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BLANKER.DOC
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1995-04-12
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Screen Blanker
Version 5.0
All rights reserved.
Copyright (C) Peter Wansch, 1995
April 8, 1995
Vienna, Austria
OS/2, Operating System/2, WIN-OS/2 and Workplace Shell are trademarks of IBM Corp.
DPMS.EXE and Screen Saver are copyright of Siegfried Hanisch and Peter Wansch.
Deskpic is copyright of John Ridges.
The modules AQUARIUM, EYES, FIRE, MELT, PUZZLE, SPHERES, STRING and WALL are copyright of John Ridges.
The module RAIN is copyright by T. Alex Beamish.
The modules SMARTIES and OS22BOUN are copyright by Delboy.
The module SWARM is copyright by Patrick J. Naughton and John W. Cocula.
The modules BLANK, FLAME, HOPALONG, IMAGE, LIFE, PYRO, QIX, ROTOR, SWARM and WORM are copyright of Patrick J. Naughton and Michael Lenzen.
The modules EXTERNAL, STICKS, TV, RAUPE are copyright of Olaf Koch.
The module HOPOK is copyright of Michael Peters and Olaf Koch.
The poem 'raupe' on which the module RAUPE is based is copyright 1985, 1990 by Luchterhand Literaturverlag. All rights reserved.
The module BOUNCE is copyright of John Ridges and Peter Wansch.
The module TREK1 is copyright of D. Howell.
All other modules are copyright of Peter Wansch.
All modules are distributed in this package free of charge.
INSTALLATION
============
To install Screen Blanker open a full screen or windowed OS/2 session
and type INSTALL at the prompt. Make sure that the LIBPATH and PATH statement
in your CONFIG.SYS file include the directory where Blanker is installed.
The default password is PASSWORD. Screen Blanker is Shareware. Please read
the registration notice in the online help. To use Screen Blanker 5.0 you must
have REXX support installed.
WHAT'S NEW
==========
DPMS support for VESA compliant monitors has been added. VESA should
only be selected when the VGA mode or the 8514/A mode does not work
since the VESA mode could produce unwanted results. The VESA DPMS
code was written by Staffan Ulfberg and ported for Screen Blanker
by Peter Wansch.
The items regarding the information window have been taken out of
the Options menu. The information window now has a pop-up menu
that can be displayed by clicking over the information window
with the right mouse button.
Printing captured screen bitmaps is now WYSIWYG. If you select
Original size and print a screen image its dimensions are
identical to the dimensions on the screen.
The internal modules have been taken out and are now available as
external modules. Memory consumption has further been reduced.
A new Screen Blanker module (Tapdance) has been added. It was
inspired by David Slauson's Tiny Dancing Elephant program which is
available from hobbes.nmsu.edu (elephant.zip).
"Some years ago, someone in the computer industry said that it
would be as hard to get a good personal computer from IBM as it
would be to teach an elephant to tap-dance. Shortly thereafter,
IBM introduced the IBM PC, and set a new industry standard.
Since that time, tap-dancing elephants have been a kind of
running joke within IBM.
I wrote the program after someone on the OS2ARENA FORUM
suggested that a tap-dancing elephant might be a good OS/2
mascot."
You can now use the Print Screen key for screen captures and
turn off the message display before capturing the screen. (if
you use the Print Screen key you might want to disable standard OS/2
screen printing which can be done in the System settings notebook)
The modules that are displayed when the screen is blanked can now
be set to change every 10 to 240 seconds.
You can determine how long the message "Switching off your monitor..."
is displayed. The Power off message time in seconds can be set from
0 (no display) to 120 seconds.
--
The user interface has been modified. The Settings dialog box has
been replaced with an easier to use Settings notebook and the other
dialog boxes have also been redesigned.
The online help has been rewritten.
Due to a complete code reorganisation Blanker has become smaller
and faster and is now easier on system resources than prior versions.
Resources like the user bitmap are only loaded on demand and they
are unloaded when they are no longer needed.
The Blanker window has been replaced with a control center like
window that has no client area.
--
The installation program is now a multi-threaded 32-Bit PM
program that will keep your existing settings if you install
Screen Blanker over an existing version. It can also be installed
over Tools 'n Games for OS/2.
Information about objects and screen capturing has been added
to the online help.
Five new modules (EXTERNAL, STICKS, TV, HOPOK, and RAUPE) were
included. Please see ssok.doc for more information.
Two new Deskpic modules are distributed with Screen Blanker:
AQUARIUM.DSS and TREK1.DSS. These Deskpic modules require
much memory. Hence on low memory systems it is recommended
to delete these modules. Unlike Screen Saver modules Deskpic
modules have to be kept in memory all the time.
There is a new option called Horizontal display that displays the
information items side by side.
There is a new blanking option in the Options menu called Hide
visible windows. If you for instance use OS/2 Warp Version 3
and have the Launchpad always displayed on top it will also
be displayed when the screen is blanked unless you select this option.
The Launch key combinations have been extended and also include
function key combinations now.
It is now possible to schedule a total of 32 different alarms.
The alarms can be triggered daily or once a week. This makes it
easy to schedule weekly tasks such as data backup.
A bug in the xlock modules has been fixed.
--
Screen Blanker has a new alarm clock and a new function called
launch keys. The launch keys allow you to open any object on
your workplace with a single easy to remember keystroke.
You can also capture the mouse pointer now when you make screen
captures.
Screen Blanker displays the available memory and the available
disk space on both local and remote disks in the information
window.
You can blank the screen from any application on your desktop.
Set the key combination in the Settings dialog box.
You can now start the clipboard viewer from the Capture menu.
Screen Blanker has a new Corner delay feature to prevent the
unwanted blanking of the screen.
There is also a new Status line that displays help information
for the buttons on the button bar and for menu items.
If printing captured bitmaps has been unsatisfactory, because
there were colors missing etc. try the new Dither bitmap
function. This function dithers the screen colors according to
the available printer colors to produce the best possible
printed output.
Screen Blanker now supports the popular Screen Saver modules.
It also includes 10 new screen saver modules that were ported
from xlock (see copyright note).
DPMS support for VGA (including SuperVGA), XGA and 8514/A
graphic adapters has been included. DPMS.EXE is included in
this archive by permission from Siegfried Hanisch.
There is a new Test button to test external modules. Blanker has new
watchdog functions to ensure highest reliability. If the unlikely
event occurs and your system is blocked by a Deskpic module, just
wait 5 seconds while Blanker will correct the module failure.
The time after which your monitor is blanked when in green mode
has been extended to 60 minutes.
There is a new information window that displays various important
system information such as time, date, system time and swap file
size.
You can change the color and the font of the Screen Blanker window
and the application window by dragging a color or a font from the
color of font palette to the corresponding window. To keep the window
as small as possible you can cycle the information.
KNOWN PROBLEMS
==============
Some screen capture functions are not possible when using the standard
VGA display driver. You will receive error messages like "Unable to copy
window" or "Unable to copy part of screen". This is bug in the OS/2
VGA driver.
DEVELOPING EXTERNAL SCREEN BLANKER MODULES
==========================================
The archive BSSDEV.ZIP contains a description of how to develop external
Screen Blanker modules and the source code for BOUNCE.BSS. External
Screen Blanker modules are the 32-Bit counterpart of Deskpic modules.
If you have developed an external module, please get in contact with me
if you want it to be included in upcoming versions of Blanker.