[Please note: this is a text only version of the on-line magazine "OS/2 e-Zine!". OS/2 e-Zine! is a graphical, WWW OS/2 publication and, if possible, should be viewed in its HTML format available on-line or zipped for off-line reading.]
* Hot Sellers 1 - the top 10 selling commercial OS/2 applications.
* Hot Sellers 2 - the top 10 selling OS/2 shareware applications.
ODDS & ENDS:
* How to Subscribe to OS/2 e-Zine! for FREE.
* How YOU can Sponsor OS/2 e-Zine!
* The Sponsors that Make this Issue Possible
Copyright 1996 - Haligonian Media
ISSN 1203-5696
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The Olympic Commotion - editorial
Ah, what a day it was.
You visited the cash machine. It worked.
You made a plane reservation. It worked.
You filed an insurance claim. It worked.
You made a mortgage payment. It worked.
And it's all because OS/2 has a rather attractive feature. It works.
Those are the first words I saw when I opened a very slick and glossy "Official NBC Viewer's Guide" to the 1996 Olympic Games. It's no coincidence that these words were part of an IBM advertisement or that IBM is a worldwide Olympic sponsor or that IBM sent this viewer's guide to the offices of OS/2 e-Zine!. IBM's Olympic propaganda machine has kicked into high gear and unless you're stuck in the bush without electronic or paper communications, chances are, you're hearing about it.
While not entirely focusing on OS/2, IBM's ad campaign during the Olympics has been a pleasure to behold. Emphasizing their Olympic oriented "subtitled" commercials, Big Blue has unleashed a staggering number of TV spots during the Atlanta Games and an impressive array of companion print ads. And there have been some non-"subtitled" commercials as well, pointing out IBM's broad range of software (i.e., OS/2) and hardware solutions for all situations. For those who complain that IBM, "doesn't know how to market," I say: Nonsense!
The ad I mentioned at the beginning of this column is a great example. This one is obviously a Warp specific ad and I can honestly say that I think it is one of the best I have ever seen. No, it doesn't make me want to buy OS/2 to play Quake on it, but it does do some important things. It tells me that OS/2 is used everywhere. It tells me it is used for many things. And it tells me it works.
Much to my chagrin, IBM has still had relatively little success selling OS/2 to end users (calm down, I said relatively -- in absolute terms there are still a lot of us). So when you consider that as much as 80% (or more) of IBM's OS/2 customers may be Fortune 500 companies, you can see why they produce this type of ad. It's easy to specifically target this group of customers (at least, easier than trying to find common desires in the diverse end-user market) and the dividends are fantastic: support contracts, vertical apps sales...
But that doesn't mean this ad turns end-users away. Despite its business oriented focus, the ad appeals to end-users too. It's simple and easy to understand: OS/2 = good. Heck, it even mentions that home delivery from some KFC restaurants is powered by OS/2. How much more common Joe appeal can you get than that? KFC = OS/2 = good.
Ok, maybe IBM could have made this ad (and others) more appealing to home users while still retaining its business focus but overall I'm relatively happy with it. And for those of you who don't think that IBM knows how to sell things, well, where do you think they got the billions of dollars (in cash, by the way) to buy Lotus? A loan from their fathers?
I don't think we need to worry about IBM's ability to sell OS/2 Warp. Whether we need to worry about IBM's ability to see Warp's potential is a different matter, but out of sincere respect for what they've accomplished so far, I'm willing to keep my mouth shut and see what they can do. It is their baby after all.
And speaking of the Olympics, a lot of people have been suggesting that IBM may have shot itself in the foot with its high profile as the worldwide information technology sponsor. Specifically, people have been jumping on the incessant complaints by the media that the information system is, "nightmarishly slow" (to quote one Canadian news anchor).
Something to remember here is that there are a lot of systems in place at the games and the media is only really involved with one of them. If, as IBM claims, that one system has problems, then of course the media will harp endlessly on it -- it's the only experience they have. They're not being malicious, but that doesn't mean that IBM has dropped the ball either. As long as casual viewers can be made aware of this fact, then probably no harm has been done.
In an effort to reassure the world that Canada won't accidentally be awarded a gold medal in men's basketball this year, IBM Consultant Relations recently sent out a short press release explaining many of the different systems in place at the games and stating that, for the most part, they are running smoothly. Regarding the media's perceived problems with the information network IBM said:
We are acutely aware of how serious it is when any system does not perform to a customer's expectations, and would never minimize that. However, you should be aware that the vast majority of IBM's systems are working well in Atlanta.
IBM knows spin control.
In the end, I think IBM has done what a lot of OS/2 users have been wanting them to do for a long time. They have jumped hip deep into the "mindshare" waters and this can only benefit OS/2. For the last week I haven't been able to turn on the TV without seeing IBM's logo, hearing their name or finding out how they can fulfil every need I have ever had.
Will it work? Are the Olympics as memorable as Start Me Up by the Stones? Maybe.
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Chris' Rant - by Chris Wenham
Sensationalism
If you've got nothing to make a big deal over then make a big deal over nothing. It's a known marketing fact that it's not how good the stuff is, but how well you push it. This is how pet rocks, mood rings and Sustacal make money. Slop it up cheap, blitz with the glitz.
Sensationalism is a tool used by the National Enquirer and desperate marketing executives, but unlike the mild skepticism that accompanies "Elvis captured by Aliens" style headlines in the supermarket aisles we still expect to see some kind of seriousness from the professional and businesslike computer industry. We're not yet desensitized (or weren't yet desensitized) to what is now being used more and more in our stiff nerd run world.
Twenty-four hour coverage on 57 channels is not a utopia of information, it's a wasteland of high noise, low signal garbage that gets worse every year when someone else wants to sell 30 second time slots and needs to push, pull or drag an audience in from somewhere. The real content gets diluted thinner in a bucket of blow-dried news anchors, talking heads and cheap artists' conceptions. As a result, the bangs have to be bigger, the flashes have to be brighter, the bored masses must be entertained by something no matter how superficial it is.
At 2:00 am this morning I turned on the television and found that every station was alive with under-informed news anchors speculating on the chunks of amateur and french videotape tumbling out of the Olympic blast zone. 250.. no 200.. no 150 injuries. It's a transformer explosion, or was that really a pipe-bomb? Was that 4 fatalities or only 2? Don't know yet, oh... and here's a clippit of someone two miles away talking about the big blast he heard.
Everyone was sucking up the limited news like a twenty ton sponge trying to soak up a thimbleful of lemonade. What an atrocity, they all agreed, a cheap and tasteless stunt for attention at the expense of an international peacetime event. This declared while bathed in the light of an Olympic Torch deliberately designed to look like a serving of McDonald's French Fries.
You tell me what's the greater atrocity.
This ga-ga of sparkle and sugar has invaded us now. We are made to feel that a program isn't worth anything unless some Rock musician endorses it. And just like with the two recent bombings we find that very little content is being spread-out and thickened up with useless filler.
It's not our job as consumers to take everything at face value. It's our job to keep the market in check with itself, to do otherwise is just inviting someone to exploit us. Operating Systems are not launched with a circus of hype. Applications may be, but certainly not software designed to offer services to the real programs. If Microsoft wants to spend a billion dollars marketing a list of instructions whose main purpose is to provide an environment for other programs then that's their prerogative. Anyone who wants to wear Merlin CDs on their T-shirt this coming fall is an idiot and no better than the clowns who leaped around last year.
It's this misfocus of where the marketing dollars should go that made Windows 95 only a mediocre burp. Believe me, Microsoft would have better spent its money on a big splash for Office 95 instead. Likewise, I don't see any real point in going bananas on Merlin's debut. Give SmartSuite/2 a push, show someone speech-dictating into a productive application at work on a powerful platform instead of whizzy drop-down menus and start buttons.
So when you're in the software store this fall consider what you're buying. Consider what you're paying for. How many dollars did I just pay to put a commercial on television, and how much did I just pay to feed the family of a hard working programmer living somewhere in Austin?
-----
(http://www.spectra.net/~fox/) Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company -- (http://www.spectra.net/~pendulum/webworks/) Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews.
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Trevor's Rant - by Trevor Smith
It was a normal day in a normal week and I was doing some normal browsing of the zealot-laden c.o.os2 hierarchy when I came across a very long and very unusual posting by Steven C. Den Beste. "What's this?" I thought, "rational thought in c.o.o.advocacy?" Mr. Den Beste wrote the following:
OS/2 Advocates, what is your goal?
-- To increase the sales of OS/2.
OS/2 Advocates, why do you want to do this?
-- Because with numbers comes strength and more products, and
the survival of OS/2.
OS/2 Advocates, how must you do this?
-- By displacing sales of Microsoft products.
OS/2 Advocates, who then is your opponent?
-- Microsoft.
Does the above sound logical? You bet it does!
But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. The actual post detailed (among other things) the history of Sir Bartle Frere, governor of Cape Colony in 1878, and his war against the Zulus. Normally when I run across a post like this I quickly skip to the next thread, but something about this one kept my attention. Maybe it was the excellent writing or the interesting history (I was really rooting for those Zulus but you can imagine how that turned out...). Whatever it was, my patience was rewarded. What followed was an interesting, well thought out, well written and sincere analysis of how the OS/2 world looks from the outside. And some darn good suggestions on how OS/2 users might use their energies.
Mr. Den Beste suggested that we OS/2 advocates follow some simple wisdom if we wish to spread our cause (the use of OS/2):
o Never underestimate our opponent (Microsoft and Windows users)
o Speak with credibility or risk being ignored by the people we seek to convert
o Remain calm instead of ranting
Pretty simple stuff.
So what was the result of this eloquent dissertation? Were OS/2 advocates wildly enthusiastic to receive such good advice? Did Usenet readers agree completely and feel no need to post follow-up articles? Or did they post just to let him know they appreciated his suggestions?
Before I answer that, let me show you how he finished his article:
I have provided in this article several opportunities for cheap shots. If you take them, it demonstrates that you have totally missed the point of the article - and proves that your cause is hopeless.
Well, guess what? Cheap shots were taken. Advice was ignored. Morons were revealed.
What is going on in the OS/2 community? Are we all deranged? Here came a Windows 95 user, of all people, with good advice on how we can better present ourselves to the world and possibly spread the use of OS/2, and people actually attacked him. Some posters demanded why he cared anyway (being a Win95 user and all), some acidly pointed out imagined flaws in his logic and did all sorts of other silly and embarrassing things. Worst of all, they did them publicly!
We weren't all so ridiculous, of course. Some did comment intelligently on his article and I was so impressed with it (and a few other of his postings) that I invited him to contribute to OS/2 e-Zine!. Hopefully Mr. Den Beste will receive a kinder response here...
But there it was: a Windows user came to our door and plainly told us how he (and presumably the rest of the non-OS/2 world) sees our plight and people jumped on him. Frankly, I was disappointed. This man didn't attack us. Sure he pointed out some unflattering characteristics of the average OS/2 advocate but he wasn't exaggerating; we do have flaws!
You know, after the way some people act in some of the c.o.os2 newsgroups, I wonder if Mr. Den Beste is right. Maybe we have, "totally missed the point of the article," and maybe our, "cause is hopeless."
Come on folks, prove me wrong. Let's all start acting a little more calmly and rationally. At least in public.
-----
(editor@haligonian.com) Trevor Smith is the full time editor of OS/2 e-Zine! and part time evangelist. You know by now how much he likes to preach.
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Linfield's Line - by Kevin Linfield
COMDEX Canada Report
COMDEX Canada (Toronto) comes to SkyDome and the Metro Convention Centre each July and provides a technological show for thousands. This year I had the luxury of attending as a member of the press (I did an article on new software for Canada Computes! ) and I thought that I would give a small summary of what OS/2 related news I saw and heard at COMDEX. The big news for OS/2 was that Merlin won The Computer Paper! 's "Editor's Hot Pick" for best product of the show.
First off, I'd like to take a paragraph and thank Team OS/2 for their dedication and perseverance in the face of cutbacks by IBM and the onslaught of Windows NT and 95. This is the first year that Team OS/2 did not have a booth to answer questions and to demonstrate OS/2 and its applications to the thousands of attendees. Instead, a conference room was rented in an adjacent hotel and pink flyers were distributed telling people about getting more information and seeing demonstrations in the conference room. Of course, Team OS/2 members still combed the floor, talking to vendors (trying to get installs or support) and attendees.
I was quite disappointed at the lack of machines running OS/2 at COMDEX, although when you go to an event also featuring a show called "Windows World" you have to take what you get. Except for IBM, I didn't see anyone running any version of OS/2 on their own. Talking to Terry Hamilton (IBM's Team OS/2 liaison), he claims that Teamers installed the Merlin beta on maybe 3 vendor machines (MicroMart being a confirmed install). Even IBM's booth was (to me) a disappointment. They had about 3 machines with the Merlin beta running, but none were set up with Voice Type Dictation or Navigation (IMHO the killer application in Merlin). Lucky for IBM there were good crowds around the Merlin machines as interest was high.
IBM was demoing Merlin and the VTD to a seated audience in their auditorium, but it was limited to one demo per day (three days in total for COMDEX). Pitiful. Terry claims that approximately 20 vendors came down to the Team OS/2 conference room to check out the Merlin beta, so word was slowly getting out.
As for OS/2 software (and vendors), the Team OS/2 conference room featured demonstrations and talks on Merlin, Dr. Solomon's AntiVirus, IBM Visual Age, MGI Photoworks, IBM AntiVirus, IBM BESTeam, TruSpectra's Photo>GRAPHICS, and discussions with IBM Media Relations Anne Hays and IBM Product Manager Glenn Rogers. Those who attended were pleased, but it was unfortunate that the COMDEX masses were not a part of the audience.
I'll unfortunately conclude with some bad news. IBM Canada hosted a press luncheon on COMDEX Thursday and during that time we (the press) were informed that Warp was aimed at the home user to take on Windows 95 and that in IBM's opinion it failed (lack of pre-loads, market penetration, etc.). Subsequently, Merlin will not be marketed at the home user. OS/2 is now for the connected business consumer and it was sad to note that in a room full of press personnel I think that I was the only OS/2 user, and one of the few who had actually seen Merlin. I could give IBM advice, but I feel it would fall on deaf ears. I really hope IBM changes how it will target OS/2 by the Merlin launch (October?) but I'm a tad skeptical. Please don't shoot the messenger.
-----
Kevin Linfield is a Toronto based consultant and a freelance writer. He can be reached via e-mail at (linfield@torfree.net) linfield@torfree.net. Be sure to check out (http://www.haligonian.com/os2/list.html) Linfield's List, Kevin's favourite OS/2 Freeware.
The View from Outside: Notes from an (denbeste@world.std.com) Infidel
So there I was, minding my own business, and suddenly Netscape tells me I've got e-mail. Someone named Trevor Smith suggests to me that I ought to write for his on-line (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 magazine.
"But I don't use (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2!" I wrote back." That's OK - we're looking for people who write well - (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 usage isn't mandatory."
"But they'll crucify me! I use (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/) Win 95!"
"Naah - they're a sweet bunch of guys. Not a mean bone in their bodies. They'll make you welcome! Try it - you'll see!"
So here's the deal: I know a lot about computers and business, but very little about (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2. So I can look at things from the outside and maybe point out stuff y'all might miss for being too close.
And if we have a laugh together, or if I make you think, then it will all have been worthwhile. What the hey. Let's give it a (http://www.mos.org/sln/sem/needle.html) shot.
-----
About a month ago I began reading and contributing to comp.os.os2.advocacy and marveling at the range (vertical range) of quality of the contributors there. Much of what goes on is little more than verbal knife fighting, but occasionally someone transcends the mundane. Three people independently suggested related ideas, and I felt they were worthy of discussion.
The idea each was wrestling with was this: How do we make (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 sell better? Our three heroes came up with answers in different areas: One in management, one in advertising, and one in sales. And very innovative they were, too.
The manager realized that one problem (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 has is that it doesn't have as broad product support as (http://www.microsoft.com/) brand X (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/) operating systems; if product support from ISVs was more comprehensive, (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 itself would sell better.
And how did our manager propose to get ISVs to support (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2? Easy: _blackmail 'em_.
It seems that (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) IBM owns the patents on OLE, and (http://www.microsoft.com/) Brand X's license runs out at the end of 1996. Our manager thinks that (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) IBM should go to the ISVs and gently say: "If you want to continue selling apps for (http://www.microsoft.com/) Brand X which use OLE, you gotta do ports to (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2."
What a brilliant idea! Why, it's thinking like this that made America great. And it wouldn't cost (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) IBM a dime! But this was nothing compared to the other two guys.
The advertising genius realized that the "Nun" ads last year just didn't cut it. No, the problem was that they were too short, and they didn't show what (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 could do.
(http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 is just too powerful a product to summarize in 30 seconds. What we need is a half-hour _infomercial_.
Yup, right there at 3 AM between the hand-hammered Wok and the miracle stain remover, you put half an hour demonstrating (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2. And once it makes sales rise, you put it on (http://www.qvc.com/) Quality Value Channel.
But the best idea of all came from the salesman. A good salesman can succeed even without advertising, if his sales plan is good enough. And what do you know, this guy had just the thing: _Multilevel marketing_.
It works like this: If you sell two people, and each of them sell two other people, and each of them sell two other people, and it goes like this for a while, soon millions and millions of people will have bought (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2, and it will eclipse (http://www.microsoft.com/) Brand X.
Yes, you heard it here first. It seems that (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) IBM needs to go study sales from a company that really understands the field: (http://www.Amway.com/) Amway.
I am in awe of these ideas. Truly in awe. Not even the galactic intelligence of (http://www.mnsinc.com/dmccoy/) Mr. Inhuman could conceive of ideas this brilliant.
I would never hope to match them, but I have to try. So, here are my suggestions.
We need to revamp the ad campaign, no question of it. It'll need to target several audiences, though.
If there's one rule of advertising, it is this: sex sells. So let's go hire (http://www.duke.edu/~qn1/elle/elle.html) Elle MacPherson (drool) to do some TV ads: "My men wear (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 - or they wear nothing at all." In that luscious Australian accent? This'll bring in the young men.
We need to appeal to older men, too. Try this on for size: A helicoptor-camera view of a cattle herd on the open plain, just at sunset; Marlboro-style music in the background, and we zoom in on a virile rough-and-tough cowboy sitting on the back of his horse. And as we get closer, we see that he's holding a notebook computer in one hand - and he's wearing a microphone headset and talking to his computer because he needs his other hand to drive the horse.
