PsL Monthly 1993 December/PSL Monthly Shareware CD-ROM (December 1993).iso/psl_news/psl_news.1

Text File | 1993-11-04 | 17KB | 371 lines

=====News & Views <psl_logo.pcx>


- Programming is Easier Than Ever
- How We Review Programs
- A Day or Two In the Life...
- Shareware Overload?
- New Retail Products
  ...$15 Game Controller/Joystick
  ...$5 Grateful Dead Mouse Pad
  ...$25 King's Quest VI CD-ROM Offer
  ...$149 Network System installs on parallel port
  ...Bram Stoker's Dracula
  ...Front Page Sports: Football Pro

-----Programming is Easier Than Ever

Starting with this month's PsL Monthly CD-ROM, we are putting a section of
PsL's disk-based library on the CD each month. The section this month is
Programming.

The major programming sections in PsL are Basic, C, Pascal, and Assembly
Language. Other languages included are Cobol, Fortran, Forth, Modula2,
artificial intelligence languages (e.g.: Lisp), and others.

Each programming section has tutorials for learning the language,
third-party compilers and/or interpreters, tools to make programming
easier, libraries of routines and individual routines to add features to
your programs without having to do the programming yourself, and more.

---Picking a Language

[CD-ROM Note: Ignore disk numbers and look in the PRGMMING directories.]

If you have an interest in programming, first pick a language, study some
of the tutorials, and try some of the third-party compilers to see how you
like it.

We recommend starting with Basic because it is the easiest program with
which to get immediate results. Disk #4744, Basic Training, is a good
tutorial and MegaDisk set #27344 gives you three different Basic compilers
to try. MegaDisk set #27053 is a trial version of Microsoft's QuickBasic,
but if you got QBASIC with your version of DOS, you can do a lot with it,
short of turning your program into an EXE file.

Young people who are serious about programming and may want to make it a
career might want to start with assembly language and learn the basic
elements of programming. A86 (disk #0690) is an outstanding assembler and
comes with D86, a powerful debugger, by the same author. Megadisk set
#27052 is a collection of 5 disks (for a total of $6.99) for learning
assembler.

If you really want to maximize results and minimize programming, you cannot
do any better than Visual Basic for Windows. With an understanding of only
a few of the most essential elements of programming, such as DO-WHILE and
FOR-NEXT loops and calling subroutines, you can write professional looking
programs.

While a dying breed of hard-core DOS users still swear that they will never
use Windows, nowhere are the advantages of Windows more evident than in
programming with VB.

---DOS vs Windows Programming

For a good example, compare the CD-ROM access programs for DOS and for
Windows. The DOS version was written with Microsoft's Professional
Development System 7 (MS's euphemistic name for Basic). The Windows version
was written in VB.

A great deal of the code in the PDS version has to do with displaying text,
scrolling text, and detecting user's input. Virtually none of that code is
needed in VB because Text Boxes with scroll bars display the text
automatically. VB takes care of detecting user input and executing the
proper code.

The DOS program requires you to load a third-party TSR (by the name of
Together) to view graphics and the Windows version does not. This is
because like the mouse support in the Windows version, graphics support is
a function of Windows and the programmer does not have to worry about it at
all.

In contrast, writing a program in DOS to try to support the countless
variations in video graphics is a daunting task which we are happy to leave
to the author of Together.

---VB - Almost No Programming At All!

To give you an idea of how little programming can be required with Visual
Basic, take a look at the following screen shot of a Windows wallpaper
changer being written: <VB.PCX>

In the screen shot, the box that the user sees (with the title "PsL's
Wallpaper Changer") is surrounded by VB windows.

This program, which we have put in the WIN\UTILITIES directory of the CD
this month as [CH_PAPER], lets you change drives using a pull-down drive
box (upper right of the PsL window) which displays all available drives,
change directories with a scrolling directory box which automatically
changes when a new drive is selected.

To the left of the directory box is a file list box which shows all the
files in the selected directory. The user can change the Windows wallpaper
simply by clicking on a file name, or can enter a number of minutes in the
box above the file box to have the program display each BMP file in the
directory.

All of these boxes were inserted into the PsL window simply by clicking the
appropriate button to the left of the window.

Below the PsL box are two code boxes. The bottom one sets up the necessary
Windows commands for the program to call to cause the wallpaper to change.
These commands were cut-and-pasted from a VB-Windows reference file.

The box above that is essentially all the code required by this program -
two lines which call the Windows commands. The first line, "Sub
m_Change_Click" is just the title of the subroutine. "m_Change" is the name
we gave the menu item "Change". When the user clicks on that menu item,
VB/Windows automatically runs this subroutine.

The programmer doesn't have to worry about what the mouse is doing, about
what kind of video the user has, about creating and operating all the
directory and drive boxes, or even about what makes the wallpaper change
once the command is given.

Voila - a very useful utility with virtually no programming!


-----How We Review Programs

PsL's reviewers have to test and review up to 1000 programs a month
(including those which are ultimately rejected). We are often asked how we
can review so many programs every month.

Part of the answer is that we have an experienced staff, most of whom have
been with PsL for years. The other part of the answer is a program which
automates much of the review process.

PsL's Reviews program starts by automatically virus-checking the new
disk/files as part of the installation process.

Reviews is tied into a database which can instantly tell us if a program
has been written up in the past and if so, it can insert information from
the past write-up into the current one. Since we get well over 100 updates
a month and have written up over 10,000 programs in the past, this one
feature saves a tremendous amount of time.

For new programs, Reviews makes it easy for reviewers to run programs and
to extract information from DOC files for use in the write-ups.

The Reviews program runs in Windows, where it is easy to test-run a program
and view the docs in separate windows while keeping Reviews open in another
window.

Paint Shop Pro, another Windows app, makes it easy to capture program
screens, whether text based or graphical, and to manipulate the screen
images before saving them for inclusion with the program write-up.

When all the reviews for a month have been done, checked and edited, the
program assigns disk numbers and assembles the write-ups into categories
for importing into FrameMaker (DTP program) where the raw text is prepared
for output to PostScript files and sent to the printing company.

The result is the monthly PsL News.


-----A Day or Two In the Life...

...of the computers at PsL.

For about a year, we struggled with a problem of one of our systems locking
up when opening a DOS window in Windows. We reinstalled Windows, Stacker,
and every other piece of software on the machine. We replaced every
component including the mother board. We appealed to Microsoft for help to
no avail.

The problem has apparently been solved. A MediaVision techie told us to
move their drivers from a Stacked drive to an unStacked part of the drive.
Although we don't understand the connection, we did so and the problem went
away.

Another "feature" of Windows that I've been unable to figure out is how to
turn down the volume on the Multimedia Mixer and have it STA