We at Softdisk Publishing are always looking for ways to make our software better. When we publish a program on an issue of ON DISK MONTHLY, that's usually not the end of it; we're always looking back at our old material to see what can be improved. This gives long-time ODM readers "upgrades" to their old favorites, while introducing new readers to programs that are even better this time around.
DOS Manager, our multi-purpose disk utility, was an obvious choice for this revamping. Here at Softdisk we find DOS Manager to be handy for a wide variety of daily tasks. In fact, I'm using it to edit this file right now!
DOS Manager version 3.0 continues the evolution of this program by adding many valuable features. Now you can display several popular graphic file formats: GIF, PCX, LBM/IFF, Windows BMP, Print Shop (Old and New), and PrintMaster. This is done in a manner that is transparent to the user; all you have to do is move the cursor to the file you want to see and press <Enter>, and DOS Manager takes care of determining what file type it is and viewing it appropriately. Combined with the other file formats DOS Manager will let you view, such as text files, binary files, ARC, ARJ, LZH, ZIP, and ZOO archives, self-extracting archives (archives that have been converted into an executable .EXE file), Lotus or Quattro spreadsheets, and DBF-format databases, DOS Manager gives you a quick and easy way to see what's on your disks. You can even take a quick look at all the files in a directory by pressing the "+" key to mark them all, then pressing Ctrl-Enter to view them; the space bar will move, rapid-fire, from one file to the next. Seeing all your files has never been easier!
Once you have seen what files you have, you can use DOS Manager to copy, move, or delete them, with a friendly interface that permits you to mark the files you want to act on, and choose their destination through a scrolling directory tree. A new feature in DOS Manager 3.0 is the ability to turn on and off the powerful Hidden and Read-Only file attributes, letting you make files invisible or unchangeable (or undo such settings created by other programs). This gives you more power over the files on your PC.
DOS Manager also functions as a disk menu program, allowing you to run any programs, including .EXE, .COM, and .BAT files. DOS Manager will swap itself out to disk or extended memory, then come back right where you left it when you exit the program.
The user interface has been improved and cleaned up considerably from the earlier version. You'll find that the screens are fully mouseable, with "inversed" prompts serving as mouse buttons. File marks stay put even when the directory is re-loaded (after a switch from sorted to unsorted mode, for instance), and you can keep files marked after a copy command to allow you to copy the same files to several different disks. And the usual pitfalls of copying to floppy drives, such as full and write-protected disks, are handled more gracefully, with informative dialog boxes that give you a choice of aborting the copy or remedying the condition and continuing right where you left off, even in the middle of a subdirectory. There are many other improvements, too numerous to mention, each of which may be fairly minor, but which add up to a general increase in quality and usefulness for DOS Manager. For example, the help screens are all printable, and the text viewer has a direct hot key to go into the text editor with the current file. This key (F7) is the same key used to invoke the editor from the main screen; this consistency of interface makes the powerful keyboard commands in this program easier to learn. However, there is also a mouse-based pull-down menu giving you access to DOS Manager's many features.
If you're using DOS Manager 2.0, make the upgrade now. If you haven't used DOS Manager before, try it; you'll never want to go back to the "naked" DOS prompt again!