I mean, this works. Not only is it an attractive heartwarming patriotic memorable image, but it truly shows VTD being used in an area where a keyboard just won't do. What more can you ask from an ad?
We need a way to keep people thinking about (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2. (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) IBM needs a (http://scott.arc.nasa.gov/code_a/code_ao/simlabs_AOO-AOS/Document_Archive/AR_95/Blimp.html) blimp. (Hey, it works for (http://www.fujifilm.co.jp/usa/aps/smartcity/) Fuji
and (http://www.goodyear.com/) Goodyear.) Splash that 'ol logo right on the side of it, fly it over (http://www.sccsi.com/13/mnf.html) football games, and sales will be as high as that (http://scott.arc.nasa.gov/code_a/code_ao/simlabs_AOO-AOS/Document_Archive/AR_95/Blimp.html) blimp.
We need some product tie-ins, too. How about getting GM to mount a computer with (http://www.austin.ibm.com/pspinfo/) OS/2 and VTD in every (http://www.cadillac.com/) Cadillac they sell? You can dictate to your computer while you drive, and it'll become the new status symbol for the elite, (http://www.system.missouri.edu/ics/staff/andy/astrop/lunec/lunec.htm) eclipsing
(http://www.l0pht.com/radiophone/panasonic/panasonic.html) cellular phones. (Heck, these days even the prole's have (http://www.l0pht.com/radiophone/panasonic/panasonic.html) cellular phones. They're just not (http://www.aaconsult.com/chicshe/chicshe.htm) chic
any more.)
And even better, we can --- Hey, get away from me with that (http://sgva-vr1.ucsd.edu/~art-slab/ARTSLAB/PaddedCell/jacket.html) straight-jacket! Put down that (http://www.mos.org/sln/sem/needle.html) needle
- I don't NEED any (http://external.csmc.edu/neonatology/ref/meds/med96.html) medication! I feel just FINE today! LEAVE ME ALONE!
[(denbeste@world.std.com) Steve will be back next month, if he can figure out how (http://upanet.uleth.ca/~young/magicians_club/Houdini.html) Houdini did it.]
-----
(denbeste@world.std.com) Steve Den Beste dropped out of college in 1975 when he was offered a full time job and never looked back. Since then, he has worked on products as varied as logic analyzers, factory automation, wide area networks, medical equipment and robotics. He has been programming microprocessors since the days of the Intel 8008 (talk about stone knives and bear skins) and antagonizing folks in c.o.o.a since 1996.
I thought I would take this opportunity to rave about Creative Labs, the maker of the Sound Blaster line of sound cards. The reason that I am raving about them is that they have proven stalwart companions and trusty allies to the OS/2 community through the trials of diminishing market share and the vagaries of Plug-n-Play (TM).
Microsoft has been writing the rule book for success in this industry since the late 1980's. They have defined the standards, spec'd the architecture, and created a climate in which hardware is designed to run their software, rather than their software being designed around the hardware. But standing there, at the dawn of the multimedia age was Creative Labs, who, with their Sound Blaster line of sound cards, defined what a sound card is. And OS/2 drivers are available for them all.
This might not seem all that remarkable at first, but Creative has not merely been tossing off barely adequate OS/2 drivers to appease a loud but small market. They have taken the time to port the wonderfully rich set of apps supplied with their cards to native OS/2.
And when Plug-n-Play peripherals came along, IBM turned its back, assuring OS/2's also-ran status by waiting for Warp 4 to implement Plug-n-Play. But Creative Labs, demonstrating a degree of pro-action rare in the computer industry, released its Plug-n-Play sound card, making available drivers to support the card under OS/2.
I think it poignant that Creative Labs seems to show more dedication and support of the OS/2 market than even IBM itself. But don't take my word for it. Go check out (http://www.creaf.com/) their web site.
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(richardf@skypoint.com) Rich Furman is a Technical Support engineer at Micron Electronics Inc. where he also serves as point man for OS/2 related issues. If you want to know where to get a bite to eat in the Twin Cities metro area, visit his page (http://www.skypoint.com/members/richardf/tcfood.shtml) Good Eating in the Twin Cities.
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the Beta File
Welcome back to the Beta File, your source for the latest breaking news in OS/2 beta development. Every month we scour the OS/2 world to bring you interesting news of OS/2 software in development. If you have a product that you're sure is going to be the next killer app, or you want a little free exposure for your beta test (editor@haligonian.com) drop us a note!
***
Well, it's official, Merlin mania has arrived. Just as with that other company's operating system, announcements of products for Merlin have started before Merlin itself is even available (to most people)! Last month KrazyDog Software released a beta of what is, to our knowledge, the first Merlin specific app to be widely available, the TransWarp PlusPak.
Author (neice@nando.net) Michael Neice says, "TransWarp PlusPak was an idea sparked during my beta testing of Merlin. The Merlin developers had enhanced the look and feel of OS/2 with new icons, schemes, and 256 color backgrounds. However, the great looking backgrounds, like the nature background, only look so good in 256 colors, so I decided to put together my own Desktop schemes that use 65,000 color backgrounds, and then decided to build an app so that others could benefit."
The TransWarp PlusPak is a Desktop utility that enhances the look of the Merlin Desktop with mini-schemes that change the Desktop background and the six icons installed by default. As of July 2, there were four mini-schemes in the beta (Blue Sky, Space Shuttle, Outer Space, Horror). All are cool, and "Horror" (complete with blood dripping from the Shredder icon) is sure to please.
The beta test started early in July and anyone is welcome to join. Just download the product from the (http://www.webbuild.com/~neice/kdog.htm) KrazyDog Software web page and send your feedback via e-mail. System requirements are OS/2 Warp 4.0 beta (Merlin) and a video card with color depth of at least 65,000 colors. Expect Version 1.0 of the TransWarp PlusPak to be available one week prior to the release of Warp 4.0. And expect the price to be right -- it's freeware!
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For all you web heads out there, Panacea Software is looking for beta testers of its new HTML page design software, HTML Studio. HTML Studio is a 100% 32-bit OS/2 Presentation Manager application used to rapidly design custom world wide web pages. HTML Studio allows you to create web pages that truly stand out without having to know the HTML tag language. Some of the features included are:
o A complete PM interface to generate HTML 3.0 code.
o A "preview window" so you can watch your web page develop right before your very eyes.
o Drag and drop support to create your page fast and easy.
o A fully customizable toolbar complete with flyby help and drag and drop support.
o Printing support from both the edit and web preview windows.
o Full font and color support.
o Extensive samples, documentation and robust on-line, context sensitive help.
o A fully functional HTML 3.0 web browser using WebExplorer libraries
Panacea Software is planning to open the beta test as of August 2nd so there is still time to sign up. The beta is only scheduled to last a month though, so sign up early (drop by the (http://www.program.com/panacea/) Panacea WWW site for details).
One reason for the short beta cycle is the tentative release date for the software of August 30th. While not yet decided, the eventual price for HTML Studio should be between US$25 and US$30. The program will be shareware.
***
Moving right along to the more business oriented side of things, we have the upcoming Prominic Warp Cloner. Prominic (tm) Warp Cloner lets a single OS/2 Warp machine act as a server to another computer. This is accomplished by creating boot disks for the client and running a small server process. The client can then copy the entire OS/2 installation (all HPFS and FAT drives) from the server, thereby "cloning" the original machine.
Ongoing for about a month at the time of this writing, the beta test is open to the general public. To join the program see (http://www.prominic.com/) Prominic Technologies, Inc.'s web site. But get there quick, the Warp Cloner is scheduled to be released some time in August.
When it is released, MSRP for this commercial product will be between US$40 and US$50 and a "demo/shareware" version will be available.
***
From the "not quite beta, not quite finished" department comes (Marcus.Better@abc.se) Marcus Better's HFS/2. HFS/2 is an Installable File System (IFS) for OS/2 that reads and writes Macintosh diskettes with Apple's Hierarchical File System. Yep, you read that right, it reads and writes Mac diskettes right from your OS/2 system! Support for other media (hard disks, CD-ROMs, etc.) is expected in future releases.
The program can be downloaded from (http://www.abc.se/~m9111/HFS/) Marcus' web site, where new versions will also be found. The first beta version was made available to the public in late June/early July but there is no organized beta programme. Those interested in banging on HFS/2's tires should just download the program and jump in. Accordingly, the software has no official expected date of completion. It's a "work in progress" for now and the foreseeable future.
HFS/2 is, and will remain, Freeware. And for the technically inclined, source code is included.
***
If you have been looking for the latest in Pascal compilers to play with, SpeedSoft GbR has announced the beta test of their upcoming, SpeedSoft Sibyl 2.0. (jho@special.infox.com) Jens Hofbauer of SpeedSoft Customer Support tells us that anyone is welcome to join in on the beta and there is no special procedure to do so. Just grab the code from (http://www.midilink.nl/speed/) SpeedSoft's web site and get started.
Hofbauer also said that, "with Sibyl, SpeedSoft has given you the ultimate freedom in building your applications: you can write modern, high-performance programs with a minimum of effort." The key-features of the compiler are a visual development environment for Pascal and a portable class library for OS/2 and WIN32.
As would be expected, this will be a commercial release, targeted for September/October of 1996. The expected price is 250-300DM (German Mark's).
***
For some time now (since November of '95) a text mode program called DMP has been available to the OS/2 community. Currently the program's author has set his sights on a new project, a Presentation Manager version of DMP called, originally enough, DMP/PM. The first beta version of DMP/PM was released last December and the code is now up to v0.75. Both versions of DMP (text and PM) are available in a single package that you can find at (http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/Madbrain/software.html) Julien Pierre's web site.
Before I get too far ahead of myself, DMP stands for Dual Module Player. A "Module" in this case is a music module. DMP/PM is a Presentation Manager player using (madbrain@ibm.net) Julien Pierre's OS/2 port of Otto Chrons' Digital Sound & Music Interface.
DSMI/2 is the sound engine used by DMP and DMP/PM to play "modules". It is a commercial library aimed at developers of OS/2 multimedia applications or games. It allows developers to use 32 digital audio channels simultaneously on any OS/2 supported sound card. It also provides functions to play modules and includes the source code to DMP and DMP/PM.
Dual Module Player itself though, is a program for playing music modules on different sound systems on IBM PC compatible machines. It uses the DSMI sound programming interface to achieve high quality sound and wide sound card support. Currently DMP supports following module formats:
o MOD, NST
o STM, S3M
o 669
o FAR
o MTM
o AMF (DSMI's internal module format.)
There are already hundreds of beta testers using DMP/PM but more are welcome. DMP/PM will be freeware when released.
***
And finally this month, that veteran of everyone's Desktop, PMView is finishing up its latest beta cycle. The new v0.93 (will these folks ever reach v1.0?) will be in beta most, if not all, of August. Developer, (pnielsen@abo.fi) Peter Nielsen hopes to have the final release ready for the public in early September though.
Just in case there are any OS/2 users out there that are not familiar with PMView, you can find details on the BMT Micro hosted (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/pmview/) PMView web site. For those of you that are familiar, here's a sampler of some of the new features:
o TWAIN scanner support!
o WPS drag & drop support
o The size of the thumbnails that PMView creates is now selectable
o New menu item and hot-keys to open next or prior image file in the current directory with a single keypress (Shift+PgUp, Shift+PgDn)
o Multi-page file support (TIFF, DCX, GIF, and BMP)
o Palette Load and Save
o Optional delayed screen capture that lets you capture pop-up menus, etc.
o Automatic recovery of GIF, JFIF, PNG, and TIFF files with an unknown header (extra bytes at the start of the file).
o Transparent UUDecoding and XXDecoding. PMView transparently decodes any uuencoded or xxencoded file that contain an image file.
o A ton of new file formats will be supported; and
o PMView now has a real Installation/Uninstallation program!
The program will remain shareware and the price is not expected to go up from its current US$42 which gives users a lifetime license for this indispensible program. This new beta is available (as far as we know) only to registered users of PMView and only directly from the developers.
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Chris' ColorWorks PowerTips - by Chris Wenham
Curves and Highlights
(Tip works only in ColorWorks V2 and higher, however, provisions are supplied for 1+ users further down.)
Ahead of the drop shadow and the lens flare, the "beveled edge" is the most commonly used graphical effect on web pages (and almost everywhere else in the universe). It gives a sense of 3D to an otherwise flat surface. However the plain old square edges have lost their appeal and I know some of you are looking for a new twist.
The trick to creating that 3D effect is to supply a highlight or a shadow or both, suggesting that light is shining down on an extruded surface. As you saw in the first PowerTips column, we created a ball just by adding a gradient highlight to a circle.
To do this to a rectangular surface is easy, you just give it a border, then slice that border in half diagonally and paint one half lighter or darker than the other. Paint the bottom right-hand half darker and it looks like it's extruded outward, paint the top left-half darker and it looks like it's sunken into the page. Now just fill the middle with whatever icon or text you want.
Boring! Let's try something more funky instead...
In the SPG ColorWorks tutorial "Creating 3D images" they show you how to make a "lozenge" shape by drawing a circular gradient and squidging it with the Pinch/Punch plug-in. This is actually put to even better use as a highlight that suggests a curved and extruded surface, much more sophisticated than the "beveled edges" described above. With an amazingly simple design you can create futuristic "curved" panelling and controls and you don't even have to muck about with 8-bit masks.
We start by defining the outline shape of the button. Now instead of a square we'll use a "pill" shape, or one that has round ends instead of square ones, like this:
Since ColorWorks doesn't have a rounded rectangle tool we construct it using two circles and a couple of horizontal lines, then erase the bits of the circles we don't want with a filled rectangle of the background color.
o Tip: Don't use a softened brush for this first part. If you want the edges to be smooth draw the button outline first with a "hard" brush, then click Anti-Aliasing on in the Effects.Drawing Merge Control dialog and paint the finished outline with the floodfill tool. If you use a softened brush you get irregularities when you remove the unwanted parts of the circles you have just drawn.
The next part is blissfully easy; we just open up a separate canvas, draw a white radial gradient with the circle tool, and use the Image.Plug-in Effects.Pinch/Punch to "punch" the canvas just below and to the right of the gradient we just drew. Use a punch value of about 10 for this and experiment with moving the punch point around a bit. Apply that effect, mask the new highlight and float it. Drag the floated highlight onto your new button and stick it up there in the corner.
o Tip: Use the curve tool to mask the highlight precisely, since you don't want to accidentally erase part of the button's edge when you're positioning the highlight close to it.
Cool black curved buttons that look much more stylistic than the crummy bezeled square ones, and they're fall-off-a-log easy to do.
Note to ColorWorks 1+ users: Although you can't create the highlights yourself since 1+ does not have the gradients effect, you can download a collection of highlights we generated ourselves and just "cut and paste" them into your images. Find these below in the Download Depot.
Longer edges can be accented with highlights too, simply punch the gradient into a long vertical or horizontal sausage with no curvature, then after floating the image, use Image.Transforms.Interactive Resize to stretch it longer and thinner to suit. Take a look at this example of an image I created for an upcoming web site.
Q&A Center
"With my old paint program, UberPencil 5.5 Special Edition, I had a tool for creating light source effects. How can I do this with ColorWorks V2?"
- Joe Anybody, Somewhere, Idano
Light source and lens flare effects can be produced in ColorWorks V2 by using the gradient tool in conjunction with one of the gradient maps. For light-sources: "Load the decel.grm file, use the Vary Opacity setting and draw a gradient with the Full Canvas tool. For the traditional light source effect, draw the gradient in combination with a brightness increase using the Tune Image Colors.Brightness/Contrast... command of the Effects menu. For more interesting effects use Vary Opacity to draw with a gradient of a color, combination of colors (also with the Vary Palette Colors setting), or other effects for a much more interesting 'light.'" - ColorWorks 2.0 manual, page 470.
Plug-In developers: If you've developed a shareware or freeware plugin for ColorWorks and want to get some free publicity, let us know and we'll provide a link to your home page or distribution .zip file right here. Not only that, but we may even highlight it in upcoming ColorWorks PowerTips columns. Note: We'd love to have a good Gaussian Blur plugin!
SPG News
(http://www.spg-net.com/) SPG's Home page
The big news this month is the sudden cut in the price of SPG's ColorWorks product range. ColorWorks V2 including the glossy printed hardcover manual is "street priced" at $169 now, ColorWorks 1+ is $79 and the upgrade from 1+ to 2.0 is only $99. SPG also announced that 3.0 is due for release in Q1 of '97, and if anyone wants to be a beta tester you should give them a holler at (info@spg-net.com) info@spg-net.com.
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(http://www.spectra.net/~fox/) Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY and president of his own company -- (http://www.spectra.net/~pendulum/webworks/) Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and will work for tips.
Visit Indelible Blue's Web Page - (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/)
Indelible Blue is a mail order reseller specializing in state-of-the-art
OS/2 software and hardware solutions for corporations and individuals.
Corporate volume discounts available.
============================
Answers from e-Zine!
Welcome back to your source for answers to all your OS/2 questions! Each month we bring you tips, tricks, questions and answers from our readers and contributors. If you've got a question or tip you would like to share with us, (editor@haligonian.com) send it in!
Q-- Like many people, I have a URL folder sitting on my desktop neatly subdivided into folders for various types of web sites. I've recently had a system melt down and now my URL folder has a bunch of plain text data files in it instead of URL objects. These files don't actually contain any data, like the WWW addresses that previously were in them, and they can not be opened with a text editor. Is there any way to get my URLs back?
A-- Most likely the problem is that the URL class needs to be reregistered. A simple solution that often fixes problems like yours is to reinstall WebExplorer. Just run the install that comes with later versions of WebEx and the URL class will get reregistered. Most or all the data files in your folders should magically become URL objects again.
By the way, you should try to store your URL folders off a directory that is not the Desktop. For ease of use just shadow it to your Desktop. This way the folder is handy and if the Desktop goes south, you will lose the shadow but the actual folder will stay put.
- (editor@haligonian.com) Trevor Smith
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Q-- I want my computer to page me at certain times everyday. I know that I can use the ECHO command to access my modem and send out a string. For example:
ECHO ATDT1234567,,9999# > COM2
where:
o 1234567 is my pager number
o ,, is a few seconds delay for the pager to answer
o 9999 is the code I want to be paged with
o # to end the action
o COM2 to send the whole thing to COM2 (my modem)
and then I can reset the modem with:
ECHO ATZ > COM2.
