[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 at http://www.haligonian.com/os2/ or zipped for off-line reading.  For best reading of this ASCII version of OS/2 e-Zine!, use a text editor at full-screen width.]


OS/2 e-Zine!		January  1997			volume 2, number 1
----------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1997		Haligonian Media  		ISSN 1203-5696


OPINIONS:

  From the Editor
  Chris' Rant
  the Rave
  	... EBCScheduler v0.9
  Packaging 101


DEPARTMENTS:

  the Beta File
  Answers from e-Zine!
  Chris' ColorWorks Power Tips
  Object Desktop Tips
  Need for Speed
  the REXX Files
  How Do I?


UP FRONT:

Hardware Reviews
  Editor's Note		MCA Pentium 133		Indelible Blue Einstein


SPECIAL FEATURE:

First Annual OS/2 e-Zine! Readers' Choice Awards Voting Form


REVIEWS:					

MOD Players Revisited				Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for OS/2
MD+F Special Effects for ColorWorks		Family Tree v1.1b
Another View of Archivers			Type/2 v1.2
BackAgain/2 Pro v4 Bundle			Partition Magic v3.0


ARTICLES:

* Internet World Expo Fall 96 Report - Jon Winters
    Jon visited one of the biggest Internet shows in North America this month,
    looking for Warp news... 

* REXX Reference Summary Handbook - Dr. Dirk Terrell
    Our REXX expert looks at the new edition of this old favourite by the REXX
    expert, Dick Goran. 

* Warp Server SMP in the Real World - Chris Williams
    We all know Warp and Warp Server are better than the competition, but in the
    real world, the results can be amazing... 


END NOTES:

* The Chronicles of John Ominor
* Hot Sellers - the top 15 selling OS/2 commercial applications.
* Hot Sellers - 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 1997   -   Haligonian Media
ISSN 1203-5696

***********************************

New Years and Bright Futures

-----

Happy New Year and welcome back!

Before you ask (because everyone has been), let me assure you that the recent change in our publication dates from the 1st of each month to the 16th is not an indication of anything negative (hey, we're still here aren't we?).  Everyone at Haligonian Media remains as committed to OS/2 and OS/2 e-Zine! as we have always been.  Nothing sinister is going on in our back rooms, no dallying in the forbidden arts of Win32, no visits from Redmond executives with suitcases full of money, no dimming of the torch.

We intend to continue what we started way back in 1995: publishing the absolute best OS/2 reading anywhere, once a month, every month.

If you are worried that new issues coming out on the 16th might be harder for you to keep track of than when they appeared at the beginning of each month, why not take advantage of our free subscription service (see below!).  We'll be happy to keep you notified every time a new issue of OS/2 e-Zine! is released.  Past subscribers to this service were among the first to hear news of our surprise Christmas Special late last month--our way of saying thanks to you, our readers, by the way--so don't delay!  Be the first on your block!  Sign up now and receive a free automated reply message!

Ahem.  Sorry about that.

Remember, regardless of whether you decide to register with our notification service, you will always be able to find and read every issue of OS/2 e-Zine! right here on the WWW, free of charge.  We have built our publication on the old fashioned Internet belief of free access to information for users.  Our publication dates may change but that will not.

Moving right along, if you are using Netscape Navigator, you may also notice that our magazine is beginning to take advantage of some of the features of that browser such as animated GIFs to name but one.  In fact, this is the very first issue that we tested primarily in Navigator instead of WebEx.  But we tested it extensively in WebExplorer too.

Because many of our readers have written with concerns that we will forsake good old WebExplorer, let me reassure you all that we will not.  While frames and Java are certainly exciting features to work with, we still believe that the purpose of our magazine is to provide readers with content, not force readers to switch browsers.  Even if you choose to use WebExplorer you may still see some of the many improvements we have been making to e-Zine! lately.  More importantly, none of the Netscape-centric "improvements" will actually degrade e-Zine! 's appearance in WebEx.

Many people seem to think that just adding frames and a dancing mascot to their web page somehow makes it better.  We will continue to focus on content first, then tasteful and backwards compatible use of Navigator features second.  As long as a significant portion of our readers are using WebEx or a similar browser we will not forsake them.

So what are we doing to improve our content?  Plenty!

A new year brings exciting new opportunities to expand the world's favourite electronic OS/2 publication and we're eager to get going!  First, as you will notice from our table of contents this month, we have listened to what is probably our readers' most common suggestion and expanded our reviews to cover hardware as well as software!  Throughout this year we will be taking a look at computers, tape backups and many other toys and tools that are OS/2 compatible.

You will also notice from our table of contents, a link to the voting form for our first annual OS/2 e-Zine! Readers' Choice Awards.  All year you've sat at the other end of this electronic connection and listened to us rant and rave about various products.  This is your chance to let us know what you thought about those applications.  The Readers' Choice Awards are just that--your opinions on what OS/2 products deserves special recognition for outstanding achievement.

Please take a minute to fill in the ballot and make sure you tell every OS/2 user you know that we want their opinion.  Of course, the voting results will be published in our very next issue, so get your vote in now before it's too late!  (Please, one vote per person per category.)

