing for OS/2? BW: Well let's see. OS/2 2.1 came out and we looked at the numbers and there was, at the time, four or five million OS/2 users and we [said], "Why aren't there a bunch of OS/2 products?" And there weren't any. I had a game idea I had been wanting to do for a long time in my own spare time and I said, "Well why don't we get the company to fund it - my game idea - and why don't we develop for OS/2? There are no games for it." e-Zine!: So the reason you chose a game was partly out of personal preference and partly because there was no game software around? BW: Right. There was no competition. The other thing was because it was our first OS/2 program there would be some tolerance. There is some tolerance in a game if there are bugs in it and we weren't sure how well we were going to be able to do it. We were totally new to it. e-Zine!: Were you surprised by GalCiv's success? BW: Yeah. I know IBM was. e-Zine!: I know you mentioned to me one other time that somebody told you that you would be lucky to sell, 500 copies was it? BW: Yeah. e-Zine!: How many copies did you eventually sell of GalCiv? BW: Well, I don't want to go into specifics but I will say that by the end of this year we expect to have shipped our 550,000th game. That's a combination of betas, GalCiv, Star Emperor and Avarice. e-Zine!: You're saying by the end of the year, right? BW: Um hum. e-Zine!: GalCiv v2 will be out by then, correct? BW: Right. It's counting our preorders of GalCiv v2. e-Zine!: Is it true that you personally wrote GalCiv? BW: Yeah. Well 99% of it. e-Zine!: Do you still do any of the coding at Stardock? BW: Oh yeah. GalCiv v2 - I'm the only one developing that. e-Zine!: Oh, really! Well then I guess I don't have to ask you if you miss it. Are you always going to keep your fingers on the keyboard or. . . BW: Oh yeah. Star Emperor I wrote, Entrepreneur I wrote most of the code for - that's been horrendously late because I have been overly busy. We've put more people on it to get it on track, but that's the one I'm really excited for, for this next year. Game-wise, that is. e-Zine!: OK. While we're talking about GalCiv, what really happened with AIM? BW: Well, let's see. Back in 1993 IBM got wind that we were developing a game, and after they discovered we were not going to go away and stop making a game for their mission critical client-server platform, they said, "Well, you guys haven't published a game before." And I said, "No." "Well, you guys really need experts to help you. Here's this company called Advanced Idea Machines. They're *experts*. Why don't you have them market and publish your game?" e-Zine!: So it was IBM that approached *you* to tell you about AIM? BW: Exactly. e-Zine!: Aha. Then what happened? BW: Well, then we met a guy named John Schaefer - or not met him, but over the phone - and he told us he was this multi, multi million dollar company, and he had helped fund a bunch of really famous movies and he was looking to publish things in the software market, he had a lot of great ideas for GalCiv, and he was going to do a $100,000 ad campaign, he would guarantee us 75,000 first year sales at retail, and lots and lots of promises, and really great production of everything, and so on and so forth. e-Zine!: And as we all know, when the box came out things were slightly different. BW: When the box came out, that was when we decided that we would never again let someone else publish our software. We didn't get to see the GalCiv box until the beta testers saw the GalCiv box, essentially. And the manual - the manual that I had written for GalCiv v1 is coming in GalCiv v2 - but originally I had an over 100 page manual for GalCiv on paper and at the last minute. . . You know, AIM had come to me and said, "Say, if we had it on-line instead of hard copy we think that the users would like that better." And I said, "No way, they would hate that. People want a real manual." And he said, "Well our studies have shown that that's not the case." And I said, "Well, why don't we ask our beta testers on [comp.os.os2].games?" And he said, "Oh no, that won't be necessary. We'll go with the paper." And then when it shipped we discovered he didn't use our manual. He'd gone with the disk. Well, actually not when it shipped, just before. About two weeks before we shipped we found that out. And the way we found it out was, we were supposed to have five disks for GalCiv because we had made all these movies for the game. There are two video clips that show up in GalCiv that we had done through ray tracing. We had done quite a few more and, so, suddenly we had to go from five disks to four disks [to fit the manual on the fifth] and we had to go through and scrunch down all the graphics, so the graphics in GalCiv are much poorer in quality than they were originally supposed to be. And then we had to take out some of the movies. e-Zine!: So overall, not a pleasant relationship. BW: No. Well, it got worse. [laughs and chuckles] e-Zine!: OK, well, I won't ask you to go into too much of it. I'm sure its a touchy subject. Let's change the subject a bit then. I know Object Desktop took a while for you guys to develop. Did you know it was going to sell well? BW: Um, not really until June. When we decided on Object Desktop, we only wanted 50 or 60 beta testers. We [thought we] would have it kind of public but basically for people who were real diehards. We actually charged $50 for the early experience program thinking, "No one is going to want to pay $50 for beta software, even if they do get the final version free." We were going to have this program open until the middle of July, originally was the plan, because we thought it would take a long time to get the 50 or 60 people. Well, within the first few days we had a thousand beta testers. And basically that shut down Stardock during that time because - if you do the math - if you're open eight hours a day and if you get a thousand beta testers in five days, that's 200 calls a day divided by eight - that's a lot of calls an hour. e-Zine!: So now that its been released, are sales meeting or exceeding expectations? BW: It's kind of hard to say. Shrink wrapped sales have not done quite as strongly as we had hoped because it's been a lot harder to get OS/2 apps into the channels. When GalCiv came out, IBM was putting a big push on Warp as a retail product and because of that GalCiv was pretty