But how do I use this idea in a .CMD file or REXX script so I can use it with CHRON?
A-- You can put system command in 'quotes' in a regular REXX program and they will execute as system commands because the default address is 'CMD', the system command processor. A REXX program equivalent of your command would be:
/* Pager.cmd a REXX program to page me */
'ECHO ATDT1234567,,9999# > COM2'
'ECHO ATZ > COM2'
exit
Just save the above text file with a file name such as Pager.cmd and get CHRON to launch Pager.cmd at the specified time.
- (callaway@indirect.com) Merrill Callaway
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Q-- I have been using OS/2 for a month now, and I like it. It is easier to install OS/2 than I thought (the first time only took 45 minutes, installing on top of DOS and Windows). The only problem is my sound card. In order for it to work under OS/2 I first have boot into DOS then reboot into OS/2. Is this normal? (I have an Acer sound card).
A-- Is it normal? Maybe. Is it acceptable? No. We have heard of some similar situations where proper drivers for OS/2 did not exist for a sound card and the technical support at certain companies actually recommended booting to DOS (which loads the DOS drivers), then doing a warm boot (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to OS/2 (leaving things in working order). So I guess the best advice is, if it works, don't knock it. But a far better solution would be to demand real support for your sound card under OS/2 from Acer.
- (editor@haligonian.com) Trevor Smith
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Q-- I have been shutting off the power switch to my monitor and leaving my computer running, in order to save the monitor screen. Someone told me that turning on the monitor while the computer is running can send some kind of surge to the video card or otherwise damage things. She said that the monitor should always be turned on first and then the computer, and the computer off then the monitor. I had never heard of this before. Is that precaution true?
A-- This used to be true in the beginning times of personal computers (Apple II, C64). Basically it held true for all peripherals, not just the monitor. These days peripherals are surge-protected, so this precaution isn't necessary any more. What you are doing (turning off the monitor) is actually a good practice. We are doing the same thing all the time with our servers, which are machines of up to $30,000 US in worth, not to mention the data...
- (bernhard@valkyrie.lfn.unterland.de) Bernhard Rohrer
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Q-- I've been looking for a dialer with an AutoDial feature, such as with Win95 (one that dials a specified number as soon as it is opened). Is there an existing dialer for OS/2 which offers this feature (e.g. InJoy)?
A-- Yep, InJoy does offer an "AutoDial" feature. Also, so does the "Dial Other Internet Providers" utility you are probably using right now. Just type the "Name" of the connection you want to dial (whatever you entered in the "Name" field of the DOIP Add Entry notebook when you set up your Internet connection) in the Parameters field of the Settings notebook and when you double click on the DOIP object, it will autodial your provider. One note though, make sure you enter the "Name" exactly as it appears in the DOIP because this is case sensitive (meaning "INTERNEX" is not the same as "Internex").
- (editor@haligonian.com) Trevor Smith
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That's it for this month. If you have a tip or question that you don't see covered here, don't forget to (editor@haligonian.com) send it in!
I hope everyone is having a good summer, and I certainly hope you're not all glued to your computers and missing out on the great weather we've been having. Well, this month I promised I'd talk hard drives, and so I will. But just as an aside, I'd first like to talk about buying a new system, which is what I've just done.
It happened like this: My Kingston Turbochip had finally arrived (which is really an AMD 586/133) and I installed it into my trusty PS/1. And nothing happened. So I made sure the chip was installed correctly, turned the system back on, and more nothing. At this point I was a bit frustrated, so I called Kingston who informed me I needed a BIOS upgrade from IBM. I called IBM, got the upgrade (free) and in 5 days was ready to rock again. I installed the BIOS and Turbochip and more nothing. So I gave up. Threw in the towel. Whipped out the checkbook and went shopping.
[By the way, I don't want to cast any doubts on the Kingston Turbochip. I've heard tons of success stories with it, and it just seems that my system is too old to support it. The company I bought the chip from, Spectrum Trading, was very nice and took the chip back with no restocking fee.]
Right away, I knew I would need a CPU, motherboard, and video card. Finding out which ones and the best prices would be the difficult part. For the CPU I decided on the Cyrix 6x86/133 because of its great performance and nice price. Getting the CPU was a headache of the largest magnitude however. I decided to get the whole package locally (so I could return it locally if there were any problems) and there are more computer dealers around the Princeton area than 7 Elevens.
Nobody sold the Cyrix chip. The only place who could get it for me, Clancy Paul (who will build a system to your specifications and even get a part if they don't carry it and you want it) wouldn't sell me a Cyrix chip (so much for that custom building story). I finally stumbled onto a place in East Windsor who sold me the CPU, motherboard, mini-tower, and a video card (Trident 9880 with 2MB of vram, MPEG, and EnDive support (!) for US$92) for US$450. Not a bad deal compared to some of the other prices I've seen locally, or even through the mail.
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So now on to hard drives. Upgrading your hard drive is one of the most important upgrades you can make at the moment, because it seems Merlin is going to be quite the space hog, and with prices as they are, a new drive can be oh-so-cheap. Just 2 or so years ago a 540MB hard drive could easily cost US$300. Today at Best Buy they've got a 1.2GB hard drive for US$199. And you can even get a 2.5GB hard drive for US$349. Who would have ever thought they'd be this cheap?
Once you've bought your new hard drive you're probably going to install it. A word of warning before you do: Not all computers are going to support that massive new hard drive. Most later 486 systems and almost any pentium system will, but the majority of early and mid-life 486 systems won't. Most of these systems are limited by BIOS restrictions to hard drives of 1024 cylinders and under (roughly 520MB). Which isn't to say you can't use that hard drive, it just takes a bit more planning and care.
To install a hard drive on a system that won't support it, you have a number of options. The cheapest and easiest way is to use Ontrac disk manager (supplied with all Western Digital drives). Ontrac is OS/2 friendly (unlike other products supplied with other hard drives) and its dynamic drive overlay works nicely with OS/2 and will allow you to see the full capacity of the drive. I really recommend this method, and haven't run into any problems with it yet.
The other way to do it is to buy a BIOS extender card. One of these cards will plug into any available ISA slot, and effectively upgrades your BIOS to an EIDE BIOS. One word of warning with this method, make sure you can selectively shadow ROM, or your performance will go down drastically (you have to shadow the extender card's ROM in RAM). I really don't see any reason to go this route, as it's a bit of a headache.
The last method available is to just install the drive, boot off your handy OS/2 boot diskettes and run FDISK. OS/2 can see the full capacity of an IDE hard drive, even if the BIOS doesn't support it, and will let you use the full capacity of the drive once OS/2 has booted. All this is accomplished with the magic of HPFS. So, in order to go this route, make sure your first partition is under 508MB and the second partition can be the rest of the capacity of the hard drive (as long as it is HPFS). The reason for the size restriction on the first partition is that OS/2 uses the computer's BIOS to boot (at least the beginning stages of booting) and if a critical file is located over the 508MB boundary, the BIOS won't find it and the system won't boot. Fair warning!
For those who don't want to reinstall OS/2 and all their applications on their new drive, you can take the relatively easy way out of it and clone your installation. It's easy, and only takes a few minutes. Here's how you do it, in easy to follow steps.
1. Set up your old hard drive as the master (if it isn't already) and your new drive as a slave to the old one.
2. Boot OS/2. Your old drive should be C: and your new drive should be D:. Have more than one partition on the old drive? You're gonna have to substitute drive letters then, so follow along closely.
3. Open an OS/2 command window and type XCOPY C:*.* /S /E /H /T /R /O /V (Actually, before you do this, type XCOPY /? to make sure all those options are correct. Who knows what a different version of XCOPY might do with those prompts!)
4. Wait for the operation to finish.
5. Take out both hard drives. Make the new one the master. Install it. Make the old one a paperweight. Put it on some papers. Boot your computer with the new drive. It won't. No problem. Boot from your OS/2 boot disks. (Aren't they handy? Glad you made them, I'm sure.)
6. Run FDISK from the disks. Make sure the hard drive is set to bootable. Then from a command prompt run SYSINSTX C:
7. You're ready. Enjoy.
Well that was fairly painless. Next month, I believe it's going to be a nice multimedia primer and review. Until then, go to the beach or something!
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(cochran@genius.rider.edu) Jon Cochran is a full time student at Rider University majoring in History/Secondary Education. He hopes (or at least his parents do) to graduate soon.
I've always been fond of articles that discuss interesting or unusual ways of using OS/2. However, it seems that many of these articles are aimed at the novice user. Since nobody was writing the type of "tips and tricks" columns I wanted to read, I decided to start my own. Thus was born "Power User."
The "Power User" column will be devoted to discussing unusual or innovative ways to use OS/2. Each column will discuss a "project" that will mix REXX, Workplace Shell manipulation, and freeware programs to create a useful or cool result. In keeping with its title, "Power User" is aimed at the advanced OS/2 user. I won't be explaining the projects in detail, although I will give an overview and an explanation of any unusual tricks used. Less-advanced users will still be able to benefit, however; each column will be accompanied by a downloadable installation program that will automatically set up the project on your machine.
This column needs good ideas to survive. I've got several projects planned, but I'm hoping that the majority of ideas will come from you, the readers. If you have an unusual Workplace Shell setup or a bunch of customized REXX scripts that perform your every wish, let me know. Even if your idea isn't large enough to be a project of its own, I can incorporate it into other columns. I'll also occasionally be publishing a compendium of smaller tips and tricks. In short: Send me your ideas!
With that out of the way, let's move on to this month's project.
Backtalk
By now, you've probably heard that the next version of OS/2 will include voice recognition capabilities. One thought that immediately came to my mind after reading the announcement was, "Great! Star Trek! So, will the computer talk back?" Well, it doesn't look like IBM plans on including speech generation in Merlin. Fortunately, we don't need it. There's already a great freeware program called RSynth which can synthesize speech. RSynth was originally written by (nik@tiuk.ti.com) Nick Ing-Simmons and was ported to OS/2 by (djd@cris.com) Derek J. Decker. Rsynth's speech sounds more like a frog than Majel Barrett, but it's understandable.
By itself, RSynth is interesting, but not all that useful. After all, most people can read faster than they can listen. RSynth's real value appears when you integrate it into your REXX scripts. For example, imagine having your computer tell you when a lengthy batch job is complete. Or having your computer tell you when new e-mail has arrived, complete with the name of the sender and the subject of the message. Or even a talking alarm clock that informs you of appointments. Since it doesn't interrupt your current work, speech has a real advantage over a pop-up information window. And, of course, having your computer talk to you is just plain cool.
Unfortunately, integrating RSynth into your REXX programs isn't as simple as just calling the program. Access to RSynth has to be serialized... otherwise, if two programs try to run it at the same time, messages will be lost or garbled.
To resolve this problem, I used a REXX queue. Only one program, constantly running in the background, is allowed to call RSynth directly. This program sits and waits for messages to be added to the queue. As soon as a message is found, it is sent to RSynth. Other programs send their speech-bound messages to the queue, rather than calling RSynth directly. In addition to preventing multiple programs from accessing RSynth simultaneously, this approach has the additional advantage of allowing programs to issue special commands, such as "Mute," and have them affect speech from any program.
The Programs
There are several REXX programs in the Backtalk project. The primary program is SPEECHQ.CMD, which runs in the background and speaks any message that appears on the queue. It also accepts several commands (these are case-sensitive):
COMMAND_END end program
COMMAND_MUTE mutes speech and discards both pending and new messages
COMMAND_UNMUTE unmutes speech
COMMAND_DISCARD discards all pending messages; new messages are processed normally
COMMAND_NUMQUEUED speaks the number of messages in queue
To use SPEECHQ, you simply change the current queue to REXXSPEECH by using the RxQueue() function, then add your message to the queue by using either the Queue or the Push instruction. I recommend using Queue for messages and Push for commands. That way, messages are spoken in order, but commands occur right away. The example programs SPEECHSND.CMD and SPEECHCMD.CMD illustrate this use of the speech queue. SPEECHSND uses Queue, while SPEECHCMD uses Push.
In addition to the SPEECHQ program and examples, I've also included two REXX programs that use speech to perform a useful function. The first, SPKSTATS.CMD, uses (cytan@tristan.tn.cornell.edu) Cheng-Yang Tan's UPTIME.EXE to voice some system statistics. The second, NEWMAIL.CMD, is a more complex program that is designed to be used with your e-mail program. Given the filename of an incoming message, it parses out the author's name and subject (with the aid of (boris@innonyc.com) boris@innonyc.com's Unix to DOS text converter), converts them to a speech-friendly sentence, and sends this sentence to the speech queue. I've included instructions on using NEWMAIL.CMD with MR/2 ICE and PMMail 1.51 in the project zip file.
That's it for this month. You can download the Backtalk project via the link below. The project includes the REXX files discussed above, RSynth, Uptime, the Unix to DOS converter, and an installation program. You can also download these files separately. If you haven't installed the EMX runtime module yet, you'll need to download that as well. I also recommend that you download a pronunciation dictionary to go along with RSynth; I didn't include it in the project zip file because of its size, but installing it will greatly improve the quality of RSynth's speech.
Comments on this project or suggestions for future projects are welcome. I would particularly appreciate knowing about any improvements you make to my REXX programs. I'm also interested in any speech-enabled programs that you write. Contributions will be discussed in a future column.
Next month: REXX, the WPS, and some computerized sleight-of-hand combine to create a drag-n-drop MIDI jukebox.
(jiml@teleport.com) Jim Little has been spotted in front of his computer making Tim Allenesque grunts and shouting, "More Power! More Power!"
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the REXX Files - by Dr. Dirk Terrell
REXX has some very powerful string-handling functions that can make the casual or professional programmer's life a lot easier. A common example of these is the string-handling function, PARSE. For those of you not up on the lingo, "parsing" means taking one string and splitting it into several others.
This function has several forms, and is extremely powerful. One variant of PARSE, PARSE ARG, is useful when you want to get the ARGuments that were passed to a program (or a function or subroutine).
Let's look at this function with a simple example. Suppose you need a REXX program to calculate the square of a number. You could write it like this:
/* REXX program to compute the square of a number */
NUMBER=5
SQUARE=NUMBER*NUMBER
SAY "The square of" NUMBER "is" SQUARE
EXIT
But you would quickly grow tired of having to edit the square.cmd file to change the NUMBER=... line every time you wanted to compute the square of a number. It would be better if you could run the program and tell it the number you wanted the square of at runtime. For example:
C:\>square 5
The square of 5 is 25
C:\>
In this case 5 is the "argument" of the program square.cmd. To make it work like this, we have to have some way of getting the 5 from the command line into the program. This is done with the PARSE ARG function like so:
/* A more flexible program to compute squares of numbers */
PARSE ARG NUMBER
SQUARE=NUMBER*NUMBER
SAY "The square of" NUMBER "is" SQUARE
EXIT
As a final note on PARSE ARG (and PARSE in general), you can split the command line into several parts (if they exist). Suppose you have a program that needs two numbers as input, for example a program that computes the density of a body. For density you need mass and volume, with density being mass divided by volume.
/* Computes the density of a body given mass and volume as input */
PARSE ARG MASS VOLUME
DENSITY=MASS/VOLUME
Say "The density is" DENSITY
EXIT
You can extend this behaviour to as many command line arguments as you like by adding more variables to the PARSE ARG line. If you include fewer variables after the PARSE statement than the user enters on the command line, the extra arguments are lumped together into the last variable listed after the PARSE statement. For example:
parsetest.cmd one two three four
with a PARSE ARG line in the .cmd file like:
PARSE ARG a1 a2
will set a1='one' and a2='two three four'
You can force extra command line arguments to be dropped if you add a . (period) at the end of the PARSE ARG line. For example:
parsetest.cmd one two three four
with a PARSE line like:
PARSE ARG a1 a2 .
will set a1='one' and a2='two' but ignore the 'three four'.
That's it for now. Until next time...
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(http://www.gnv.com/HTMLWizard/) Dr. Dirk Terrell 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.
Programs written for OS/2's graphical user interface often have to store program initialization information and keep track of settings between executions. To handle this storage of information efficiently, OS/2 makes use of INI files to store text or binary data that is easily accessible by the application. This article will describe the basic internal structure of an INI file and show how to access INI file information using the standard REXX Utility Functions DLL (REXXUTIL.DLL) and Watcom's VX-REXX (v2). To demonstrate the practicality of INI files, a simple VX-REXX skeleton application that maintains window size and location between executions using an INI file will be created. A basic understanding of REXX and VX-REXX is assumed throughout this article.
INI Basics
OS/2 uses two main INI files for storing information between boots. OS2SYS.INI contains OS/2 system initialization information and OS2.INI contains user setup information pertaining to your specific system. Applications may have their own INI file for storing information or may share INI files with others (many use OS2.INI). Preferably, each program should have its own INI file to provide easier system maintenance and keep the OS/2 INI files uncluttered.
INI files are divided into separate Application sections for each application that uses the INI file. Under each Application heading in the INI file, there are keywords that have some binary or text information associated with them. An analogous situation is the way files are stored on a hard drive; the actual INI file being analogous to the root, Applications representing subdirectories and keywords representing files that contain the information required.
To become familiar with how applications use (and share) an INI file, the REXX Information book in the OS/2 Information folder has a useful sample program. To run the program:
o Open the REXX Information book and do a search for "SysIni".
o Use Copy in the Services menu (or just press Ctrl-Ins) to grab the entire section text and paste it into your favourite editor.
o Cut away all of the text except for the last few lines that contain the second sample program (there are two code snippets presented) and then save the file with a .cmd extension.
Now the program can be run to see how information in the User INI file (OS2.INI) is arranged. It becomes apparent how an INI file may become cluttered by looking at the amount of information presented and the variety of applications sharing the User INI file (depending on applications installed on a machine).
INI File Access with the REXX Utility Functions DLL
The REXX Utility Functions DLL (REXXUTIL.DLL) uses the SysIni command to access INI files. A program can set, retrieve and query information contained with the INI file using various combinations of parameters with the SysIni command. Programs can make good use of INI files by just setting and retrieving keywords so only the set and retrieve functions are discussed here. For those who would like to know more, the REXX Information on-line book describes all of the options available for INI file access under the SysIni section.
