Request For Help

If you like XFolder and would like to contribute to it, your support will be very welcome. XFolder is slowly beginning to become too complex to be handled by one person all alone.

You don't have to be a programmer to help. I'd appreciate any support in the following areas:

Translations. XFolder is designed to be translateable in a fairly easy way. All language-dependent parts have been separated from the actual "intelligence" of the program into separate files, which can be translated independently.
If you're interested in translating XFolder to your language, you can simply download the XFolder sources from my homepage, which contain everything neccessary for this. You don't have to be a programmer to do this, but it would be of great help if you have a basic knowledge of HTML, since both XFolder's Online Reference and the help file were originally written in HTML and then simply converted to the IBM format, which I dislike very much.
In this case, please contact me, so I can add you to my mailing list to allow you to get news about changes in time.
If you're a programmer and have some experience in PM and/or WPS programming, please contact me also. I have great plans for XFolder's future and would like to turn it into more of an "XWorkplace" package to overcome the most obvious WPS limitations which exist today. Since there's little hope that IBM will do anything about this, I believe the OS/2 community needs to do it themselves. The following major things are on my to-do list (I am not listing the "little" features that I'll add myself soon):
1. WPS file handling. This needs some serious reworking. I cannot believe that the WPS hangs every other time one copies more than a dozen files. File handling is the main task of an operating system's shell, and the current implementation needs at least the following enhancements: thread-safety, speed, proper progress bars when copying, a "Cancel" button that's not always disabled, more meaningful error messages etc.pp. This will require all of the WPS file-handling methods to be reworked (wpCopy, wpMove etc.).
2. Populating folders. One of the reasons that the WPS has become so much slower in Warp 4 is that the WPS now seems to create object handles for every single file while populating a folder, which wasn't the case with Warp 3. Object handles are a thoughtful mechanism which is neccessary for program objects and shadows, but they should only be created when neccessary. I suspect this misbehavior is situated in wpPopulate, which therefore needs some rework too.
3. Icon handling. Drag'n'drop in the WPS always causes icons to be arranged in a fairly random way. This should be improved.
4. WPProgram. I have never understood why there's an object for global DOS/Win-OS/2 settings if the program objects don't respect the settings there. We need support for global settings and also global and individual environment variables in program objects so that CONFIG.SYS does not always have to be modified.
5. WarpCenter. That thing is instable, slow, and does not conform very well with the rest of the WPS. This should be completely reprogrammed. Since XFolder already has code for those "folder content" menus, this shouldn't be too hard to to.
6. Multi-user support. The WPS is already designed to support multiple users thru the use of multiple OS2.INI files and Desktop hierarchies, so I cannot quite understand why IBM is not implementing this. XFolder could do this; I am thinking of replacing the PROTSHELL and/or RUNWORKPLACE statements in CONFIG.SYS with some XFolder executable, which will then start PMSHELL.EXE with a bunch of preset environment variables, most importantly OS2.INI settings and a UNIX-like HOME environment variable to support multiple configurations for applications in a "home" directory for each user. XFolder should then offer a context menu item to "logoff" or something.
7. OS/2 also needs to be able to restart Presentation Manager somehow without having to reboot, for example to change display resolutions. The current solution is a joke. If you have any ideas about this, especially how to terminate and restart PM without blocking the system, please contact me.
So if you're interested in adding any of these features to XFolder (or if you have other suggestions), you'd be very welcome to join the project! Any help is appreciated.