easy to get into stores. OS/2 Essentials, our second product, was a little bit harder to get into the stores but still not impossible. With Object Desktop, it has been a major problem to get it into the stores. e-Zine!: Because the retailers themselves are resisting, or because the distributors are resisting? BW: No, we had no problem getting it into distribution because we do have a good track record. But the retailers see OS/2 apps as not selling anymore and that if IBM's not pushing it, people aren't going to buy it anymore. So we said, "Well, people can go to CompUSA and Egghead to buy Object Desktop," before we had actually got it in there because we based it on our prior experience; it only took us a little while to get our products there. And even as we speak, it's still not in CompUSA - and we have to do a lot more [to get it there]. In marketing terms you have to take all risk away from the retailer. You have to essentially give them free copies to get it on the shelves and we've never had to do that before. e-Zine!: So they're not reassured by the previous success of GalCiv or. . . BW: No, they look at OS/2 as a whole. GalCiv was the top OS/2 product of this year at the store and currently OS/2 Essentials is the top selling OS/2 product at the stores, but that's not what they look at. They look at OS/2 products in general. e-Zine!: Presumably the notable exceptions to that case are the OS/2 only mail order places like Indelible Blue and House of Technology and places like that? BW: Right. They've done really well with it and that's where, in fact, I would say almost half our sales - not half, but maybe a third of our sales - have come from Indelible Blue alone. e-Zine!: Of shrink wrap? BW: Of shrink wrap. e-Zine!: Wow. BW: Now, with preloading we've had a lot of success. By COMDEX we expect to have sold about 40, maybe 45 thousand preloads. e-Zine!: Are you preloading in the States, in Germany, or both and other places? BW: Europe only right now. e-Zine!: What kind of machines are they preloading on? Eight meg machines or. . . BW: Eight to sixteen. e-Zine!: What kind of preparation did you make for technical support? BW: I was just on the Internet a little while ago and was reading someone flaming us on technical support. I think we're kind of a target because everyone knows we read the Internet almost obsessively, so people say, "Hey, I can really get 'em at home," so to speak, "by posting." But for tech support we figured that Object Desktop would have a [high] tech support need because it's essentially a third party upgrade. It turned out that the beta testers did a really good job, because there weren't that many problems. The way we got our tech support people is, Stardock's kind of known on the Internet as being a pretty pro-OS/2 company, so we've had a lot of people send us resumes [saying], "Hey, I'd love to work at Stardock. I'm not really a programmer, but I really, really know OS/2 really well." So we've gotten a lot people in tech support who know OS/2 inside and out. And we may have overstaffed because we were expecting all these calls. As you and I talk right now, none of the tech support lines are on. There are no tech support calls in the whole company right now, as we speak. e-Zine!: Unbelievable. I was going to ask if it had really been under-utilized, but I guess it's *really* been under-utilized. BW: It's *really* underutilized, to the point where it's almost a problem. A lot of people luckily use E-mail and other channels for it and that helps quite a bit. For the most part it's been a pretty trouble free product which has been to our surprise. I mean we tested it, but with so many configurations, we figured we should run into the same sort of problems IBM does with Warp itself. e-Zine!: Obviously everyone expects to have some problems when you release something of that scope. BW: Right. A Microsoft guy in Australia thought Object Desktop was OS/2 4.0 - a preview of OS/2 4.0. [more chuckles on my part] e-Zine!: I don't know if this is a realistic consideration, but what will you do if IBM addresses a large number of Object Desktop's features in its next version of Warp? BW: It depends on what those features are. We're not standing still. I think it's more like IBM would approach us about trying to license some of the technology. e-Zine!: Have you every given any thought to an arrangement with IBM to bundle or integrate Object Desktop with Warp? BW: Probably not the whole thing. Really, to be honest with you, a lot of it would come down to price and how much they wanted. You read the [comp.os.os2].advocacy newsgroups. It really helps OS/2 when they can say, "Look at Stardock. They're succeeding. They're developing only for OS/2 and they are succeeding." Whereas, if IBM comes and buys the crown jewels, so to speak, what do we have? But I'm not too worried about IBM coming up with stuff on their own. I mean they haven't changed Work Place Shell essentially since 2.0, and we know from trying to get tech support on Work Place Shell that they aren't overstaffed in that department. e-Zine!: What about the future? You've got a bunch of new products coming up. What are you most excited about? BW: Well on the game front, Entrepreneur. That, in my opinion, will be the next SimCity game where you're playing and you say, "Well of course! Why didn't someone think of this earlier?" e-Zine!: It's that good? You think it's going to be that successful? BW: I think it's going to be that good. But it's going to take a lot longer to develop than I thought, too. e-Zine!: What will you do if IBM does drop all pretense of marketing to the home buyer, just completely drops advertising and tries *only* to sell to corporate markets? BW: Well, we'll continue with our corporate strategy for OS/2 with Object Desktop and OS/2 Essentials and the upcoming Process Commander and that line of software. We'll have to move to Windows 95 for our games. I mean, what can we do, if IBM essentially leaves us high and dry? e-Zine!: OK, what enhancements are coming up, or I suppose are *in*, GalCiv v2? BW: Oh, we had a meeting about this. GalCiv v2 is half written for me. I addressed the things that really bugged me about GalCiv and a lot - well not a lot, but some - suggestions from users. For me, the thing in GalCiv that I really didn't like is that the whole galaxy was like one big area that you could explore without any