Before using the SysIni command, it must be loaded from the DLL using the following command:
call RxFuncAdd SysIni, REXXUTIL, SysIni
Now that the command is available to all REXX programs (until it is unloaded using
RxFuncDrop), SysIni can be used to set a keyword value:
result = SysIni(inifile, application, keyword, value)
where inifile is the filespec of the INI file to be accessed, application and keyword are strings naming the application and its keyword and value is the binary or text data to be stored. If successful, result will be set to the null string ('').
The command to retrieve a keyword value is very similar:
value = SysIni(inifile, application, keyword )
The value variable will now contain the keyword value associated with application. If the application and keyword pair are not present, value will contain the string ERROR:.
To access OS/2's System and User INI files, the strings SYSTEM or USER can be used as the inifile parameter.
INI File Access with VX-REXX
Watcom's VX-REXX has three commands for handling INI files: VRDelIni, VRGetIni and VRSetIni. As with the REXX Utility Functions SysIni command, only setting and retrieving INI keyword values is described here.
The syntax for setting an application's keyword value is
The inifile, application, keyword and value variables have the exact same meaning as with the SysIni command. If the inifile parameter is omitted, the User INI file is assumed (OS2.INI). The optional "NoClose" parameter causes the application to keep the INI file open to speed up subsequent access. The rc variable will be set to 1 if the operation is successful, 0 otherwise.
To retrieve an application's keyword value, the command is
value = VRGetIni(application, keyword, [inifile], ["NoClose"])
No surprises here; the syntax is again very similar to the equivalent SysIni command, but the parameters are switched around and the "NoClose" parameter is added. The value variable will contain the keyword value if it is present in the specified INI file. If the keyword is not found, value will be set to the null string ('').
To access OS/2's System and User INI files, the strings 'System' or 'User' can be used as the inifile parameter.
INI Files by Example
INI files are excellent for saving window size and position between program executions. VX-REXX programs can handle this task with simple modifications to the Fini and Init sections of the main window file.
To retrieve and use window size and position information before the main program window is drawn, several steps must be taken in the Init section. First, the filespec of the application's INI file must be found. If the INI file exists, the window coordinate information can be retrieved. If the INI file doesn't exist, default values should be used instead.
To locate the INI file, the steps described in the Programmer's Manual included with VX-REXX (p.139) can be used.
rc = VRGet( "Application", "Program" )
WorkingDir = VRParseFileName( rc, "DP" )
INIFile = WorkingDir||'\MyApp.INI'
Now that the filename for the INI file is available, the application should check to see if the INI file exists (i.e. is this the first time the program has been run?). If the INI file does not exist, default values should be used when drawing the main program window.
ok = VRFileExists( INIFile )
if \ok then do
WindowTop = ''
WindowLeft = ''
WindowWidth = <insert_default_width>
WindowHeight = <insert_default_height>
end
The WindowTop and WindowLeft variables are set to null strings because the window will be centred later using a window method. The WindowWidth and WindowHeight variable are set to the values obtained from the Size page of the main program window's properties book. If the INI file does exist, the VRGetIni command retrieves the main window's coordinate information. This piece of code is the second half of the if statement above:
The "NoClose" parameter is used repeatedly in the VRGetIni command until the last call in order to keep the INI file open for successive access and to speed things up. Now the coordinate information is ready for passing to the main program window.
To change the dimensions and position of the window, the VRSet command is used to change the window's Width and Height properties as shown here:
window = VRWindow()
/* Restore window position. */
if WindowLeft \= '' then ok = VRSet( "Window1", "Left", WindowLeft )
if WindowTop \= '' then ok = VRSet( "Window1", "Top", WindowTop )
ok = VRSet( "Window1", "Width", WindowWidth )
ok = VRSet( "Window1", "Height", WindowHeight )
if WindowTop = '' then call VRMethod window, "CenterWindow"
call VRSet window, "Visible", 1
call VRMethod window, "Activate"
drop window
return
Note that the instructions to set the main window's width and height occur before the instruction to make the window visible. In this way, the window is resized before it is drawn. Any other events that are triggered on a window resize event will happen before the window becomes visible, allowing other elements contained in the window to be resized appropriately before drawing as well.
To save window size and position upon exit, the Fini section of the main program needs to be modified. The window's position and size is fully described by its upper left x,y coordinates along with the window's width and height. To get this window information, the VRGet command is used.
WindowLeft = VRGet( "Window1", "Left" )
WindowTop = VRGet( "Window1", "Top" )
WindowWidth = VRGet( "Window1", "Width" )
WindowHeight = VRGet( "Window1", "Height" )
Once this information is obtained, it can be transferred to the application's INI file using
VRSetIni.
ok = VRSetIni( "MyApp", "WindowTop", WindowTop, INIFile, "NoClose" )
ok = VRSetIni( " MyApp ", "WindowHeight", WindowHeight, INIFile, )
Again, the "NoClose" parameter is used repeatedly until the last INI file access has occurred to keep the INI file open. These two sets of lines can be placed anywhere in the Fini section of the main window file.
Functionality that is taken for granted in most programs can be added to a VX-REXX program with relatively few lines of code. Taken to the extreme, the method shown could be used to make an application customizable by saving and retrieving font/colour information for interface objects when shutting down or starting up the application.
Conclusion
When used effectively, an INI file can really make a program shine. REXX and VX-REXX both help by making INI file access an easy and painless addition to a program. As well as storing window configuration information, any settings such as working directories or hot-key values are ideal candidates for storage in a program INI file. The uses are only limited by one's imagination.
OS/2 Procedures Language/2 Reference on-line manual, IBM Inc.
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(peakea@sfu.ca) Chris Peake is somewhere between 3rd and 4th year in the Engineering Science program at Simon Fraser University in beautiful B.C. He will be working at Nortel in Ontario for co-op this fall. In his spare time he... uhh... can't remember what it's like to have spare time.
Visit Indelible Blue's Web Page - (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/)
Indelible Blue is a mail order reseller specializing in state-of-the-art
OS/2 software and hardware solutions for corporations and individuals.
Corporate volume discounts available.
============================
OS/2 Direct Retail Companies -- Reviews
One of the earliest things OS/2 users learn about their operating system is that it is difficult to find applications for it in retail stores. Most, if not all, of us have come up against at least one surly sales clerk or opinionated retail manager who felt it necessary to explain our folly (for using OS/2) to us when we inquired about OS/2 applications. But one of the next things that most OS/2 users learn is that there is a consolation to this problem: Direct Retailers.
On top of its rich selection of high quality shareware, OS/2 has a very healthy (and growing) tradition of direct retailers supporting it. The obvious reason for this trend is the relatively small and geographically widespread user-base of OS/2. Users can be found from Tokyo to Toronto, but even in some large cities, trying to find a large enough population to support a walk-in retail outlet can be difficult.
There are notable exceptions to this of course, and our hats are off to those who loyally provide shelf space to OS/2 software. But the real heart of OS/2 sales is through direct channels, either direct from the manufacturer or through one of a number of Direct Retailers.
In July, OS/2 e-Zine! advertised to the public that we were conducting a simple survey of user experiences with OS/2 direct retailers. Announcements requesting votes were posted to comp.os.os2.announce, comp.os.os2.misc, and comp.os.os2.apps newsgroups, to the (http://www.bestofos2.com/) Best of OS/2 announcement facility and on our own home page. The request was simple: we asked users to send e-mail stating which direct retailer(s) they had experience with and how they ranked that company, from 1 to 5 (1 being worst, 5 best) in two categories, Promptness & Reliability and Customer Service.
We received votes for a great number of direct retailers and learned some interesting things about the OS/2 software market in the process. For example, while the direct retail market is definitely strongest in the United States, it is picking up in many other parts of the world.
Here in Canada (http://www.pacificablue.com/belowzero/) Below Zero/2 serves the Western part of the country and (http://www.hotinc.com/) House of Technology, an exclusively Canadian distributor of OS/2 products to retail stores, is gearing up to make sure that users from coast to coast will be able to buy products, either in walk-in or mail order venues.
Users in other parts of the world may also have alternatives to American outlets. Companies such as (http://www.euronet.nl/users/mensys/) MENSYS in the Netherlands, or OS/2 Software Express (Tel: +2711-616-6485) in South Africa and many others serve their local areas and beyond.
And on another interesting note, shoppers may be interested in the newly born (http://www.bestofos2.com/) Best of OS/2 electronic direct retailer, founded by the folks at InnoVal Systems Solutions. While the company was not yet operational at the time of this writing, some time in August they will be retailing OS/2 products in full force, offering over 150 shrink wrapped or electronically delivered products. For the buyer who wants the most instant purchase possible, this may be the retail method of the future.
Despite the many good direct retailers worldwide however, we chose to focus on only five. We made this decision for a few reasons: these five were the companies that received the most votes in our survey and they all assured us that they can ship to most parts of the world.
Below you'll find links to a short description of each of these companies and a table representing the results of our survey plus some other useful information.
On July 31st, we visited each company's WWW site or in some other way checked prices on six common (but arbitrarily selected) OS/2 products (Object Desktop, MicroLearn Game Pack II, Galactic Civilizations 2, PartitionMagic for OS/2, BackAgain/2 Professional v4.0 and GammaTech Utilities). The prices for each company were averaged to give a general indication of prices (but, of course, the best way to judge prices is to contact the various companies directly). These numbers, along with our readers' votes on Promptness & Reliability and Customer Service can be found in the table below.
(what does it matter, as long as it's on your machine?)
Anyone familiar with comp.os.os2.advocacy and comp.os.os2.apps is also familiar with the threads discussing what you can and can't get for OS/2 at retail stores. Everyone has their own OS/2 battle story: many are the times I've walked into Egghead and asked for OS/2 software, only to be met with a blank (or slightly hostile) stare, and informed that, "nobody wants OS/2, so we don't carry it." My favorite is when I asked a sales rep at CompUSA if they carried the OS/2 version of PartitionMagic, only to be told (to my surprise and amusement) that PartitionMagic wasn't available for OS/2... only Windows, DOS, and Windows 95.
We've all been slighted, either intentionally or otherwise, by clueless salesmen who believe Windows 95 is the greatest (and only viable) operating system for the Common Man. We've all had to quietly count to ten while the uneducated proceed to insult our intelligence by telling us we don't know what we're doing or obviously we'd be using a "cutting edge" operating system.
Of course, most OS/2 users and supporters would love to see OS/2 filling the shelves of CompUSA, Egghead, MicroCenter, and all those other retail stores. And, of course, it would be wonderful if we could go even farther than that: to see OS/2 Warp connect and the up-and-coming (eventually) SmartSuite '96 for OS/2 gracing the shelves of Staples and Wal-Mart would be a truly satisfying experience -- breaking out of the "Computers only" stores would definitely be a sign of true acceptance from the public at large.
As it is, we haven't gotten quite that far. Stardock has been making a herculean effort to get their products on the shelves of CompUSA, and they've actually made progress: every time I go by the meager OS/2 section of that store, I see Object Desktop (now 1.5), Galactic Civilizations 2, and OS/2 Essentials sitting on the shelves right next to some odd Windows 95 utilities. But to tell you the truth, I don't see many more: the occasional IBM AntiVirus/2, the occasional Back Again/2, the occasional American Heritage Dictionary. That's it. And since I've already bought all of these (mostly direct), I don't buy anything. And I can't help wondering if others do the same.
Brad Wardell, president of Stardock Systems, has been very clear in many of his posts on
comp.os.os2.advocacy and comp.os.os2.apps that more people need to buy from retail stores, or those stores will not see any need to continue stocking OS/2 products. And he's right: if everyone keeps buying from vendors like Indelible Blue to the exclusion of stores like CompUSA, CompUSA will stop carrying OS/2. And the media will say (once again, like they need any prompting), "OS/2 is dead. CompUSA does not carry it any longer, so it is dead, dead, dead."
So what?
The fundamental question we need to ask in this case is: what will getting OS/2 applications on the shelves of a store like CompUSA do for us now? The fundamental answer to this question, I believe, is: not much.
From a straight, business-oriented point of view, depending on large chains like CompUSA to distribute OS/2 will kill OS/2. To put all our energies into getting OS/2 into those stores will be energy wasted, best spent elsewhere.
Hear me out before you reach for those flamethrowers.
CompUSA and such chains make their money through volume, volume, volume. This means they are necessarily ruled by public opinion and common perception, and they only make money when they can sell X number of units in X amount of hours at price X. Chains that sell in this fashion are more interested in paying their operating costs and making a profit than they are in changing the face of computing forever. In fact, changing the face of computing forever means getting rid of a lot of software nobody wants anymore at a huge loss.
All things considered, it's no surprise that CompUSA is reluctant to carry OS/2 any more than it does. Not that people who work at CompUSA don't like OS/2, in fact, I've met many who do like it and actually use it. No, the reason is far more basic than that: A large company that focuses on retail can not take financial risks.
Large retail companies are, in my opinion, dinosaurs. They try to be everything to all people, and wind up short. They're too inflexible: because they depend on too strict a method of making money, if the climate changes (to a more cross-platform computing environment, which may very well happen) they're sunk.
The question is, what takes more energy: getting a dinosaur to change position, or helping some of those furry mammals scurrying around to evolve? Although most pundits claim a paucity of products for OS/2, this has been changing. Many new companies (like Stardock) are perceiving and responding to a need in the OS/2 community, and many (like Stardock) are doing well. A lot of really good shareware (like PMMail, for example) is getting the attention it deserves that it wouldn't get in computer retail stores. And there are places you can go to get software: Indelible Blue (by mail or by 'net), and of course Kiyo Design, an OS/2-only store in Annapolis, MD. or any of the other companies mentioned in the following reviews.
OS/2 has been around for seven or eight years, but it has only been in the last year or so that much of this new "OS/2-infrastructure" has been emerging. The best thing about this infrastructure is that the components of it are relatively new themselves -- and small, and fast, and flexible, and able to change when necessary. We have the opportunity to create a new paradigm in the computer marketplace: a consumer oriented, as opposed to a sales oriented, market.
I think we worry too much about whether or not people will accept us. I think OS/2 users are as concerned with appearances as the "experts" are... do we really need "brand name" companies designing software simply because it'll make us look good? Not if we have "unknown" companies making software that works just as well, or better! I'm certainly not hurting merely because Adobe refuses to make an OS/2 version of PhotoShop -- I like ColorWorks' flexibility much better. SPG saw a need and filled it with a vengeance. Corel and WordPerfect aren't interested in releasing an OS/2 version of WordPerfect or CorelDraw? Well, the CorelDraw decision hurts for the moment, because the only vector-drawing program we have is Freelance 2, which is pretty basic, but DeScribe, Clearlook, and even Ami Pro are pretty decent word processors (and lets not forget IBM Works -- a decent though lightweight program).
And do we really need CompUSA and Egghead to pat us on the head in affirmation of our worth? If CompUSA feels the need to slight OS/2, well, Indelible Blue works harder for your business anyway, and so does Kiyo Design. I've always felt that the companies that work for your business are the ones who should get it, and I don't see CompUSA and Egghead working too hard.
If OS/2 succeeds in the marketplace, computer retail stores will stock it, but I don't expect it will work the other way around. It's up to us to encourage new companies to get into the act, not to plead with old companies to "grace us" with their "endorsements."
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(brennanw@richmond.infi.net) Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Northern Virginia/D.C. area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95. He is also a member of Team OS/2.
---Our Sponsor: SPG (http://www.spg-net.com/)---
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APS Technologies
APS Technologies (http://www.apstech.com/) is the new kid on the block in the OS/2 direct retail market. When we began this survey of OS/2 direct retailers we were somewhat skeptical about how well a hardware oriented retailer would fare against the competition. The answer was: apparently not too badly.
While their Promptness and Reliability was ranked by our readers as slightly lower (4.33 out of 5) than some of the other companies surveyed, it was not nearly as dismal as IBM Direct's rating. Their rating on Customer Service (4.48 out of 5) was tied for the top spot with that of Kiyo Design. And we found a substantial difference in prices at APS compared to the other stores; our sample list totaled only US$424.70 for an average price of US$70.78 while all the average prices from the other stores were in the US$73 dollar range (with IBM Direct over US$76!).
Part of APS's ability to offer such low prices no doubt comes from their cross platform advantage. They sell hardware suitable for OS/2 or other users and most likely high volumes on items like PartitionMagic allows them to keep prices to a minimum.
However, this same diversity affects their sales people's experience. When we spoke with a representative on the phone he seemed unsure of many details on pricing and availability of OS/2 software. Their web site is also not the most user friendly -- we could not find prices for any OS/2 apps on-line. But as long as you have a copy of their glossy catalog you should do alright. It lists 38 different OS/2 products as well as Warp itself (although some of these products are a little dated, such as CorelDraw 2.5 for OS/2).
Reader responses regarding APS were mixed. At least one person gave them a dismal rating and a scathing report complaining of all sorts of delivery, replacement and service failures. Others were less condemning and claim to have found APS to be very knowledgeable and professional. An interesting note is that many OS/2 e-Zine! readers who buy from APS Technologies buy not only OS/2 software from them, but also fulfil their hardware requirements there too.
IBM Direct (http://www.ibm-direct.e-com.ibm.com/us/desktop/cvrpage.htm) is a surprising underdog in the OS/2 direct retail market. One might assume that with their size and obvious advantage at getting their hands on OS/2 applications, they would be an aggressive price and customer satisfaction leader. The opposite seems to be true.
Readers of OS/2 e-Zine! liked IBM Direct least of the big five companies we reviewed this month, giving them the lowest marks in both Promptness & Reliability (3.5 out of 5) and Customer Satisfaction (3.33 out of 5). Their prices were the highest we found too; our shopping list at IBM Direct would cost us US$458.75 for an average price of US$76.46.
Then there's the issue of even contacting them. As we have found in the past, it's often difficult to actually locate the proper person to speak with at IBM. We were expecting the retail organization to be more approachable but were disappointed not to have this verified.
Our problem (your results may vary) started when we called the US toll free number. A helpful recording identified our call as coming from Canada and directed us to a phone number and extension in this country that would handle our request -- or so we thought. The person at the specified number did not understand what we were looking for and after 5 minutes of holding we were directed to another number. This person was more helpful but still had to direct us to another person -- who was not available for immediate conversation and had to call us back (1.5 hours later!). This final person informed us that all non-IBM retail business in Canada is now directed to independent retailers. Since there are none in our area, there was nothing IBM Direct could do to help us (IBM Direct in the US will not ship outside of the US).
