Previewed by Colin Polonowski

One of the few things the Atari has a lot of is replacement desktops. In the Shareware corner, Thing currently holds the title of being the best around with Gemini not far behind. However the commercial side is much more closely fought between Ease and NeoDesk.

Now there is another contender for the commercial throne - Jinnee from ASH. As with all ASH products, Jinnee will most likely be distributed in the UK by System Solutions.

Jinnee is designed to run as part of a Multi-Tasking operating system such as MagiC. All dialogue boxes are non-modal so if one appears the system will not ground to a halt. The program can also run under normal TOS so if you don't have access to a multi-tasking OS you can still run Jinnee as a replacement for the relatively poor Atari alternative.

I did encounter one problem whilst running with MagiC - the icons were all corrupted on screen. Other than that small fault it did seem to be much more stable under MagiC than normal TOS.

The demo which I tested was fairly slow in comparison to Thing - opening drives and screen redraws were most effected. The actual interface was nice to use and I was able to carry out all the usual tasks I'd expect from a replacement desktop. Different programs can be assigned to different tasks and Kobold can be used for file operations much in the same was as Ease.

Jinnee also has a notepad feature which enables you to put small messages on the desktop. You can assign the text and background colour as well as the typeface - if you have NVDI or SpeedoGDOS installed. Ease has a very similar option built in and most other replacement desktops can use Stripper to obtain a similar result.

There is currently a German demo version available from ASH and it can be downloaded from their web page at:

It does have some pretty stiff competition and most people have now already made their choice. Jinnee will need to offer something special if it is to stand a chance. It would also be a very good idea for ASH to do something about the speed.

All in all, I'm looking forward to seeing the full English release of Jinnee some time in the near future...