barriers. Like when you play a conventional land conquest game, there's land masses and crossing the water is a tedious thing that is done. So you're kind of isolated by your land masses. In space you don't have that, but you should. Not just from a fun level but because if you're in a galaxy and you're billions of light years from home there are a certain amount of problems that you're going to run into being so far away from a supply station. But in GalCiv that's not addressed. Until now. So in GalCiv v2, each ship has a specific range how far away from your planets it can go before it says, "No, you can't any further away." e-Zine!: And that's based on a function of fuel carriage or. . . BW: Not so much fuel because I really hate that concept in space. Like, "Whoops! You're out of fuel, ha ha!" But just how far you can get away from your star systems before it says, "We're not going to allow you to go any further." Basically for repairs, food - well not necessarily food - but basic infrastructure needs of the ship. So we just established a range. It totally changes your strategy for the game. e-Zine!: Anything else? BW: Yeah, the thing that annoyed me most is micro-management of the planets. In GalCiv you can go on to each of the planets and set up how you want to spend your money. It's a bunch of little buttons that you press. And I know I'm not the only one that felt that was a terrible way of doing it on all your planets, so I established star system governors who actually go in and set up your resources for you. e-Zine!: So as the game gets larger in scope you don't have to deal with all the mundane details. BW: Right. You just choose a governor, like a warrior guy or a scientist to run your star systems and he will actually say, "I'm going to put all your resources toward warfare or all toward research for you." e-Zine!: So do you see GalCiv v2 selling more copies than the original, now that you've got more awareness, more marketing, better graphics, etc.? BW: Yeah, I think so. We're going to do something that AIM never did, and that's advertise it. e-Zine!: I guess that would help. BW: Yes. So in Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer you'll see full page ads for GalCiv in the coming months. e-Zine!: So assuming that IBM doesn't do anything crazy like drop its marketing focus from the home market, Stardock plans to continue in both home and the corporate market for the long term? BW: Yes. We have, actually, separate consumer and corporate divisions here. e-Zine!: How large do you see Stardock growing in the future? BW: I don't want us to grow too big. I don't want us to be a Microsoft sized company or anything like that. There are a lot of advantages to being a small company. You can do things purely because you want. If you have 400 people or more in your company, and I'm just using an arbitrarily large number for a software company, you stop being able to do things that you want instead of what is the smart business decision. I like to personally be able to hang out on the Internet. Now if we had 400 people, the Chief Executive Officer of a company does not hang out on the Internet fighting flame wars on the .advocacy forum. You know, it's just not proper behavior. e-Zine!: Right. I guess Bill Gates probably doesn't have a lot of time to actually write code anymore either. BW: Right. That's another thing. I see my development time getting less and less as the company does grow. We've doubled in size just this year. e-Zine!: Is the company public yet? BW: No. Not yet. e-Zine!: Do you have plans to take it public? BW: Eventually, but not in the near future. Most companies go public because they need money and our profit margin last quarter was over 100%. e-Zine!: Ooh! Not bad. You don't want to say that too loudly. Remember, this is on the record. [more hah hahs] e-Zine!: So in the short term then do you think that one company - Stardock - can make a difference in the OS/2 market by providing quality applications and showing people that this can work? BW: Oh, absolutely. I think we already have. e-Zine!: Do you think that it's turning the tide somewhat? BW: Well, I don't think that one company can totally turn the tide. Only IBM can do that kind of support for OS/2. I think in a pinch, we can slow down backlash. Or slow down bad public opinion online, at least. But in terms of overall, no we can't do it alone. e-Zine!: What about in the long term then. How do you see OS/2's software base and market share five years from now, or ten years from now, even? BW: Well, a lot of it will depend on what Lou Gerstner says Monday at COMDEX. I mean if he goes on and basically mentions a vague IP strategy that doesn't mention OS/2 as a cornerstone of the IP strategy, I think OS/2 is going to be in serious trouble. And not just in a corporate environment. What I've tried to tell IBM for a while now is that having OS/2 not in a consumer platform or trying to focus OS/2 as just a corporate client and server is not the way to go because then [consumers can] just choose Windows NT and eventually Microsoft Exchange will just come with the operating system and blow away Notes. IBM needs to make sure that the world knows that it's betting the computer part of its future on OS/2 and Notes. e-Zine!: And you've already mentioned before that you're not sure if Lou Gerstner is listening to your suggestions or not. BW: Obviously, right. 'Cause I'm just a whiny ISV to one of their many operating systems. e-Zine!: Are you going to COMDEX? BW: Yes. e-Zine!: How many people from Stardock are going? BW: Myself and the vice president will be there - so just two of us. Someone has to be here to man the store. e-Zine!: One of you will have to man the booth and the other one. . . BW: Oh we're not going to have a booth. e-Zine!: Ah. What are you going to do? BW: We go to there just to meet with people. We'll have a hospitality suite that we set up so people can meet us. The days of going to COMDEX to have a booth are long gone. e-Zine!: Just because of the sheer noise and volume? BW: Yeah. There's just no point. It's like going to the auto-rama. It's a show for end-users now. We go to the other trade shows where we can make sales. IBM outright offered to give us a booth at COMDEX but we said, "no." It just doesn't make sense. e-Zine!: Well, the only other thing I was going to ask was related to a comment by one of our readers. He