Still, some buyers in the US have been satisfied with Big Blue. One voter wrote: "[IBM] delivered orders to me in from 2 to 5 days. The competence of the staff has been high in my opinion, answering my questions with an ease that speaks of personal use of the products I was inquiring about."
However, another reader echoed our local problem when discussing IBM Direct in the UK: "IBM Direct in the UK gave me very good service when I bought DualStor 2.0 last year. However, they no longer sell any PC software direct and leave it all to resellers! So today they get 1/1."
---Our Sponsor: Best of OS/2 (http://www.bestofos2.com/)---
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Indelible Blue
Indelible Blue (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) is the obvious giant in the OS/2 direct retail market (but other companies are trying to change this!). Their success is definitely a great indication of the potential for profit in OS/2 retail and has sparked more than one competitor into existence over the years.
While their ratings, according to our readers, for Promptness & Reliability (4.63 out of 5) and Customer Service (4.42 out of 5) were similar to their competitors', they did receive the most votes of any company surveyed. Their prices were also very much in line with the other companies'; our list totalled US$438.00 at Indelible Blue for an average price of US$73.00.
With no overwhelming price or customer service superiority, one might wonder why Indelible Blue is so popular. Possibly the reason lies in their easily accessible and searchable WWW site or their beautiful, full colour catalogue sent to almost 100,000 OS/2 users every 4 months. Or maybe it's their high profile, with advertisements in print magazines such as OS/2 Magazine and on-line right here in OS/2 e-Zine!. Whatever the case, they're obviously doing something right.
Our readers said it best with some of their comments: "I've had very satisfying contacts with IB. As a new network administrator, I'm trying to find ways to move my department toward OS/2 solutions. IB has provided me with ideas, demonstration software, and lots of encouragement. They are good people."
One fellow Canadian said, "With this type of customer support, no-one would will be disappointed ordering across the border. (Except for the exchange rate on the Loonie!)" And perhaps most convincing was another reader's comment: "I'm an Indelible Blue repeat customer. I've been so completely satisfied with their service that I haven't considered any of the mail order alternatives."
However, no company is all good and Indelible Blue did have its detractors. One reader gave IB a 3 out of 5 for customer service and wrote that it was, "because their returns policy does not apply to customers outside the USA; I wish their web site could give a quote for international shipping charges anywhere in the world, it's very tedious to have to e-mail each time; and when I send an e-mail asking for information, they are supposed to reply within 24 hours, but normally they do not reply at all. I can get a reply by e-mailing the sales manager and saying, 'why did I not get a reply?' But if I fail to do this, my e-mail languishes unanswered."
---Our Sponsor: BMT Micro (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/)---
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J3 Computer Technologies
The Contender from the West Coast in our survey is J3 Computer Technologies (http://www.os2store.com/) . Dedicated to OS/2 only retail for many years now, J3's domain name and WWW address say it all: www.os2store.com -- their sole reason for existence is to supply the OS/2 market with software.
J3's ratings put them squarely among the leaders of the OS/2 marketplace according to our readers. With a score of 4.58 out of 5 for Promptness and Reliability and 4.42 out of 5 for Customer Service, they are clearly well liked. We agree and found that getting through to the "people who matter" at J3 was an easy task (as opposed to IBM Direct at the other end of the scale) and that they were very helpful and friendly. Prices were also good with a total of US$442.00 for the products we selected or an average of US$73.67.
Perhaps most important about J3 is the fact that they are one of a few companies that can match Indelible Blue's range of products. While this is not a comprehensive survey of how many applications each company offers for sale, it is clear from J3's web site that they carry most products that an OS/2 end user will want. In fact, a nice feature of J3's web site is a comprehensive list in alphabetical order of everything available for sale there. And, of course, they also have their on-line product catalogue separated into categories for convenient searching.
Customers had only good things to say about J3, giving them one of the cleanest records in our survey. One reader wrote, "Whenever I had a problem, [which was] not many, [J3 owner] J. Ames always called to make sure it was corrected, called if there was a problem, and to check on how I liked the product. [I was] very satisfied with his service."
Obviously the fact that J3, like Kiyo Design, is a relatively smaller company (compared to IBM Direct) plays a large part in the owner's ability to make personal calls to his customers. Still, it's an attention to service that is appreciated no matter what the reason. This "hands on" management and attention to details has won J3 a loyal following.
Kiyo Design (http://www.kiyoinc.com/) is a well known OS/2 only store in the Annapolis, Maryland area that has taken its show on the road so to speak. Realizing that many of us aren't as fortunate as those in the Annapolis area, Kiyo opened the Kiyo Design Web Store -- essentially an extension of their walk-in retail store where users all over the world can browse some of their prices and order products.
The owner of Kiyo Design is a frequent poster to comp.os.os2 newsgroups and well known OS/2 advocate so it is no surprise that our readers were generally pleased with both Kiyo's Promptness and Reliability (4.53 out of 5) and Customer Service (4.48 out of 5). Prices at Kiyo are comparable to other direct retailers with our sample shopping list coming in at US$438.45 for an average price of US$73.08.
An interesting idea offered by Kiyo Design to alleviate high shipping costs often associated with single item mail order purchases (especially internationally!) is to break down the original packaging of some software before shipping. Apparently great shipping rates are available through the US postal service if packages can fit in certain sizes of envelopes and with creative repackaging this can save substantial amounts on software orders. In some cases the original boxes can be folded and sent along with the order. Of course this doesn't work for items like ColorWorks V2 with its monster manual, but it may save you some money on selected items.
Despite the fact that Kiyo is the only company in our survey without a toll free number for at least the US, we found that our readers who have used their services were quite happy. Understandably, many commented that they enjoyed the personal attention they felt they received dealing with a smaller operation. One customer wrote that he, "liked [Kiyo Design] because I felt sure that my order wasn't going to be misplaced or delayed."
Still, its relative size may be a disadvantage in other ways. Certainly Kiyo does not have the resources of IBM or Indelible Blue, so you probably won't see the same types of full page magazine ads for them as you will with those other companies. But if you're more concerned about and just getting your OS/2 applications on time than with glitz and toll free numbers, Kiyo might be a good solution for you.
APS Technologies sales@apstech.com or intlsales@apstech.com
IBM Direct ibm_direct@vnet.ibm.com
Indelible Blue sales@indelible-blue.com
J3 Computer sales@os2store.com
Kiyo Design hamasaki@capaccess.org
Notes:
a. Promptness & Reliability was voted on by readers of OS/2 e-Zine!. Companies were ranked from 1 to 5 with 1 being the worst score and 5 the best. The average score of all votes received for each company is the number reflected above.
b. Customer Service was voted on by readers of OS/2 e-Zine!. Companies were ranked from 1 to 5 with 1 being the worst score and 5 the best. The average score of all votes received for each company is the number reflected above.
c. The "price" ranking displayed in the table above was determined by obtaining prices from each company for 6 arbitrarily chosen products (Object Desktop, MicroLearn Game Pack II, Galactic Civilizations 2, PartitionMagic for OS/2, BackAgain/2 Professional v4.0 and GammaTech Utilities) and averaging them. Prices were determined by web site, phone call or catalog as of July 31st, 1996. The average prices above are meant to be used as a relative guide only and are subject to change without notice. All prices are in US Dollars.
d. IBM Direct in the US can only ship products within the US. IBM Direct in other countries may not carry OS/2 software from ISVs other than IBM and Lotus.
e. Weekend hours may vary. Call for verification.
f. Weekend hours may vary. Open Tuesday to Sunday; Closed Mondays. Call for verification.
---Our Sponsor: House of Technology (http://www.hotinc.com/)---
***********************************
Interview: Robert Novitskey and Evan Goldring - by Tim Walker
Like me, decent OS/2 PM-based e-mail clients have only just arrived on the Internet. The round-up of graphical e-mail apps in issue 6 of OS/2 e-Zine! indicates that the OS/2 community now has access to the features other platforms have boasted for years -- but it wasn't that long ago that we had to grit our teeth and use Eudora (or whatever it was we used when we discovered how awful UltiMail was).
Judging by BMT Micro's Hot Software Chart, PMMail 1.5, from (http://www.southsoft.com/) SouthSide Software, is among the most popular of this new generation of OS/2 e-mail clients. I'll come clean right away and point out that I'm a registered user; indeed, it was released shortly before I got connected to the Internet at the end of April, thus proving to be a case of perfect timing.
I recently corresponded with SouthSide's main men, BoB and Icon (aka Robert Novitskey and Evan Goldring), while they were putting the finishing touches on PMMail 1.51 (which has now been released to the public) and... well, enough of my prattling, see for yourselves!
***
OS/2 e-Zine!: The bio in PMMail 1.5 seems to say you both lead pretty full lives. How do you fit in writing great OS/2 Internet apps at the same time?
BoB: First of all, we have very understanding girlfriends (thanks Jennifer). Secondly, we don't sleep much. That about sums it all up. A lot of the people that live in my dorm asked me if the PM in PMMail stood for 'P.M.' as in nighttime. I guess they figured since we mostly wrote it at night... that was the most appropriate name.
Evan: Hmmm... We covered the understanding girlfriend thing (thanks Zoe), which is important because both of these things are long-term. I have to admit, I've had to give up some of the luxuries in life... like sleep. It doesn't hurt to have mastered the 25 hour day either. :)
BoB: Yeah, it just basically seems like we fit it in. If I have an extra 25 minutes before class, then 25 more minutes of work gets done that day. It's that simple. Unfortunately, sometimes class takes an extra 3 hours which means code doesn't get written, e-mail doesn't get answered, and a lot of frustration sets in. It's really a shame, but I won't compromise my education... it'll be over in three months anyway. (Side note, BoB and Evan get their M.S. AND B.S. in December)
OS/2 e-Zine!: How did you two meet up?
BoB: It's kinda strange... I had received the DOS 6.0 beta in '93. This was before I saw the light of OS/2. Icon (Evan's nickname) heard that I got it through a friend of ours. He asked if he could stop by and see the beta running. When he stopped by my dorm room, we just shot the breeze and began talking about computers, college life, women, etc.
After that, we just started hanging out a lot. We kept in contact over the summer of '93 (the summer after our freshman year) discussing writing an internet phone-ish type of program for OS/2. It was to be called No-Phone. We started work on it and thought up a company name. We originally settled on Shafted Software. This was because we always seemed to have a dark cloud over our heads and we "got shafted" a lot.
We never finished No-Phone, but instead got internships with AT&T (formerly NCR). During that summer, I decided there was no good e-mail client for my personal use, so I decided to write one and PMMail 1.0 was born. I showed it at an OS/2 users group here in the Cleveland area and people said, "I'd pay you money for that." So, I decided to clean up the software and choose a more professional company name. And the rest is history.
Evan: BoB got it about right. I came to college thinking, "I'm going to meet some guys that know a lot about computers." However, it took a while to find someone that really impressed me. Like BoB said, it wasn't until much later into our freshmen year that we met up. We had a lot more in common then just computers, so we hung out a lot. We always wanted our own company. We didn't really know that PMMail was going to be a big hit.
While he was working on PMMail, I was busy writing what I liked best, screen savers. I was working on a scripting language for writing screen savers. Needless to say, it never saw the light of day. BoB really took off with GUI programming, while I continued to work on learning how to program heavy algorithms in C. During the coding of 1.0, I just fielded a few late night, "why is this crashing, I've tried everything" phone calls from BoB. I then got very involved with my fraternity, and served as its president while PMMail took off. When we discussed the 1.5 release, that is when we really began working together 50/50 professionally.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Did your present team working arrangement just come into being of its own accord, or did you plan it?
BoB: It came into being of its own accord. Evan and I think a lot alike and often know what the other is thinking. It's very easy to work that way. We used to try to get summer jobs working at the same place (so we could work on PMMail and the like). We would always tell prospective employers: "If you hire Evan and I it's like getting 3 people for the price of 2".
Evan: Hmmm... that sounds about right. We have been in about 35 classes together throughout undergraduate and graduate school. By Sophomore year, we were working on everything together, labs, homework, etc. We have been lab partners a lot, and that is when we realized that we were both very good in different areas, so we exploited that and produced some good code for school. BoB could turn the rough algorithms that I would write into solid user-friendly programs. That is how we split into GUI and GUTS. When it came time to do 1.5, we saw the natural split, he would do the user interface, and I would work on the algorithmic intensive MIME engine, parsing routines, etc. It came to the point where he would say, I need function X to take these parameters, and then tell me such and such information, and vice versa, and we could always produce for one another.
OS/2 e-Zine!: What made you begin work on PMMail in the first place? Was it a perceived lack of a decent PM-based OS/2 e-mail client, or something else?
BoB: It originally started as a small project for myself. I didn't know "C" (PMMail 1.5 is approx. 80,000 lines of "C" code) and I hated firing up windows to read my mail, so I learned "C" to write PMMail, and vice versa. It only became a business venture due to feedback early on.
Evan: How else were we going to learn how to program a GUI operating system! Seriously, we knew that we could write it, so we tried.
OS/2 e-Zine!: What compiler, authoring tools, etc. did you use to create PMMail?
BoB: PMMail 1.0-1.1 were written using Borland C++ 1.0 for OS/2. Version 1.5 was written with IBM Visual Age C++. It's funny... we actually wrote 1.5 twice. The first time we wrote it in C++ using IBM's Open Class Libraries. Those libraries were so slow and buggy that we couldn't finish the product. Actually we could have finished it, but I wasn't proud of it in that state, so in December 1995 we made the executive decision to rewrite the whole product from scratch. All the controls (square buttons, split windows, tabbed notebooks, status bars and toolbars) are home-brewed. We used no custom libraries. I think extra DLL's just slow down program load time, so I try to do the most I can with the compiler and the API.
Evan: For a long time, believe it or not, I was stuck on DOS. Since my code didn't rely on OS/2, I wrote 100% ANSI compatible code under my all time favorite compiler, Quick C (from Microsoft) v2.5. All the code always clean compiled under OS/2. Since I was doing some "hairy" things like a lot of file I/O, and memory-intensive routines, I wanted to use DOS for a very important reason: when I crashed the machine, it didn't take long to reboot. Also, I had limited memory at my disposal, which forced me to keep my code tight and not hog memory. This kept the encoding/decoding algorithms fast.
Everything is home brew, not just the GUI. We wrote our own UU, MIME, QP, and BinHex encoding and decoding routines from scratch. That way, we don't rely on any third party programs for internal message processing.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Are there any other e-mail clients, for OS/2 or other platforms, which you look at and say, "We'll make PMMail match that"?
BoB: I liked the interface of Exchange, but not the guts of it... MAPI slows it down a lot. We wanted to get rid of as many layers of abstraction as possible. We realized that Eudora had a large market share, so the feature set there was obviously important. Therefore, PMMail is a meld of those two with a bit of our own flash. By "our own flash" I mean things like the RMB address book, and RMB URL exploring. Most of those ideas came from just using the product and saying, "I wish it did that..." That's how most of the really cool features got in there. We really focused on speed and stability above all else though, so to say we "matched" something is only skin deep. It's the implementation that matters.
Evan: I more saw what I didn't like, than what I did like initially. I guess that is a lot easier to see. From 1.1 to 1.5, we knew MIME was one of the most important features, which most mailers had at that time. I used POPMail for DOS for a long time and, since it wasn't slowed down by heavy graphics, it was really fast (that's why I used it). So, we really wanted to try and keep that element of speed. That is where implementation comes into play.
OS/2 e-Zine!: What are your views on the OS/2 e-mail market, now that PMMail in its various forms has been out over a year?
BoB: The market has really made PMMail a better product. I met Nick Knight about a year ago and he has made an impressive offering to the OS/2 community which really raised the bar for us. It's still a small market though. No big commercial company has come out with the killer e-mail app yet. We're hoping we might be able to do that with PMMail 2.0.
Evan: Well, there really wasn't one intially. Like BoB Mentioned, MR/2 was an impressive offering. It was a very new and big twist on the UI aspect of a
mail client. From my standpoint, I used it as a speed benchmark for a while. I know a great number of people that run OS/2 with a windows based e-mail package, so I'm glad there are OS/2 native choices out there.
BoB: After all...it's all about choices. If there aren't lots of choices [BoB tries to pull other OS/2 developers into the ring] OS/2 will die.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Have you been overwhelmed, satisfied, disappointed (etc.) at how PMMail has been taken up?
BoB: I'd say I'm satisfied. I'm overwhelmed with its market penetration considering that it's a shareware product.
Evan: Very overwhelmed with its market share and how it has spread all over the world. I think it's great to see people from all over the world use it. I guess that is what you have to expect with the Internet, but you still don't expect to get e-mail from someone half way around the world when you live in the States telling you how much they like the product. I've gotten e-mail from just about everywhere you could imagine. You really get the big picture with how important the Internet is world wide, not just in the States.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Can you tell at this stage how many users of PMMail 1.5 are new, and how many are upgrading from early versions?
Evan: I'd say about half and half at this point, which is what I expected. I think the number of internet users has doubled in the last year, so we have about twice as many new users. We can really only tell officially by the number of registrations, but I know that is a very limited sampling considering how many people I have seen or heard about using the product. I know that many more people at least tried out 1.5 than 1.1. Just due to the sheer increase in volume of e-mail that 1.5 has generated.
BoB: That's probably about right, but then there are also the few people who have registered both. I get a few letters that say, "Here's $10 or $25... I felt guilty getting a completely new e-mail program for free." I thought that was pretty cool. It's not the money that I liked, it's more that they considered all the 4 a.m. nights when I squeezed programming time in after a lab report instead of sleeping.
Evan: It's usually other programmers that write the best letters. I like
hearing from another programmer that some code we wrote is fast, or that the UI was "well thought out". That is the ultimate compliment, when another programmer acknowledges your work.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Does the knowledge you're providing high-quality OS/2 applications make up for the less remunerative nature of the market? (In other words: are you in this for love or money?)
Evan: Like we said at first, PMMail would have been created no matter what. Definitely the love. We really didn't expect many users other then the small circle of friends that were, at that time, jumping on the OS/2 2.1 bandwagon.