was singing your praises and mentioned something that has made me wonder for the last little while. How do you still find time to read the OS/2 newsgroups? BW: Eighteen hour days. Literally. No kidding. Seven days a week, eighteen hours a day. ***** The Memory Issue - by Chris Williams How much RAM could a Warp-RAM RAM if a Warp-RAM could RAM RAM? How much RAM is enough is one of the most infamous issues in the world of OS/2 Warp. Most everyone agrees the IBM recommended minimums are bare-bones amounts barely capable of a "Gee, it came up!" level of performance. After that, how much you really need seems to depend on who you ask, what you run, and how fast "fast enough" is to you. OS/2 Warp, like other modern operating systems, plays the memory game of "Robbing Peter to pay Paul" called swapping. In simplest terms, if Warp needs a certain amount of RAM to run a program, but that RAM is not available, Warp will write (or swap) some of the data it has in RAM to the hard drive to free up that RAM for the program. The problem is, a PC hard drive is much slower to access than RAM, so there's a big performance penalty for swapping. A small amount of swapping is normal on any Warp system. Excessive swapping will slow performance to a crawl and, in extreme cases, can damage your hard drive. This is called thrashing, and should be avoided at all costs. Benchmarks aside, empirical measurements of OS/2 system performance in various RAM configurations are pretty straight forward. Most people agree 4MB is not enough to do anything useful, 6MB is enough to get all of Warp's neat features (including HPFS) running, and 8MB can handle basic applications with an "acceptable" level of performance. Again, what is "acceptable" to one person may not be to another. Moreover, once you get used to faster performance, your own definition of "acceptable" will also probably change. As an IS professional and long time OS/2 "Power User", I usually recommend that nobody should consider running Warp in less than 8MB of RAM. For my own taste, the more RAM you can throw at Warp, the better. I'm also into instant computer gratification. On the other hand, most home users I know of never push their systems hard enough to really need more than 16MB, which also happens to be a nice RAM "sweet spot" for Warp. By a RAM "sweet spot", I mean the following: In a given system, Warp's performance increases dramatically as you increase the amount of available RAM in that system from 4MB to 8MB to 12MB. As you add RAM in these amounts, the size of the performance increase gets smaller. Basically, the economic Law of Diminishing Returns comes into play. Going from 12MB to 16MB still provides a nice speed increase, but it's not nearly the size you see going from 4MB to 8MB. After 16MB, unless you're running memory intensive applications, or like to keep more than several applications going at once, adding more RAM probably isn't going to be a big help. Keep in mind that RAM isn't the only thing that factors into overall system performance. How fast your hard drive and video card are can also have a dramatic effect on overall speed. If your video card is from the Dark Ages and your hard drive is slower than your old stereo's 33 1/3 RPM turntable, loading your PC with 64MB isn't going to do an awful lot for you. "OK, so what kinds of things will I notice as I add RAM to my system?" That's a fair question. To answer it, I'll unscientifically compare three systems I use on a regular basis. Each runs OS/2 Warp with different amounts of RAM. The lineup: My Business Notebook: IBM ThinkPad 360CSE Intel 80486/50 Processor 12MB RAM My Work Desktop Machine: Gateway 2000 4DX2-66V Intel 80486/66 Processor 32MB RAM The Family Home Computer: Packard Bell Legend 100CD Intel Pentium/66 Processor 24MB RAM I use each of these machines for different tasks, but all of them run similar software packages. All three use HPFS exclusively. The two desktop machines run video at 1024x768 resolution with 256 colors while the notebook runs 640x480 with 256 colors (the maximum available for the notebook). All three systems run a TCP/IP package. My notebook and home machine use the Internet Access Kit (IAK) while my work machine runs IBM TCP/IP for OS/2 with most of the available trimmings (NFS, X-Windows Server, etc.) and the latest patches. The NFS client and server functions are used regularly with other computers on a LAN. This PC is also equipped with the latest NetWare Client for OS/2 and attaches three NetWare servers and two network print queues. In this unscientific test, what I looked for was speed of loading OS/2 and Windows applications (separate, seamless Win-OS/2 sessions for the Windows applications), overall responsiveness of the WorkPlace Shell (opening & closing folders and switching between programs), how much disk swapping goes on, and of course, the size of the swap file. My reason for using separate, seamless Win-OS/2 sessions for Windows applications is they require more system resources this way than when running them in a single session. I set the CONFIG.SYS files on each PC to the defaults first supplied by Warp's installation program. The overall results were interesting. Even though it has the most RAM (32MB), my work machine also has the heaviest application load. The Window List routinely shows 12 separate programs running in the background taking care of various tasks this computer is responsible for handling every day. Add to this all of the background processes that don't show up in the Window List and you have a very busy system. This is all before I start doing my regular work! The swap file for this machine usually hovers around 12MB in size. Overall, WorkPlace Shell (WPS) responsiveness for this PC is the fastest of the three. Opening folders with only a few objects in them for the first time causes the traditional small amount of disk access found in Warp. Once opened, closing and then reopening the folders is much faster as Warp caches the contents of recently opened folders. My work machine comes in second, however, in speed of loading and executing OS/2 and Windows applications. While there are no unusual amounts of disk swapping going on, this machine just can't keep up with my home computer when it comes to raw processor speed. This should be no surprise to those who switch between similarly equipped 486 and Pentium systems. Before I upgraded it, my home computer originally had 8MB of RAM. When I tried it with this amount, it was slower in almost every respect than my work machine despite the faster processor. It's often said that a 486/66 with 16MB of RAM can outperform a Pentium with 8MB - even though both systems will cost about the same amount of money. My unscientific observations definitely support this claim. If you are considering a new computer purchase on a limited budget, this is something to keep in mind. I've already stated that my home machine is the fastest at application loading and execution. Ironically, it came in second in overall WPS responsiveness. I believe this may be more related to different system settings and a faster drive in my work machine than to RAM. My home computer's hard drive often appears to think for a split second before files are accessed. There is no such hesitation in my work system. I also have those annoying system sounds enabled on my home machine because my oldest daughter likes them. That results in this machine having more to do (loading & playing sounds) when you're navigating the shell. Otherwise, both systems feel similar in responsiveness and seem to have more than enough RAM for caching the contents of recently opened folders. Again, once an application is running, my home computer is faster. The swap file on my home computer starts at 2MB and rarely exceeds 8MB even under the heaviest loads it sees. My notebook has the slowest processor and the least amount of RAM (12MB) of the three. It also winds up a distant third in performance to the other two. A typical workload on my notebook is almost identical to that of my home machine without the system sounds. Keep in mind my notebook has only half the RAM of my home computer. I quickly learned to never run more than three applications on my notebook at a time (two if one is a Windows application) unless I'm willing to accept very slow performance. After bootup has completed, the swap file hovers around 10-11MB and grows from there. A single Windows application will immediately increase the swap size to 13MB. Without any applications loaded, WPS responsiveness is sluggish compared to the other systems, but is otherwise still within my own realm of acceptability. Load one Windows application and forget about responsiveness. Folders can take as long as 30 seconds to open or close, and switching to and from the Windows application becomes a major event. It's almost better to just exit the application and restart it when you need it again. Almost, but not quite. OS/2 applications, on the other hand, are less stressful, unless they are old or poorly optimized like the old version of Lotus AmiPro for OS/2, which is almost legendary for being rather piggish on performance. "Speaking of Windows applications, how much more RAM do I need to make my PC run with the same snap as it does now with Windows 3.1 or Windows 95?" This is a little tougher to answer for one platform and easy for the other. For Windows 3.1, I use what I call the 2MB rule. If you want to get roughly the same level of "snap" with Warp you now have with Windows 3.1, add 2MB. To put it another way, Warp in 6MB is about like Windows 3.1 in 4MB, Warp in 8MB is about like Windows 3.1 in 6MB, etc. This applies mainly to native applications. Windows applications running in separate Win-OS/2 sessions under Warp will obviously need more RAM. Again, this is because separate sessions require more resources. As you approach 16MB, this rule starts to break down (diminishing returns again) and Warp can actually wind up faster at some things. Keep in mind that, because Warp often has to access the hard drive when a folder is opened to do things like getting icons and object information, it will always feel a little slower. The WorkPlace Shell (PMSHELL.EXE) also does a *lot* more than Windows 3.1's Program Manager (PROGMAN.EXE), compounding the effects of feeling slower. Finally, remember that Warp and Windows 3.1 handle memory using very different methods. It will never be a true apples to apples comparison. With Windows 95, I use the 0MB RAM rule. Similar scenario, different number. In fact, one can argue that, when running applications native to each OS, Warp is probably a little faster in systems with more than about 8MB. Because Windows 95, like Warp, tends to read the disk when opening folders, the advantage Windows 3.1 has is lost. So what's the bottom line? I see it this way. If you're an average user running Warp, adding RAM to your system will definitely speed things up for you until you reach the 16MB range. After that, you should probably look at other things like faster video cards, hard drives or processors if you want more punch. On the other hand, if you regularly run memory intensive or more than several applications at the same time, going to as much as 32MB of RAM or more before looking at the other performance factors is probably the way to go. You'll definitely fall into this category if you run things like VisualAge C++, lots of big multimedia applications, do lots of heavy duty networking, or regularly handle huge graphic files. Ironically, if you can't let go of running more than a few Windows applications at the same time, you might also fit in the more RAM category. Just remember, what's fast enough for one person might not be for another. In the final analysis, after you get safely past IBM's recommended minimums, how much RAM you really need is still subject to some interpretation. (editor's note: You can actually get a great deal on 16MB of RAM. The reason is that one 16MB chip costs less to produce than two 8MB chips. You should be able to get the 16MB chip for only one and a half times the price of an 8MB chip - not double! That means if memory goes for around $350/8MB in you area (as it does here), instead of $700 for a 16MB chip, you'll probably pay around $600. Of course these prices are only examples and change by the day.) ----- Chris Williams (http://www.henge.com/~chrisw) has been actively involved with OS/2 systems for the past six years. A former IBM employee, OS/2 Ambassador, and long time member of Team OS/2, he is currently a PC and network specialist for Perot Systems Corporation. ***** The Developer's Connection for OS/2 - by Stacy John Behrens One of OS/2's biggest ongoing complaints has been its lack of support from Independent Software Vendors (ISV's). IBM has