BoB: Amen to that. I never knew that money could be made on a shareware app. I started out as a chemistry major. Then I took a (mandatory) course in PASCAL programming. It (the way of thinking about programming) came way easily to me. I was a computer engineer from that point on.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Do you aim your product at the OS/2 market as a whole, or at certain sectors? (E.g. users of the IAK, homes, businesses...)
Evan: Hmmm... We definitely don't plan for anyone specific to use the product. Our target market would be OS/2 users. Our goal is to have something that anyone can use. We figure that if a company is going to be running it, it better be easy enough to use for the least technical person to be able to use it quickly and easily, and for the heavy users to have the functionality and feature set they might require.
BoB: Hey, like I said, we think alike... I'd have to admit, though, by sheer volume of copies in use, it's split about 75% home users and 25% business users. I'd like to push into the business market. That is where you start to be able to change the way your product is used and viewed, because it gets such exposure from company to company. Some of our corporate users tell stories like this: "IBM came and showed OS/2 to our company. We told them we liked it, but the e-mail package that comes with it is not up to par with the rest of the system. Then the IBM'er opened PMMail and said, 'Now let me show you what mail program I use.'" That is the best advertisement in the world.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Any other apps in the pipeline, such as an IRC client?
Evan: Heh, heh... funny you should ask! BoB and I have always been the type to write a small app to do a specific task if we couldn't already do it with what we had. So, now, when we come across an application that doesn't do what we need, we think about writing one ourselves.
BoB: Well PMINews is coming along. It's an On/Off-line USENET news client. Anybody who likes the look and feel of PMMail will like this. We adapted the same interface. It should be out in November/December. As well, we are getting some suggestions from or corporate users to do a Win32 version of PMMail, which we are investigating. In addition, we had planned to do an FTP client, but we're waiting to see how Merlin handles FTP. It's rumored to appear in the WPS. Other than that, there are just pipe dreams (a la No-Phone). In all seriousness, any apps will most definitely be useful network
related apps.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Ok, how about some more general questions? Are you looking forward to Merlin? Are you beta testers?
BoB: Yes, I'm a beta tester. I am looking forward to the UI part of Merlin, but I had hopes for greater ease of configuration, with an obvious emphasis on the networking area. I just really like how easy it is to set up networking on Win95. It should be that easy on OS/2. OS/2 is the most stable, reliable OS on the planet, but what needs to be done is to make it ACCESSIBLE. Make it easy to use. It's nice to have the pop-up help and such, but instead of putting a coating on the problem, how about getting to the root of the problem and making it easier to use in general. That is what will make the general population flock to it and give it a long life. Let's keep in mind though, this is a beta, so all these comments are kind of tongue-in-cheek until it's finally released.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Will Merlin change the way you work on your apps, especially with the proposed new Internet tools (FTP desktop folders, cc:Mail or Notes:Mail client)?
BoB: It's too hard a question to answer. When I heard about Ultimail, I thought, "Oh great, I'm dead." And then I saw it. It wasn't nearly as nice as it appeared on paper. None of those features are in the Merlin beta yet, so we'll just have to see.
Evan: As far the FTP goes, we actually had a few pieces of UI code done, as well as working FTP client prototypes. We were in the midst of discussing how best to do the UI and how best to integrate PMFtp with PMMail, but we're gonna wait and see how easy integration with Merlin's FTP is. So for now, we're gonna focus on News until Merlin is released.
OS/2 e-Zine!: If SouthSide was in charge of the entire Merlin project, what would you add, emphasise, leave out, etc. in the finished product?
BoB: I would add glue to bind all the parts of OS/2 together. When installing Warp Connect, it's painfully obvious that you are installing several distinct products (Base OS, Networking, BonusPak). Just glue the whole OS together and pretty it up. That will give it mass market appeal. That is what will make it survive. Also multiple input queues are needed badly. There's not too much I would leave out. The voice stuff needs some work, but it's very cool technology and I'm sure it'll be fixed up before the release.
Evan: Yeah, I agree fully. There's a lot more I could say, but it'd get
pretty tangential. It would end up being one of those debates about what's an OS and what's an application. We'll just have to see what IBM does with this one.
BoB (laughing): I hope for our business's sake IBM doesn't drop the ball.
OS/2 e-Zine!: Finally, one for Evan: are your music tastes as staggeringly diverse as Bob's? (Note to reader: Read the bio in PMMail 1.5->Help->About, and the question will make more sense!)
Evan: (with VH1's 8-track flashback on the TV behind him, and The Who's Tommy playing simultaneously out of the Stereo) I am the hugest Donovan fan ever. I finally got to see him in concert. I really like the era [1965-1977]. When I started driving, I always got the car after my mom, who never turned the radio down. Well, being the lazy 16 year old kid, I never turned it off. I really got to like her oldies station. Now, you'll mainly see anything from 1964-1977 in my CD player. I still deny that any music from the 80's really existed. Music seemed to have lost its folkie story telling roots. I listen to music for the lyrics more so than the instrumental aspect. BoB definitely beats my 16 CD collection (of which about 11 are Donovan).
***
-----
(tawalker@dircon.co.uk) Tim Walker is a 23-year-old non-programmer, living near London, UK, working in electronic publishing and running Warp at home... which marks him out as a pretty unusual OS/2 user. His golden ambition is to create a Web home page on a topic no-one has thought of before -- anyone else like the Penguin Cafe Orchestra?
---Our Sponsor: Indelible Blue (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/)---
***********************************
Post Road Mailer v2.0 - by Tash Hepting
InnoVal Systems Solutions is making its next foray into the e-mail wars with the 2.0 release of Post Road Mailer (PRM). With competitors such as SouthSide Software's PMMail, and Nick Knight's MR2ICE outgunning the old version of PRM, it's nice to see an updated and
feature rich product emerge from an OS/2 veteran. I had a chance to look at a version of the program almost identical to the release version made available to the general public on July 31 of this year.
Installation
The installation of PRM is easy; unzip it into a new directory and go. No messy modifications to your INI files, no hassles. An option under the file menu allows you to migrate your old inboxes from previous versions. Simply use the file dialogue to locate the directory your old copy of PRM was installed in, and it will present you with a list of which inboxes you wish to migrate. In my tests the migration proceeded smoothly, and finished in a couple minutes.
The help system has a quick-start guide that shows you what to do to create a new inbox and customize the settings to your e-mail environment.
Interface
When you first start the program, you are presented with a view of your inbox with a toolbar below. If, like me, you prefer to see more information in less space, InnoVal has provided an alternate display which only uses one line per e-mail.
Each letter has a lot of information contained in the entry. By default, unopened mail has an icon that looks like a sealed envelope, unless it has a "Mood Icon" (see below). Opened mail has an icon that looks like an opened envelope, even if it was sent with a mood icon. If there are any files attached to the e-mail, there will be a paperclip around the envelope. If you have attached a "sticky note" (see below) to a message, there will be a small pushpin next to the message. Messages that just arrived this session have a "NEW" bullet next to them. Messages that you have opened this session will change color to red so you can tell what you have already looked at. Messages that have been replied to will have a red check mark over the opened envelope. Those that have been slated for shredding will be X'd out (unless you set PRM to immediately move them to the shred folder).
From the toolbar you can perform a variety of actions such as composing a new note. Composing a note in PRM is a two step process. When you start to compose a new e-mail, the first thing you see is the message header window. From this window you can address e-mail, attach files (MIME or UUEncoded), change the mood icon, change your signature, or toggle the use of PGP (if you have it installed) to encrypt or sign your message. After entering all the header information, pressing the "Text" button on the bottom of the window will bring forward a separate window for composing your messages. When you are finished, simply press the "OK to send" button at the base of either window, and the note will be moved to your outbox and sent.
Reading mail in your inbox is accomplished with the expected double click on the message. Attachments, which used to be presented as icons in a folder with cryptic names like C345FB are now displayed in a "details view"-like window which lists the name of the file and who sent it, along with the aforementioned cryptic name. As before, you can associate applications with file types for easy viewing of attachments.
Some Features
Post Road Mailer v2.0 has many nice features including:
ISO-Latin-1 Support:
Finally, PRM supports the ISO-Latin-1 character set allowing proper use of accented characters for foreign languages.
PGP Support:
From the settings notebook you can set up your PGP information to allow encrypting or digitally signing your e-mail as easily as clicking a check box. You can also set the program to automatically decrypt incoming messages if you like.
Internet Support:
If you are on-line while reading a message which contains a URL (like http://www.haligonian.com/os2/) you can simply double-click on it and WebExplorer will appear and load the page. Unlike PMMail v1.5 which also features easy access to WebExplorer or other web browsers, PRM will send the URL directly to the running version of WebEx if it is already open.
Filters:
You can define custom filters to perform a wide variety of tasks on your incoming mail (generate automatic replies, move messages from a mailing list into a specific folder, redirect mail, etc...). The filter will search a specified portion of the e-mail for a text string, and do the selected action to every piece of mail that meets the criteria.
Mood Icons:
You can use OS/2 icons (.ICO files) to add character to your messages by either attaching a mood icon to messages you send out to other PRM users, or by configuring filters that will attach mood icons to incoming mail.
Sticky Notes:
Ever wanted to jot down a quick note about an e-mail and then be able to find it later easily? With sticky notes it's possible. Simply right click on the message, and select "Sticky notes...". You can then enter a short message, set the date you want it to show up, click on the "followup" checkbox and hit OK. Now, when you pull down the "Features" menu, and select "followups", it will let you specify a date and search your inbox. Unfortunately, in this copy, it did not display the notes found in the search, making the feature rather useless. I have contacted InnoVal, and hopefully they will be fixing this before the general release.
Mail Search:
After subscribing to several mailing lists, and receiving tons of e-mail I find it hard to find specific messages after a time. Luckily PRM has a mail search feature which will scan through all the folders you specify for a particular string. This alone is worth the price of admission!
Mail Preview:
For people who are on slow connections or having problems with a particular message, PRM includes a mail previewer to scan your POP server and display the headers or the number of messages waiting. This feature allows you to delete messages directly off the server, peek at the first few lines of a message before downloading it, and retrieve selected notes.
Documentation
The on-line help in PRM is full of useful information. I was disappointed in the lack of documentation on the PGP feature, but everything else was well documented.
Problems
While PRM is a very good product, it is not without noticeable problems. Aside from various minor display bugs that were still present in the version I looked at (but that InnoVal has promised to fix before release to the public) some other issues are:
o The mail files are stored in a plain text format, which renders the password protection of inboxes practically useless.
o Unlike other mailers, PRM v2.0 does not have its "send" and "retrieve" functions on different threads so while you are performing one action you can not initialize the other.
I'm not sure if these will be corrected before the time you read this but InnoVal has insisted they will ship on July 31st and have promised to clean up the "loose ends".
Conclusions
PRM is strong product from InnoVal, and weighs up against the competition. I would recommend any current PRM customer make the upgrade immediately, and other e-mail users strongly consider it. The inclusion of PGP support makes it easy to have secure, private communications across the Internet; and makes this product stand out from the others.
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* Post Road Mailer v2.0
by (http://www.innoval.com/) InnoVal Systems Solutions
download the full function demo from (http://www.tiac.net/innoval/post200.zip) InnoVal
MSRP: US$59
-----
(phoenix@surf.internex.com) Tash Hepting is a Solaris Systems Administrator by day, and a self professed OS/2 guru by night.
Back in the days when DOS was the only operating system available for home computers, the one program that I could not live without was Central Point Software's PC Tools. It was a program which let you manipulate files and directories easily without having to utilize DOS commands which were inhospitable to users. It was also the one program which I missed when I finally saw the light and changed to OS/2!
Now, I have my utility program back, although it's not by Central Point (since swallowed up by Symantec) and not named PC Tools. It is FileStar/2 by SofTouch Systems, Inc. Version 1 has been out since approximately February 1995. Version 2 was released mid-June of this year.
FileStar/2 comes on one 3.5" floppy and has its own install program. One disadvantage, which the company says will be corrected in future releases, is that v1.x must be totally removed from the system prior to installing v2.0 since it has a totally new INI file format.
Interface
FileStar/2 is a simple interface to your files, combining familiar file manager concepts with the superior controls available in the OS/2 Presentation Manager environment. A multi-threaded program, FileStar/2 lets you perform different operations in each of its two main display windows. Additionally, operations which do not require a window, such as formatting a diskette, may be performed concurrently with the other two operations.
FileStar/2's appearance is somewhat reminiscent of PC Tools, with two main windows displaying the files of two directories. Also displayed is a drive table listing available drives and a directory tree for whichever drive contains the subdirectory displayed by the main window with the focus.
Across the top of FileStar/2's main window is a menu bar with drop down menus which allow you to manipulate the files and directories selected. Below that is a tool bar, considerably improved from v1.x in both utility and attractiveness. The tool bar also has an adjustable bubble help display to let you know what some of the less used buttons do. Across the bottom of the screen are a series of display panels which give data on the drive space, swap file, size and attributes of selected files and the date and time.
One nice touch is that with a double click on the swap file size panel, the on-screen display is reduced to a small box which shows alternatively: Drive Free Space, Available Memory, Work Space Free (defined as a rough indicator of the proximity of swap file growth) and Swap File Size.
Almost everything on the screen is user adjustable, from colors to fonts to size and placement of windows. When the total display is resized, all the individual windows within the display are automatically resized too. In fact, when screen resolution is changed, one click on the size label with the Control key depressed will reset the display size for the changed resolution.
Features
The really nice thing about FileStar/2 is that it allows you to do many things that heretofore required the use of the command line. If, like me, you could never remember the syntax for the ATTRIB command, then you will like the ease with which FileStar/2 lets you change attributes. FileStar/2 will also let you do things you cannot do from the command line. Perhaps most important is the ability to MOVE files or whole directories between hard drive partitions.
With the "SET DELDIR" command installed in the CONFIG.SYS file, you can do undeletes from within FileStar/2, as well as change, individually or wholesale, the date and/or time stamp on files and view, browse and print any file with ease.
SofTouch Systems has made FileStar/2 a very useful program by adding several other functions. With InfoZip installed (PKUNZIP is not supported) zipped files can be viewed and unzipped from within FileStar/2. They have also utilized an extensive set of "hot key" assignments which will make the day of those who don't like to use the mouse. And for those who do like the rodent, a wide range of "drag and drop", both within the program and to the Desktop (or the shredder and printer), is available.
Documentation and New Features
Documentation is a bound soft-cover 5" x 8" manual and also excellent on-line help. Both cover almost every aspect of FileStar/2. My only complaint is that one must delve through 83 pages of information on how the windows work and can be manipulated before getting to how to use the program. The documentation itself is well written with very few grammatical or typographical errors.
Changes from Version 1.x to 2.0 are, for the most part, cosmetic. The toolbar has been vastly improved but there are few new functions. The whole program runs much faster and the overall look and feel are improved.
Conclusion
All in all, FileStar/2 is one program that I feel should be on almost everyone's "must have" list of utilities. You might not use it every day, but the time and effort it saves will make it well worth your while.
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* FileStar/2 v2.0
by (http://www.softouch.com/) SofTouch Systems, Inc.
MSRP: US$99
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(remmett@cris.com) Bob Smith is a 15 year veteran as a USAF pilot, retired from the Fire Service as an Arson Investigator and Fire Chief in a small city in California, USA. He is currently working as a photographer and computer consultant and has been using OS/2 since v2.0.
I have long touted OS/2 as a platform for scientists because of its robustness, and also because of the quality software available at little or no cost. Like most scientists whose work involves intensive computing, I have grown accustomed to using some flavor of Unix, so tools like vi, grep, etc. are invaluable. Because of the freely available OS/2 ports of almost all of these tools, my OS/2 command prompt is almost indistinguishable from the Unix machines I use.
Then there are gems like Euler for OS/2 by (http://www.ku-eichstaett.de/MGF/grothmann/grothmann.html) Dr. Rene Grothmann which is a powerful mathematics tool for doing numerical calculations with real and complex numbers, matrices, and intervals. Unlike more extensive tools like Maple or Mathematica, however, it is not a symbolic processor.
Installation
Installation of Euler amounts to unzipping the archive in a directory. There is no need for a fancy installation program because Euler consists of one executable and there are no dynamic link libraries to be installed. There are, of course, other files in the archive such as a good on-line help file (in both .INF and .HLP formats) and several sample files which bring you up to speed quickly on the syntax used to perform various functions. Euler uses a notebook type of interface, making it easy to save calculations for later use or to exchange with other users, and the archive includes a number of sample notebooks.
Interacting with Euler
Euler's interface consists of two windows, one for input and text output and one for graphical output. The interface is clean and intuitive, with menu functions for loading and saving files, printing, and editing (cut and paste of both text and graphics). It also has extensive support for keyboard shortcuts, and even allows you to program function keys for your specific needs. My only complaint about the interface is its nonstandard use of the right mouse button to select text. Users of X-Windows will be familiar with this two-click method, but others will find it frustrating.
Euler sports many built-in functions for doing a wide variety of calculations. I was particularly impressed with its ability to perform calculations with matrices. The notation is compact and logical, and the expected functions are available such as inverse, transpose, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, LU-decomposition, etc. There are also several advanced functions that make it very easy to solve problems involving matrices such as least squares solutions. While there are too many built-in functions to list here, most of the ones you would expect are available including statistical functions (Mean and standard deviation are, surprisingly, not defined internally but are trivial to define on program startup), Fast Fourier Transform, interpolation, polynomial functions, and interval functions.
The ability to visualize results is often just as important as the ability to calculate them and Euler does a good job when it comes to creating and printing graphics. You have full control over the plot parameters such as axes, labels, colors, etc. and you can create both 2 and 3-dimensional plots. For 3-D functions you can create mesh, contour, wireframe, and density plots. A handy feature is the ability to plot graphs on top of another. The printed output of Euler is superb, and is certainly of publication quality.
Euler also has its own BASIC-like programming language so that you can extend its capabilities should the built-in functions be insufficient for your needs. The language constructs include loops and decision structures for building your own functions, and you have several debugging functions at your disposal. There are also low-level functions for reading and writing files to disk.
Conclusion
Euler is a great piece of software and is free for educational use. For noneducational use, an extremely reasonable registration of 70 DM (about US$45) is required.