been quietly trying to remedy this situation since OS/2 was released. One of their most useful ideas has been the Developer's Connection CD-ROM sets. Currently in the eighth edition, the DevCon CD-ROMs are among the best software deals of all time for anyone who wishes to create software for OS/2 or to discover many of the wide variety of applications and tools available for OS/2. OK, that sounds good but what about specifics? Well, the DevCon set comes out quarterly (four times a year) and costs approximately $120 US for a one year subscription. It contains the latest beta version of OS/2 Warp at the time of its printing. As the name would indicate, it is aimed at software developers and accordingly most of the software on the discs is in some way related to development. Some of the applications are full working versions, some are time expiring versions and some are demos. There are a wide variety of tools and utilities from IBM as well as third party software vendors available on the discs, many of which are the best currently available for OS/2. It also contains toolkits for working with the various APIs for multimedia, networking, OS/2 Warp itself and much more. For the serious software developer, these CD-ROMs may very well prove to be indispensable. It literally takes several pages of small text to list all of the applications, toolkits, and utilities available. Among the utilities available are DB/2, C-Set/2, Workframe, Communication Manager/2, VisualGen, MetaWare High C/C++, Magus Pageturner, Visual SlickEdit, VX/REXX, Sybase Open Client Developers Kit, and many more. Also included is support for development for OpenGL, DIVE, OpenDoc, and several more advanced extensions. The DevCon set is not limited to just OS/2 on the Intel platform. Support for PowerPC and AIX development is also included. And since development is difficult unless you have the documentation you need, there is an enormous library of technical and product information available on the CD's about almost any product or system feature you would care to think of. There is even a complete set of development tools for network development. Impressed yet? You should be. Even if you are not a developer, the DevCon CD-ROMs are a great way to examine and use many of the most advanced software tools available for OS/2 at a minimal cost. For developers, it is foolish not to get your hands on these CDs as fast as you can. The Developers Connection for OS/2 can be ordered by calling IBM at 1-800-6DEVCON (1-800-633-8266) in the US. Outside the US, contact your nearest IBM representative for ordering information. ----- This is Stacy John Behrens first contribution to OS/2 e-Zine!. He can be reached by E-mail at sjb3@lehigh.edu ***** Using OS/2 as a Scientific Platform - by Dr. Dirk Terrell In May I had an observing run on the historic 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mt. Wilson (http://www.mtwilson.edu) near Los Angeles. Some fellow astronomers and I were there to measure the variation in brightness of several eclipsing binary stars, stars that orbit one another in such a way that they pass in front of one another as seen from Earth. When I arrived on the mountain, the history of the place made a big impression on me. This was the telescope that Edwin Hubble, for whom the Hubble Space Telescope (http://www.stsci.edu) was named, used to demonstrate that the universe is expanding. For nearly four decades, the 100-inch telescope was the largest in the world after its commissioning in 1917. In 1985 the telescope was mothballed due to a lack of funding. Recently, however, the telescope was refurbished and recommissioned. As I made my way to the telescope control room, I wondered what it was going to be like to use the old giant. Old telescopes are generally very finicky and all have their own personalities. But when I went into the control room, I was greeted by a very familiar sight. The telescope was controlled by a PC running OS/2. I was mildly surprised to see OS/2 being used to control the telescope, as Unix is much more popular in scientific applications. But OS2's preemptive multitasking and multithreading capabilities make it a powerful contender when considering operating systems for a PC workstation. I began using OS/2 when version 2.0 was released back in the spring of 1992. I had just bought a top-of-the-line 50 MHz Gateway 2000 486 DX/2 to help speed the completion of my dissertation on a particular type of binary star called "algols". The work involved running my hydrodynamics code and then comparing the results to observations of these stars. It would usually take several days for one simulation to run to completion. Naturally, I wanted to be able to use the PC for other things while the hydro simulations were running. The PC came, of course, with Windows 3.1, and right there in the manual it said that multitasking was possible under Windows. Using the Lahey DOS Fortran compiler, I set a simulation in motion, and then fired up Word to work on a letter. A few minutes later, everything froze and nothing I did would bring the machine back to life. Time to hit the reset switch and start over. It didn't take long to realize that DOS/Windows just wasn't going to cut it as an operating system for my work. I didn't want to go the Unix route because I had a significant investment in DOS and Windows software. I had heard that OS/2 was a 32-bit, preemptive multitasking operating system that could run DOS and Windows applications as well. So, I wandered over to Babbages in the mall and picked up a copy. I have never looked back. My simulations could run in their own VDM and not be affected by the crashes of other programs. Not once have I ever lost a simulation due to a crash. I have gotten so accustomed to OS/2's robustness that I cringe when I sit down at a machine running Windows and try to do more than one thing at a time. Scientific work using computers usually involves three major functions: calculations, viewing the results, and publishing a paper. OS/2 excels in all of these areas. When I first began using OS/2, there were not many native applications for doing these things. But OS/2's DOS and Windows compatibility enabled me to use my existing software without fear of system crashes. I used the DOS Lahey Fortran compiler to compile my code, Sigmaplot for Windows to view the output, and Word for Windows for publishing papers. I also used Mathematica for Windows, but it did not run under OS/2 2.0, so I had to use the Dual Boot feature of OS/2 to run Mathematica. Later, under OS/2 2.1, Mathematica for Windows ran just fine. Over time I have moved away from DOS and Windows software to native OS/2 versions of the tools I need. The Watcom Fortran compiler is very good. It produces fast, compact 32-bit code and is shipped with sample code for creating Presentation Manager applications and REXX libraries. REXX (http://rexx.hursley.ibm.com/rexx) is one of the many hidden pearls that come with OS/2. It is a relatively simple, yet very powerful language, especially when it comes to dealing with text files. A downside to REXX is that it is an interpreted language and therefore slower than a compiled one, but for small jobs that often creep up, it is ideal. A lot of my work involves processing output files from various programs, and I use REXX to do all of that. Using Watcom's VX-REXX, I have written some very powerful Presentation Manager programs with great ease. If C/C++ is more to your liking (or if you are like me and avoid the silliness of arguing about which language is best and use the one that is best suited to the task at hand), IBM's VisualAge C++ is an awesome tool. It is what I thought I was going to get when I made the mistake of buying Microsoft Visual C++ a couple of years ago. I believe VAC++ is going to lead to a flood of OS/2 applications. Some people prefer to avoid writing code if possible, and use tools like Mathematica or Maple to do calculations. With these tools you get built-in libraries to perform various numerical or symbolic calculations and avoid the drudgery of chasing bugs in self-written code. These tools can also do many kinds of graphical displays of data, a very important part of the scientific process. Last fall, Wolfram (http://www.wri.com) released the first OS/2 version of Mathematica. The OS/2 version is noticeably faster than the Windows version under either DOS/Windows or Win-OS/2. A downside is that there is not yet an OS/2 version of the Notebook interface like that in the Windows version. For some people this may be a severe handicap, but I do not find myself hindered by it. Having served as a beta tester of the OS/2 version of Mathematica, I can say that they are very responsive to input about their product and if demand is high enough, they will produce a Notebook interface for OS/2. It is possible to use the Windows interface and the OS/2 kernel, but there is a performance penalty in doing so. I hear that an OS/2 version of Maple will be released soon, and that is welcome news here. I prefer the graphical output format of Maple to the text output of Mathematica. When it comes to graphing data, nothing beats the speed of the freely available GNUPlot for OS/2. I use it to do quick looks at results. For publication-quality graphs, I still use Sigmaplot for Windows, but I have recently been working with the demo version of Xact and it seems quite capable. Publishing the results of one's work is an important part of doing science, and OS/2 is quite capable in that area as well. Many journal publishers will accept manuscripts in electronic format, and I suspect in the future most will it. The most popular format is LaTeX, and many publishers supply templates for their particular journals. The EMTeX tool is available for OS/2 and the only cost is the time to download it from Hobbes. Combined with the Enhanced Editor (EPM) that comes with OS/2 and the EPMTeX add-on, EMTeX makes a fine system for producing manuscripts. These tools are available on hobbes.nmsu.edu in the /os2/unix/tex directory. I prefer to do most of my word processing with Describe, which imports and exports WordPerfect, Word, and AmiPro documents (as well as many others). If you are like me and exhibit the Pavlovian response of entering Unix commands at a command prompt, you will be glad to know that most of the popular Unix tools have been ported to OS/2 and are freely available at the Hobbes ftp site. These include tools like grep, editors like vi, and even Perl if you are comfortable with that very powerful scripting tool. There are even ports of various Unix shells like the Korn and csh shells that can replace the native OS/2 command shell. In conclusion, I (and many others) have found OS/2 to be a stellar performer as a scientific workstation OS. The combination of robust multitasking, extensive software compatibility, and the very easily installed network features in Warp Connect turn a PC into a very powerful scientific workstation, be it standalone or as a front end into more powerful number crunchers. ----- Dr. Dirk Terrell (terrell@fdt.net) 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. ***** Kali for OS/2? - by Bernard B. Yoo I could beat you at DOOM, If we weren't 3000 miles apart. How many times have we all sat around and complained about not having native OS/2 apps? Anywhere you look, you can find Windows users saying, "If OS/2 is so good, where are the apps?" Inevitably, some rabid OS/2 fanatic will jump in: "There are over two thousand native OS/2 apps." Well, yes, that is true, but what kind of apps are they? How many shareware OS/2 versions of the DOS "More" command do we need? How many OS/2 programs does it take to set the system clock, to the atomic clock time via the Internet? And just how many "CD Audio" players does one really need? What about REAL apps? What ever happened to OS/2 spreadsheets, OS/2 word processors, OS/2 budget programs, Databases, Programming languages, Graphics suites? Well my friends. They are upon us. There are new OS/2 commercial apps appearing every day, and more looming on the horizon. Shareware apps are getting better and better too. This is all fine and dandy for the working bee in all of us, but what about that side of us that is less home office, less productivity oriented, less multitasking? What could that be? You guessed it. GAMES! How many good OS/2 games are there? Don't break out the calculators just yet, because the number can be counted on one hand. So, until new games are released for OS/2 (which happens more and more), we have to rely on DOS compatibility. Well, I have found a new way to spice up old games. Do you get tired of the same old computer AI? You can't afford a game server like DWANGO, or PlayNation? No friends with modems? Well, quick, point your Web Explorer to http://www.axxis.com/kali and get some info about the program called KALI. KALI allows you to play any IPX network game, over the internet. You simply run KALI with a designated KALI server, and anyone who is on that server is now part of your IPX network! You can use KALI with a PPP or SLIP connection over a modem, an ISDN line, or even a direct connection. Any TCP/IP connection to the internet will work. Even SLIrP and TIA will work, but run rather slowly. I personally PPP through an internet provider, over my 14.4k modem, and play Descent. Play is only limited to your connection speed. At 14.4, 3 player Descent is OK, but 4 player gets real choppy. 