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* Euler v4.12
by (http://www.ku-eichstaett.de/MGF/grothmann/grothmann.html) Dr. Rene Grothmann
download from (ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/wpsutil/euler412.zip) Hobbes (ZIP, 465k)
Registration: US$45 (Free for educational users)
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(http://www.gnv.com/HTMLWizard/) Dr. Dirk Terrell 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.
WebExplorer from IBM was one of the first web browsers for OS/2 on the market and is still basically the only real choice for most users. Though its graphics are superb, WebExplorer falls behind its Windows counterparts in other important areas. Seeing a need to enhance the usability of WebExplorer, InnoVal Systems Solutions has released WebExtra, a product that "Hypercharges the WebExplorer".
What is it?
WebExtra is a small program written in VX-REXX that has jumplists, bookmarks, archive facilities, and search facilities for use with WebExplorer. How many times have you forgotten the address of the page you went to last week or wished that WebExplorer's Quicklist organized pages into categories? With WebExtra, these are no long concerns.
WebExtra adds a few significant enhancements to IBM's WebExplorer:
Jump Lists
Have you ever wished you had bookmarked a page, but didn't and can't find the page now? Enter WebExtra's Jump List. Every page you visit is recorded in a Jump List. From the Jump List, you can put the page into a Book (referred to as "Bookmarking" by InnoVal; see below) by right clicking on the page listing and selecting "Bookmark document". Every page you visit during a session is included on the Jump List and about 40 more from the previous session are likewise included. You don't even have to be viewing a page to Bookmark it, you can do so from the Jump List while off-line. And as soon as you load a page, the Jump List gets out of the way.
Unlike the Quicklist and the WebMap that come with WebExplorer, the Jump List is persistent from session to session and is very quick. WebExtra's Jump List makes it much easier to navigate through previously viewed web pages.
Books
The best feature of WebExtra is the ability to sort your pages into books by categories. Before I found WebExtra, I was constantly searching my Quicklist for the right page. With WebExtra, I can organize my pages by creating whatever books I want and bookmarking pages to a particular book. I can add a page to a book from the Jump List or from the "Bookmark the current document" icon on WebExtra. Items in each book can be rearranged by simply dragging them around. Once a page is in a book, I can update pages, move and copy pages to other books, and edit the description of entries. Putting pages in the books speeds up access to web pages dramatically.
Archiving and Search Facility
I mentioned earlier that the Jump List only shows the current session's pages and about 40 from the previous session. Where are the other pages? WebExtra maintains a monthly log of pages for this purpose. Each month's pages are kept in a .log file and you can open these log files and view them in the Jump List or simply use the search facility to find a page. The search facility is very quick and presents the results in a Jump List fashion, allowing you to bookmark the page right from there. You could use a WWW based search engine to find pages, but if you have already visited the page, using WebExtra's search engine is much easier and uses very little space to store a year's worth of links. I found that the search engine is superb; it has helped me locate links I never would have remembered.
Performance
WebExtra requires that you have 12 meg on your system. The reason for this is that WebExtra is written in VX-REXX and uses the VROBJ.DLL file that is one meg by itself. On a 16 meg test machine, swapping takes place. This is okay if you use only one copy of WebExplorer. If you open another copy of WebExplorer though, you will notice a slight performance hit.
But, It Isn't Perfect
Though WebExtra does have many things in its favor, it does have a few limitations. WebExtra will only work with one copy of WebExplorer. If you open another copy of WebExplorer, you must rely on the Quicklist again. I like to run more than one copy of WebExplorer to get around its current limitations (the worst of which is not allowing me to go to another link until the current page is downloaded). Because WebExtra has this limitation, I still use the Quicklist in the second browser.
Currently, there is no import filter for WebExplorer's Quicklist. You have to visit each web page on your Quicklist to get it on the Jump List. This isn't a problem if your Quicklist is small, but if it is large, visiting each page is time consuming. A utility should be available from InnoVal very soon to allow you to import Quicklist entries into WebExtra books.
Another limitation is the lack of nested Books. I can have a book entitled OS/2, but currently I can't have a book entitled Games inside the OS/2 book. Likewise, the ability to sort pages in each book is missing. I find that I am always looking for my pages by name and if they were in alphabetical order it would be very helpful. Unlike products such as Stardock's Internet shell, dragging and dropping pages from the books onto WebExplorer is not supported. Though Drag 'n drop doesn't work yet, you will find in everyday use that it is much quicker to simply double click on the page from the book.
There are some other minor problems that may annoy some users, such as WebExtra's tendency to generate error messages when it is run from a Work Area Folder if that folder is shut down or when you try to shut WebExtra down from the task list (this is only an intermittent problem). But my biggest wish would be a "Float on Top" option. Presently you have to bring WebExtra and WebExplorer to the foreground manually. This is an unnecessary step that a "Float on Top" option would easily solve.
Hit or Miss?
Despite having a few problems and missing a few features, WebExtra is very nice to have to help you navigate the Web with WebExplorer. InnoVal's claim that WebExtra "Hypercharges the WebExplorer" is very true. Though there are other Quicklist organizers available, WebExtra is my choice because it is simple and easy to use. WebExtra is well worth the cost (still only US$29.95). Once you try it, you won't remember how you did without it. It is a hit.
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* WebExtra v1.02
by (http://www.innoval.com/) InnoVal Systems Solutions Inc.
MSRP: US$49.95
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(doug@uwin.com) Doug Hicken is a Team OS/2 member that has used OS/2 since OS/2 for Windows. He owns and operates a Pheasant Hunting Preserve in Utah. He welcomes your comments and insights.
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Aquanaut! v1.0 - by Steven Turk
OS/2, like many operating systems, seems to have drawn its share of classic video game nuts. Or maybe it's just that the ancient (by today's standards) software that ran on yesterday's video arcade boxes is the most complex type of game that can be successfully ported to our beloved OS. Either way, Aquanaut! is yet another classic game that many die hard arcade dwellers will recognize instantly -- PM style.
Aquanaut! by any other name...
Except it's completely different. Frankly, I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't remember the name of the original stand-up arcade hit that Aquanaut! mimics (I played it more than once...). If you ever played it, you will recognize the copy immediately: it was that space ship game that had a joystick and about 6 or 7 buttons not quite in a horizontal line for everything from acceleration to smart bombs. Space Something or Something Blaster...
Anyway, Aquanaut! is fairly faithful to (what I can remember of) the original except the setting in this case is underwater and instead of a space ship fighting UFOs, you're cruising in a sub saving the sea floor from evil seahorses. The rest is near identical. Your sub is moved up or down and the acceleration key causes the (resizable) play window to scroll by you, simulating your motion. Other keys cause you to reverse direction, fire one serious laser, drop a smart bomb or flip into hyperspace (useful for tight situations if not entirely consistent in a marine setting). The evildoers out to steal your treasures from the sea floor are Seahorses (Demonic and otherwise), Jellyfish, U-boats, Torpedoes, Mermaids and Rubber Rings (these last two appear only in the registered version of the game). And there is a handy radar (or sonar in this case) above the main screen to warn you of approaching bad guys. As with all shoot 'em up games, things get markedly hairier as you progress in levels.
The purpose, as the on-line help says, is, "to stay alive as long as possible, amass as high a score as possible and protect the sea's treasures for as long as possible." Pretty straightforward.
Window Dressings
It was a long time ago (1994 in fact) that the author, Paul Stanley, sat down and banged out this little gem and it shows. (Did the original look this cheesy? I remember it being so cool...) While Aquanaut! is a graphical PM game with sound effects (lasers, explosions, music, etc.) it is not Myst. The graphics are rough and the sounds may get a little annoying after a while. Still, the display is functional and there's enough color and noise to imagine you're really doing the world a service with all the wanton sea-life eradication you're engaged in.
Performance
The game is also reasonably snappy even on the most challenged of systems. This is probably because back in '94 a "power system" would have quaked in fear at today's RAM stuffed boxes. If you have at least 16 meg of RAM you'll likely have no problems with Aquanaut!. A nice touch is that the game pauses when its window loses focus.
There are sound drop outs but this is most likely an MMOS/2 problem since it has been observed on the test machine equipped with a Sound Blaster in the past while running other programs. Otherwise the game performed flawlessly.
Conclusions
What can I say? Aquanaut! is shareware and very reasonably priced at US$10. The only catch is that this game was written so long ago that there isn't even an e-mail address anywhere in the docs. I'm not sure if the author is still at the address listed or if he is still accepting registrations (but we can assume he wouldn't mind them). Is it worthwhile? Well, you probably won't get any great return by investing your $10 in a 2 yr old game but you might ease your conscience. And as long as you realize what you are paying for, it is worth it.
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* Aquanaut! v1.0
by Paul Stanley
download from (ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/games/aquanaut.zip) Hobbes (ZIP, 229k)
Registration: US$10
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Stephen Turk is a salesman at a small computer retailer and part time trouble shooter. He has been using OS/2 for over a year and is an avid Usenet lurker.
Toyland, a puzzle game for OS/2 very unlike many other games, has been out for (public) beta-testing for quite a while, and now, has at last been released as version 1.0. I had a look at the game this month.
In Toyland, you play the role of T(r)oy, who just like the other inhabitants of Toyland is a puppet, made of wood. He is, as a matter of fact, the only puppet left intact in Toyland; all the others were accidentally blown to pieces. It is your job to collect these pieces, the other puppets' limbs (wooden beads), so they can be reassembled.
Toyland doesn't directly fall into a special category, but the one game it reminded me of most is actually Lemmings. It consists of different levels that you have to complete to move on to the next. If you quit the game and then start it again, you'll automatically be
back where you were before (at the same level). There is also a password for each level, so you can jump to the right level at once if you reinstall, for example.
The installation utility is IBM's install program which works fine, copying files to the directory you specify and creating an icon on your desktop, just as expected. The only question I have is whether this is really necessary with Toyland since it doesn't really do anything useful. It copies the game files, but you can just as well put them where you want when you unzip toyland.zip. It also creates an icon, but... well... this can be done manually too without much trouble.
Playing the Game
There are different "states" in Toyland, each with a number of levels that have to be completed before you can move on to the next state. In every state there are several objects that work or move in different ways (some are there to help you, others aren't). Somewhere in each level there is a bead lying around, and although the difficulty and difference varies a lot between levels, the object is always the same: collect the bead.
This may sound easy, and in some levels it isn't particularly hard. But beware, some of the later ones can be really challenging.
The States
There are some objects that are the same during the whole game, walls for example. They serve the simple purpose of preventing you from passing through. They cannot be moved, removed or crossed. Other consistent objects are the beads (one per level), and of course you
(Troy).
Hobbes - (Holes or Balls Being Everywhere state) is the first state you will make your acquaintance with. Objects to contend with here are balls, holes, doors water puddles, arrows and keys. Balls can be pushed in any direction until they hit a wall or something else they can't pass. They cannot, however, be dragged so once you've pushed one into a corner it stays there. Balls can be pushed into holes, which allows you to pass over these holes (they can't be passed over otherwise).
Doors and keys are simple: keys open doors. Any key can open any door but each key can only be used once (and you can only "pick up" one key at a time). Water puddles and arrows are interesting; you "slip" over them (provided that there is nothing on the other side of
the puddle or arrow (if this is the case, you come to a halt on the object). Balls can not be pushed over puddles but can be pushed along arrows.
Chess - (Chess Has Everyone Stimulated State) consists mostly of chess pieces that have a bad habit of blocking your way. They have to be removed in one way or another to retrieve the bead. The different chess pieces (there are both black and white) move similarly to how they do in real chess games.
CPU - There is also a third state called CPU (Circuits Press U State), which is only available in the registered version. In this state you have to manipulate different buttons to move LEDs out of your way. Of course, all this is to get access to the precious bead.
Performance
I haven't encountered any problems (bugs) with Toyland, even the later betas were quite stable, although some people have reported sound problems (due to MMOS/2 -- the author reports that a new Sound Blaster driver released late in July may have fixed this problem). I haven't had any trouble with speed either, the game loads fast and runs just fine on my test machine (486 66Mhz, 16mb RAM). I have also tried it on a slightly older machine (386 40Mhz, 8mb RAM), and although the loading times are... well... not as good as they are on a slightly faster computer, performance is acceptable. Toyland supports both 256 and 65k colours, but naturally looks better in 65k.
Other Features
A small disadvantage to this game is that when you make a mistake (you push a ball into a corner, or waste a key or something), you often have to restart the level. The only way to get past this is to do a bit of thinking before you start a level instead of just throwing yourself into the game. There is actually an undo button, which remedies this to a certain point, but unfortunately it only works nine steps back. There is also a quicksave and quickload feature which saves your position in the current level.
An interesting feature of Toyland is the possibility to create your own levels, which after creation can be exported and used by other players (via e-mail!). This importing and exporting is only possible in the registered version (creating your own levels can be done even by unregistered players) but it has the potential to make the game infinitely playable, like level editors did for DOOM.
If you find it boring playing the game alone there is a multiplayer option. You can play with your friends, either competitively (first one who gets the bead wins) or cooperatively (helping each other, it doesn't matter who gets the bead first).
Conclusion
Toyland is shareware and costs US$25 (or 37 DM) to register, which gives you access to more states, more levels (104 total), special "finishing" levels, more game, more Toyland, more fun! On the whole, Toyland isn't perhaps that extraordinary, but it is a good shareware game, well worth its registration.
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* Toyland v1.0
by (http://www.teamos2.org/toyland/) Rainald Menge
download from (ftp://ftp.teamos2.org/pub/shareware/toyland/Toyland.zip) Toyland FTP Site (ZIP, 2.5meg)
Registration: US$25
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(engdahl@algonet.se) Mikael Engdahl has been an OS/2 enthusiast since v2.0. In his spare time, when not studying, he likes playing (OS/2) games.
Wednesday, July 10 was the first day of COMDEX Canada 1996 in Toronto (Canada's largest computer exhibition) and there I was arriving at 2:30 in the afternoon. I asked myself why did I stay at the office so late and why didn't I preregister? I expected the lineups of people waiting to register to spill out onto King Street. Man, the IBM Merlin display was also going to be a zoo.
Well, as it turned out there were no crowds outside the Metro Convention Center, there were no long lineups even inside at the registration desk. I showed my invitation and I was through the maze in no time; I got my pass and I was at the escalator all within 10 minutes. What a change (and a surprise) from the previous years.
As I went up the escalator I could see all the IBM banners hanging from the ceiling, front row and center. I stood at the railing for a second and got my bearings. Yup, IBM along with Lotus were right in the very middle of the Convention Center. "It's show time for Merlin at COMDEX Canada," I thought.
I strolled around one side of the IBM\Lotus display. A number of computer monitors were set up around large columns and of course the first thing I did was to check if OS/2 was on any of these machines. What's this? Windows 95! Well I wasn't totally surprised, after all this was IBM. A few monitors displayed Lotus Notes, Netscape running under Win95 and one machine even had OS/2 Warp v3.0; but no OS/2 Merlin.
I had to ask one of the friendly attendants if there was any display set up for Merlin. "Sure thing!", he replied with a rather cheery tone, "Right around here." He lead me around a column of monitors and behind an indoor fig tree and there it was, a monitor displaying Merlin. "This is it?" I asked him. "This is the Merlin display?"
"Well, we never decided to enter COMDEX until two weeks ago," he replied. He pointed out a couple of picnic tables with two monitors on each and told me that they were also running OS/2 but with WebExplorer locked on top. I checked it out. Yes they had WebExplorer running, but in VGA. Thrilling display. Well back to Merlin.
I stood back and looked at the setup. If I had not told the attendant I was looking for Merlin or I did not know what I was looking for I surely would have just walked by. Here was IBM's beta release of the best PC operating system going and it was being displayed at the back side of a column behind a fig tree. You surely would have thought IBM would have had Merlin in a more prominent position. At least an arrow hanging from the ceiling saying, "This way to see OS/2 Merlin!"
The display of Merlin was being demonstrated by a very friendly attendant. She was walking one gentleman through the voice recognition. The man stated he had never used OS/2 before and commented on its attractive interface. "This is deadly," he kept repeating, obviously commenting about voice recognition. This guy was impressed. Next to the PC was an IBM ThinkPad, also with Merlin. The attendant was also showing off voice recognition and OS/2's other new features.
Of course a few Microsoft users came by and had to toss in their views. "Looks just like Windows 95," I heard more than a few times. "IBM is just trying to copy Microsoft," was also a regular comment. A few of them did have a closer look at it though. When they did get to watch and interact with Merlin they nodded their heads in approval. Some even told me that they were considering a move to OS/2 with all their disappointment in Win95 and the long wait for a real OS (NT).
After an hour of hanging around IBM, it was time for a break so I strolled around the show. It was very obvious that there were not the big crowds of recent years. There was also a different tone to the whole show. Everyone's display area seemed to be a lot smaller, especially Apple's. A lot of vendors decided to team up with others. Even Microsoft and Windows World seemed subdued; no Windows 96 to go ga-ga over this year. (Thanks to the Computer gods for saving us.) There seemed to be as many people in shorts and T-shirts as people in business attire. Time to go back to the IBM display and have a peek at Lotus.
No one at Lotus had anything to say about the upcoming SmartSuite components. One person manning the booth said he had heard of some things under development but that was all he knew.
There was still a steady stream of people at the Merlin site. I had to wonder what it would have been like if OS/2 Merlin was properly displayed out front as it deserved. The people who did see it were left with a good impression.
It was then time to head downstairs and to visit my friends in the Team OS/2 Center. Of course they had all been out doing their famous installations clad in their equally famous salmon pink shirts. There's always enthusiasm when you're in room full of Teamers.
Randy Busch from TrueSpectra, a new OS/2 ISV had dropped by and left a stack of beautiful full-colour glossy pamphlets about their new product, Photo>Graphics, a new image editing and effects software for OS/2. This product will be released by the time you read this in retail stores across Canada and the States. Everyone was abuzz about the release price of just $49.95 (Canadian!) for a limited time (but only in Canada, I'm afraid).
It was now 6:00 o'clock and time to head back to the office. I could not help but wonder why IBM Canada didn't put a bit more effort into their presentation of OS/2 Merlin. The people manning the display were more than helpful in their efforts, the product certainly speaks for itself and there is a definite interest or at least a strong curiosity in Merlin. But why do IBM and Lotus take such a ho-hum attitude towards it? At least it was uplifting to see that ISV's such as TrueSpectra and others are still developing new, exciting applications.
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Besides being a general nice guy and OS/2 Crusader, Bryan Sarty is Product and Dealer Manager for (http://www.hotinc.com/) House Of Technology (HOT) Inc., Canada's OS/2 application distributor.
Visit Indelible Blue's Web Page - (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/)
Indelible Blue is a mail order reseller specializing in state-of-the-art
OS/2 software and hardware solutions for corporations and individuals.
Corporate volume discounts available.
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How to InJoy a Longer Lasting Connection - by Jon Winters
Nine months ago I was at work and getting very tired of long FTP sessions when I decided I wanted to take my work home in the evenings. I asked my System Administrator to allow me to set up an FTP daemon on my work computer so that I could FTP to it from home. For security reasons my request was turned down. Since I could not FTP to the computer on my desk at work I figured it would be easy to set up an FTP daemon at home. And hey, a web server would be cool too!
So I searched the 'net for inexpensive FTP and Web servers. Surprisingly, at that time, there were none for Windows (there are now). There were many for Linux and (http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/DLM/HTTPDforOS2.html) several for OS/2 though. That combined with a day with an astounding thirteen General Protection Faults convinced me that Windows would not be stable enough to do what I wanted. Since I did not want to administer a Linux box, my mind was made up. Off to the store to pick up a copy of OS/2!
Installing and Learning OS/2 was easy and I soon chose (http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/goserve/) Goserve for my web server. (It was written in REXX by the fellow who wrote REXX itself, Michael F. Cowlishaw.) Since REXX is OS2's native language, performance was great. It was also free software through IBM's employee written software program. Next, I found a very nice Shareware FTP daemon called (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/catalog/penftpd.html) Penguin FTPd. Then the real fun began... I had to automate and stabilize my computer at home to take care of itself.
We have HP-UX 9000 UNIX workstations at work and those computers are rock solid; they just do not crash. Actually, one of them crashed once and it drew a crowd in the programmers pit because nobody there had ever seen this happen. Of course the problem was between the keyboard and the seat but I'm drifting off topic. It became my goal to get my computer at home to be as stable as the UNIX machines at work. I was on a mission!
My Computer, now dubbed Obscura, would need to totally take care of itself and maintain a connection 24 hours a day. Automation was needed for everything.
On boot Obscura must...
o Connect to the Internet.
o Launch a Web server.
o Launch an FTP daemon.
o Monitor the connection and re-dial if it drops.
o In the event of a trap or crash, automatically log the error and reboot.
My first attempts at automation were identical to Trevor Smith's solution in last month's article on automatically retrieving Usenet news late at night. I noticed that the command line dialer used a lot less resources than DOIP and was faster when connecting.
However, I quickly learned that the demands of a 24 hour connection presented a few other problems that called for more functionality. On occasion my connection would get dropped and I found myself taking an early lunch to blast home and reconnect. This solution was clearly not going to work. I started searching for a dialer that would reconnect a dropped connection automatically. At that time, there were two dialers in beta testing that would reconnect automatically. Not wanting to waste resources I chose (http://www.belle.dk/~bj/dialer.html) InJoy because it was a text mode application.
InJoy is still under development and the author, (bj@belle.dk) Bjarne Jensen, is a great guy. I wrote him to see how InJoy was working for his other beta testers and to make a few suggestions on features that would make my life easier. Bjarne was very helpful and he added my ideas to his wish list for possible development. Shortly after, most of what I asked for was incorporated into the next InJoy release!
Here is how Obscura is now set up to automatically take care of itself:
If for some reason the power goes off or in the rare event of a trap error Obscura is set to log the trap error to a file and run CHKDSK on all of the HPFS partitions. CHKDSK also fixes any errors. (I used a great little utility called CNFGINFO to learn how to do this in my config.sys; CNFGINFO actually teaches you the meaning of almost every line in your config.sys! It is freeware and can be found on Hobbes.)
After checking the drives Obscura sets up the SIO comm drivers and finishes booting. The startup folder launches Goserve, which waits for a connection to be established. The startup folder launches InJoy too.
InJoy is set to dial automatically when launched. In the unlikely event of a busy signal InJoy will re-dial. It has never happened but if InJoy hit 99 busy signals it will revert to the backup number and dial my pager. InJoy will also re-dial if there is no answer.
InJoy is lightning fast on the negotiation phase once my service provider's computer answers. PPP is up in less than two seconds. InJoy then launches the Penguin FTP daemon and life is good. Sometimes a nearby lightning strike will cause my connection to drop
and InJoy will kill the FTP daemon, reconnect and restart Penguin in less than a minute. No kidding, the reconnect speed is amazing!
Obscura is now the home of the InJoy world wide announcement server. I donated the space because InJoy had been such a great help in automating everything for me. Now, every InJoy user who has activated the ticker feature sees announcements (from Obscura!) upon connecting.
A nice fringe benefit of this is that the extra activity keeps me from getting dropped when the web serer is not very busy!
I use Obscura for everything -- the Web server, FTP server, HTML development, digital imaging, web surfing, games -- it does it all! OS/2 is living up to the challenge and I have 99+% up time. In fact the longest I have ever been down is 5 hours when I needed to reinstall OS/2 due to a corrupted desktop.
Oh, one other tool I added to fine tune things is ScheduPerformance's (http://www.prioritymaster.com/) Priority Master II. I am running Goserve under Priority Master II now in a time critical priority 1 OS/2 window. Prioritizing Goserve bumps up its importance above all other programs. Requests for web pages used to stabilize around 2.21 seconds after a day or so of operation, now Goserve takes only an amazing .02 seconds to serve a web page. The only bottleneck is my modem.
IBM has a strong (http://www.ibm.com/NetworkComputing/) commitment to the Internet, and with little investment OS/2 users can achieve performance and reliability equivalent to very expensive UNIX workstations. Fantastic programs like InJoy, Goserve, Priority Master II and Penguin FTPd automate things so you have time to InJoy (grin) what ever it is that makes you happy!
Two 540mb IDE drives formatted with 8 hpfs partitions
USRobotics Modems (both ends)
Extra telephone line from Southwestern Bell
Diamond speedstar pro svga card w/1meg vram
Sceptre color monitor
Gravis Ultrasound MAX sound card w/1meg dram
Mirantz 250Watt "quad" stereo amplifier
Sanyo loudspeakers
Sony Tuner
Acoustic Research headphones and microphone
Mini Tower Case with real cool stickers!
-----
Jon Winters is the owner and operator of (http://dial131.concom.com/) Obscura! With the help of a few good friends he is up to all kinds of mischief on the web.
---Our Sponsor: SPG (http://www.spg-net.com/)---
***********************************
Nethead's Nook - by Brandon Fesler
WHAM!
ZAP! KABOOM!
POW!
You filthy rotten furry spaghetti-o eating Drengen fiend! Here comes a big shiny plasma bolt right were it counts!!! ZZZZT!!!!
Hope you didn't want to continue your race!
Now, you too, Empire, shall feel the fires of my...
Uh, hi!
I didn't expect you to come in here so soon... ahhh... uhhh... let me turn this game off.
I suppose you'd like to see what I've written especially for you this month. Well, it's a looney chunk of cheese, guaranteed to be the absolute last thing you'd want to read.
Here it comes, get ready.
The Press Release
Hi there, my name is Suxupto Beegee.
There's a little misunderstanding between you and me.
People ask me why I write down about OS/2.
It's because of the lack of support from good ol' Big Blue.
I know you want to say that isn't true.
Well, here's an example I'll give to you.
I used to write good articles about IBM's stuff.
But then I found their "thank you's" weren't quite enough.
I wrote a good line about the new Plug and Play.
I'm driving a Porsche around the very next day!
Then when I raved about that obsolete goat?
Check out my new electric blue 20-foot boat.
Yep, press life has really been good to me,
As long as I support the stagnating monopoly.
What about truth? Well, listen here honey.
You readers don't pay me nothing in money.
So if you want the truth, go find it yourself!
I'm far too busy, I've got monopoly to sell.
Response
(NetHead's formal, well articulated response to Mr. Beegee, in terse format)
Thpppppppppppppt!!!
Comment on the News
The OS/2 Warp Teleseminar III has been delayed until later this summer, apparently due to the huge response received by the Merlin beta. Reports are now coming in that IBM turned over the teleseminar to its marketing department, which has decided that "for the best interests of everyone involved" it will now be held on a Monday at 3 AM.
The Joke of the Month
Q. When will IBM fix the Single Input Queue?
A. When the machine the code is located on stops locking up.
A Thought
The Chinese phrase for satire literally means "humor with knives". I hope when you read these articles that you get the true point. You don't change the things that are wrong unless you address them. Satire does a great job of the addressing, but it is up to you, me, and especially IBM to solve the problem of OS/2 being the Rodney Dangerfield of operating systems.
-----
(nethead@okc.oklahoma.net) NetHead is a working stiff who uses OS/2 for his home PC. He plans to get his Internet provider to give him CGI access soon so he can post his home page. Stay tuned.
The Chronicles of John Ominor - by John Ominor, The Inhuman
I am John Ominor, truly, The Inhuman of legend. It seems that operating system wars stand poised to begin anew. According to at least one publication that has experienced periodic bouts of misjudgment, OS/2 v4.0, or "Merlin" as mortals are wont to call it, will forego a second beta in an attempt to become available at the end of August. Many other sources believe that the Holy Grail of WebBrowsers, namely Netscape, will be included in this package. Standing firm against this Holy Pair is Windows NT 4.0, truly, the mightiest opponent never to prove itself. The ripples of the coming siege begin to manifest themselves...
Is it not interesting that the two Windows 95 advocates who currently lead the battle against OS/2 in the comp.os.os2.advocacy group, namely, The self-styled Truthman and a more recent arrival who believes that Windows 95 will be the entertainment gaming platform of the future are growing ever more vocal of late? Is it not more interesting that these two find themselves so deep into OS/2 held territory that they are readers of OS/2 e-Zine!, itself?
Why?
Why do this self-proclaimed Windows 95 enthusiast and gamester feel the need to read OS/2 e-Zine!, rather than engage in gaining even more knowledge at a Windows 95 site?
Why does The Truthman send Ominor, via the earthly medium of electronic mail, the last entry recorded in Ominor's Chronicles? While The Truthman should be grateful that The Inhuman restored him fully, after their last... (http://www.mnsinc.com/dmccoy/calvacade/calvacade.htm) encounter, this desire to pursue Ominor to the halls of OS/2 e-Zine! in order to express his gratitude is... unique, to say the least.
What could possibly cause such concern in the face of the oncoming Windows NT juggernaut, a product destined to change the way one uses one's computer? Only Ominor knows for sure, yet, even a mortal may make a reasonable presupposition. Doubtless, it is a credit to the efforts of Servitor Trevor Smith that his magazine attracts the most vocal advocates of Windows 95 to his forum.
And what of OS/2 Independent Software Vendors? "How well fare thee?" asks Ominor. Very well, indeed.
The Inhuman must say, he is impressed by the commitment to excellence and technical support displayed by two of OS/2 Warp's Independent Software Vendors. First, John Ominor has decided to test an application whose importance has seemingly declined in this age of ever growing permanent storage media. Ominor is, of course, speaking of ZipStream v1.20 from Carbon Based Software.
ZipStream is an installable file system that mirrors access to your existing OS/2 file systems while providing automatic transparent file compression and decompression. Ominor is sure that even the most feeble of mind are familiar with the basic concept due to the high visibility of software such as PKZip, Stacker, DCF/2, and InfoZip's Zip/Unzip utilities.
The Inhuman is satisfied with the elegance of ZipStream. First and foremost is its flexibility. Since ZipStream compresses on a file by file basis, as opposed to placing all files in a large hidden volume, it allows one to place compressed and uncompressed files on the same partition. Truly innovative. John Ominor will refrain from a more detailed analysis of ZipStream in order to concentrate on the reason why Ominor has honored Carbon Based Software in such an unorthodox manner.
The Inhuman is very impressed by the customer support exhibited by the makers of ZipStream. Ominor has been engaged in a series of electronic mail correspondences with Carbon Based Software in order to test their knowledge of their product. Ominor expected Carbon Based Software's awareness of their product to be eclipsed by The Inhuman's own matchless omniscience and He was not disappointed, yet, Ominor found them competent.
Carbon Based Software answered all The Inhuman's questions correctly and gave The Inhuman notice of future design issues with OS/2 Merlin. In addition, when Ominor discovered a problem with ZipStream (a small one, to be sure), Carbon Based Software provided a fix within twenty-four hours. Of course, John Ominor is The Inhuman, yet even lesser beings would most likely get comparable service.
The next Independent Software Vendor to gain Ominor's favor is Joel Krautheim of SPG. Ominor has made it no secret that the excellent demonstration version of ColorWorks v1+ aided The Inhuman in creating FORTRESS Ominor, and will play an even more important role in the third incarnation of The FORTRESS. The Inhuman has found Servitor Joel Krautheim to be responsive and respects the Servitor's willingness to defend his product. Ominor is also pleased by this Servitor's willingness to interact with his customers.
Finally, once again, a fortunate Servitor has been allowed the honor of supplying The Inhuman with some bit of property purchased via the Internet. Ominor is pleased that all his on-line transactions have concluded in such a satisfactory manner. Add to this the number of personal web pages comparable to the (http://www.ibm.co.at/boepa/cw/) ColorWorks Power Page which are aiding OS/2 Neophytes in the use of OS/2 and its applications, and one will notice a most exceptional trend.
So? What does this mean? What is this trend? Let us review...
Windows advocates continue to feel the need to disparage OS/2 despite its so-called imminent death.
OS/2 Independent Software Vendors continue not only to survive, but to thrive, expand, and provide hands on service.
OS/2 user-originated support continues to broaden and expand.
Most importantly, John Ominor, The Inhuman continues to support OS/2.
You may draw your own conclusions. May they match those of The Inhuman.
-----
The origins and current plans of (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor are known only to (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor. He is indeed a mystery to all. Save The Inhuman.
---Our Sponsor: Best of OS/2 (http://www.bestofos2.com/)---
***********************************
July's Top Selling Commercial Applications
Note: The following list represents only the top selling OS/2 applications. OS/2 Warp and OS/2 Warp Connect are not included in the rankings.
This Month Last Month Product Company
1 2 Hobbes CDROM Archive Walnut Creek
2 3 Partition Magic v2 Personal Ed. PowerQuest
3 10 Faxworks Pro v2.0 Global Village
4 -- IBM AntiVirus v2.4 Desktop Ed. IBM
5 4 Backmaster v2.0 MSR Development
6 -- Unimaint v5.0 SofTouch Systems
7 7 Object Desktop Stardock Systems
8 6 System Commander v2.2 V Communications
9 5 BackAgain/2 v4.0 Prof. Ed. Comp. Data Strat.
10 8 GammaTech Utilities SofTouch Systems
-----
Compiled by (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue, Inc. - Your Single Source for OS/2 Solutions.
---Our Sponsor: BMT Micro (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/)---
***********************************
July's Top Selling Shareware
This Month Last Month Product Company
1 1 PMMail SouthSide Software
2 2 Xit CodeSmith Software
3 3 PMView Peter Neilsen
4 6 NeoLogic Network Suite NeoLogic
5 -- InJoy Bjarne Jensen
6 5 ScreenSaver Siegfried Hanish
7 4 iLink/2 Mental Static
8 7 WebExplorer Organizer ONG Software
9 8 MR/2 ICE Nick Knight
10 -- PM Patrol Wallyware
-----
This list is compiled by (http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/) BMT Micro - Your Source for Over 100 Quality OS/2 Shareware Applications.
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Our Sponsors:
(http://www.bestofos2.com/) Best of OS/2
Your complete OS/2 resource centre. News, demos, catalog of over 150 software products, daily Hobbes Report and links to numerous sites.
(http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro/) BMT Micro
Your complete source for over 100 of the best OS/2 shareware applications available. Drop by today and check out our WWW catalog or download the .INF version.
(http://www.ChipChat.com/home00.html) ChipChat Technology Group
ChipChat produces excellent 32-bit OS/2 software for wireless text paging
and state-of-the-art multimedia Sound Cards for Micro Channel PS/2 computers.
Defend against desktop freezes with Ctrl-Alt-Del Commander and create online documents/help with the IPF Editor.
(http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) Post Road Mailer
The Post Road Mailer is a high performance, 32-bit, email program with drag and drop filing, printing, shredding, word wrap and multiple MIME attachments.
(http://www.prominic.com/) Prominic Technologies
Software developer and IBM PC VAR preloading OS/2 Warp. Expert staff provides advice on hardware and creates custom software.
(http://www.prioritymaster.com/) ScheduPerformance, Inc.
Dramatically improve performance on your OS/2 system now with the patented priority scanning logic and visual priority identification of Priority Master II.
Providers of lifetime warrantied name brand simms, laptop and printer memory at competitive prices.
(http://www.spg-net.com/) SPG Inc.
Creators of ColorWorks for OS/2 - The Artist's Ultimate Power Program! ColorWorks has earned both the 1995 OS/2 Magazine Editor's Choice & the 1995 OS/2 Professional Magazine Best New Product Awards.
(http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) Surf'nRexx
Use REXX to build powerful Internet utilities using our DLLs. Package also includes 10 utilities as samples.
***********************************
Coming up next time - on the Web August 31, 1996
*Feature
Compilers It's back to school time and all you amateurs and professionals will be looking for the latest and greatest in C/C++ compilers. We look over the offerings from the big players in the OS/2 industry.
*Reviews
HyperWise IBM's WYSIWYG editor for INF, HLP and HTML files promises to make the world a better place for documentation professionals. We see if it lives up to its claims.
IPF Editor Perez Computing also thinks they can make your documentation editing and creation an easy task. Do they succeed? We'll let you know next month!
UniMaint SofTouch is on the upgrade warpath lately and they're not stopping until they're done! Next month we'll take a look at their latest offering of UniMaint and what it can do for you.
Photo>Graphics A Canadian company by the name of TrueSpectra is hoping to set the world on fire with their snazzy new OS/2 image editing/creation/etc. application. Our resident professional artist, Christopher B. Wright, takes a look and gives us his impressions.
Avarice! The final saga is finally here!! You aren't the only user who has waited what seems like an eternity for this sequel the the beta/preview released by Stardock and Continuous Software Systems oh-so-long ago. We finally get a look at the finished product.