28.8 is smooth with 3, good with 4, and 5 player is possible, but rough. The lucky one's who have an ISDN or T1 line will have no trouble with 8 player Descent. I use a DX4/100, with 12 meg of RAM, Pro Audio Studio sound card, Trident 8900c ISA video card with 1 meg DRAM, DTC 2278 VLB EIDE hard disk controller, and a ZOOM 14.4 fax/modem. I run OS/2 Warp with fixpack 10 installed. But what about other games? Well, any game that uses IPX will work with KALI! Virtual Pool, DOOM 1 and 2, Heretic, Command and Conquer, Terminal Velocity... just to name a few. And more come out every day. The best part is the cost. There are no connection fees or long distance charges (other than your internet connection). KALI itself is shareware, and the shareware version is not crippled in gameplay, but only allows 15 minutes of connection. But that is no matter, registration is only $20! For unlimited Network play! That is not even as much as 1 month at some game networks! KALI also installs easily following the instructions included in the zip file. KALI requires an unzip utility, and a little knowledge of DOS batch files, the internet, and your network connection. Most of the information you will need is readily available in the documentation, and if it is not the docs tell you how to find the information elsewhere. As of this writing, Jay was awaiting the arrival of his TCP/IP development kit from IBM. As soon as he receives this, he plans to start on KALI/2. The overwhelming number of requests he received for an OS/2 version convinced him it was worth the effort! KALI/2, as I understand it, will be a DOS program that utilizes the OS/2 Virtual TCP/IP support. This will allow the user to connect with the OS/2 SLIP/PPP (or network) software, and run KALI at any time, without having to reconnect under DOS. If you are interested in KALI, check out http://www.axxis.com/kali and leave feedback. Be sure to tell Jay that you appreciate the support he has shown for OS/2. With the size of the potential OS/2 gaming market, I believe that OS/2 can be more profitable than Win95. Win95 has lots of competition (supposedly), while OS/2 is relatively sparse when it comes to games. Jay Cotton's support is right up there at the top of the scale. He is responsive, supportive, and open to suggestions. Good products AND good customer service are hard to get sometimes, so Jay deserves our applause for KALI. This policy applies to ALL software publishers. If you see a product for DOS/Win3.x/Win95 that you like and want for OS/2, tell everyone (IRC and usenet news work good for that, and E-mail is great!) and tell the company. Nothing is more powerful than word of mouth. After all, 10 million OS/2 users can't be wrong! Until next time, Keep playing, and buying, games for OS/2. ----- John D. Reinhold (jreinh@mnw.net) is a computer programmer for the USAF, stationed at Gunter AFB, Montgomery AL. He is close to completing a Computer Science degree from Eastern New Mexico University, in Portales NM (http://www.enmu.edu). ***** Editorial Policy OS/2 e-Zine! strives to be a high quality publication bringing the best in news, reviews and opinions to the OS/2 community. We promote the use and discussion of OS/2 and its native software. It is not our intention, however, to engage in "bashing" of any other operating systems or its software. A certain amount of this may leak into our pages but we will try to minimize it whenever possible. It is the policy of OS/2 e-Zine! to present its readers with informative and useful facts. We will strive, in all situations, to verify the content of articles published. At this time, however, due to financial constraints this may not always be possible. In the event of innacurate reporting, OS/2 e-Zine! will promptly verify the mistake and publish a correction and/or apology. 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Remember, smaller amounts are 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! Corporate Sponsors: OS/2 e-Zine! only allots space for 10 major commercial sponsors in each issue. Arrangements are available for long term sponsorship. All sponsors are listed in our sponsors pages with links to their commercial WWW sites. Depending on contribution, we also provide our commercial sponsors with text hyperlinks to their sites throughout our pages or high impact, inline graphical links. For more information or any other questions please email (editor@mail.isisnet.com) us or contact us at: Haligonian Media 7 Pleasant St., Suite B Dartmouth, N.S. CANADA B2Y 3P1 (902) 461-2266 ***** Coming up next time - on the Web December 31, 1995 Reviews Word Processors In-depth reviews of the major OS/2 word processors and a few you might not have heard of. FTP Clients Get a glimpse of what's hot and what's not in the world of FTP. Games IBM's Family FunPack for OS/2 and MicroLearn's GamePack II Books Our reviewer unleashes Warp Unleased. Articles: Why Will Warp Succeed? A follow up to this month's article on why Warp isn't ready for prime time. What do you mean, hard? A rebuttal to all those nay-sayers who insist on trashing Warp's installation program. ISDN Blues That 14.4 got you down? Do you have a hankerin' for some real speed? Why not try ISDN with Warp. Our reviewer did. . . Interview: Dan Porter Come and hear what the man who wants to be your complete communications solution has to say. A candid discussion on the Post Road Mailer, Surf n' Rexx, and, of course, the future of OS/2. All the regular stuff: The Rants the Beta File The Rave a NEW REXX Column! Your Letters Heath's Tips AND MUCH MORE! What Else?: What else would you like to see covered in the next issue? It's not too late to let us know! ***** **** *** ** Copyright 1995 - Haligonian Media ISSN 1203-5696