See you next month...

***********************************

Corporate Sponsors of OS/2 e-Zine!:

(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.bmtmicro.com/) BMT Micro
Your complete source for over 175 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/os2ezine) 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.

(http://www.emtec.com/) EmTec Innovative Software
EmTec Innovative Software produces state-of-the-art OS/2 ISDN, modem
and telnet communications software.  OS/2 Magazine and Inside OS/2 1995
award winner.

(http://www.hotinc.com/) House of Technology, Inc.
Your Canadian Source For OS/2 Applications.

(http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue
Indelible Blue, a mail order company, provides OS/2 software and hardware solutions to customers worldwide.

(http://www.os2store.com/) J3 Computer Technologies
Serving the Global OS/2 Community, large and small!

(http://www.kssystems.com/) K&S Systems
IBM BesTEAM, NT, and Vinca certified consultants provide HW/SW products, installation, configuration, staging, support, and Web Site Design.

(http://www.kellergroup.com/) Keller Group Inc.
Developers of FaxWorks for OS/2 and PMfax, the fax and voice solution for OS/2, with versions for stand-alone, LAN and Internet Faxing.

(http://nick.secant.com/mr2ice.htm) MR/2 ICE Internet Email Client
Delivering the electronic mail features of the future, today.  A product of Knightware Software Company.

(http://www.Mount-Baker.com/) Mt. Baker Software
Developers of Money Tree, a full featured personal financial package for OS/2.

(http://prairie.lakes.com/~oberon/) Oberon Software, Inc.
Home of TE/2, TE/2 Pro and other fine OS/2 programs.  Specializing in telecommunications and the Internet.

(http://www.pcs-soft.com/) Perez Computing Services
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.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.

(http://www.cfw.com/~shenan/) Shenandoah Equipment Co.
Providers of lifetime warrantied name brand simms, laptop and printer memory at competitive prices.

(http://www.softouch.com) SofTouch Systems, Inc.
Home of the bestselling set of disk and desktop maintenance products for 
OS/2: GammaTech Utilities, UniMaint, and FileStar/2!  ---- Your System's Safe 
and Sound with SofTouch Around

(http://www.stardock.com/) Stardock Systems
Providing quality software for the home and office.

(http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) Surf'nRexx
Use REXX to build powerful Internet utilities using our DLLs.  Package also includes 10 utilities as samples.

***********************************

Chris' Rant	- by Chris Wenham

-----

The 1996 Egg-In-The-Face Awards

What a pity there are so many people whose mouths are bigger than their brains.  There ain't a shovel in the world big enough to move all the BS heard in 1996.  Here then, is my list of idiots, twits, wallies and jesters who, tongues-a-waggin', just might be able to lick the egg from their faces before they double-over and do the insert-foot-in-mouth routine all over again for '97.

In the beginning, PC Magazine columnist Bill Howard predicted "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN".... (cough) oops, sorry, I mean he said (http://www.pcmag.com/archive/content/1501/web_txt/pcmg0061.htm) "IBM's OS/2 packs it in."  To him we send one large egg along with a framed 1996 calendar that has the date September 25th circled in bright red marker (darts not included, sorry Mr. Howard).  I notice he didn't make the same mistake for '97.  (Then again, he predicts that businesses will dump Win 3.1 and shell out for Windows NT on Pentium Pro desktops instead of Windows 95. <splutter, chortle, guffaw>.)  Is PC Magazine going to keep up their yellow (journalism) streak of "OS/2 is dead" messages?  $10 says Jim Seymour will belly up to this bar soon ("Norm!")

A sad farewell to (http://techweb.cmp.com/iw/573/73uwtb.htm) Tibbets and Bernstein, we'll miss you too!  (Well... no... not really.)  Just like Ann Landers felt it was her duty to tell her readers that she'd divorced her husband, we feel obligated to tell you this: An operating system does not seek a lawyer if you decide to dual-boot.  One volley of Hen Grenades as pun-ishment for using such a ridiculous analogy.

(http://www.ifi-mpls.com/os2pro/index.html) OS/2 Professional Magazine.  An omen that another major print OS/2 publication was about to follow their lead and cease business.  Well, I never read it myself but after taking a short trip to their web site I can see that I didn't miss that much after all.  It's sad that all the major US print OS/2 magazines have closed, but with electronic magazines like e-Zine!, Warp Online, OS/2 Computing! and others, maybe it's not as bad as some think.  I don't think OS/2 Professional's failure was due so much to IBM's supposed lack of commitment as it was to the editorial staff's sour apples opinion pieces.  A double-helping of yolk for these guys, and oh... if anyone out there would like to send me your old issues of OS/2 Professional I have a place set aside at home just for them.  To paraphrase the always witty Samuel Johnson, sir, your magazine is before me now... soon it will be behind me.

And who could leave out Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates III, who in a (http://www.businessweek.com/1996/50/b35051.htm) BusinessWeek article pooh-poohed the idea of IBM doing well with Lotus or Java.  I guess time will tell, Mr. Gates.  Do you think Microsoft will be able to deliver more overhyped, poorly engineered products that tack on a load of pretty pictures, animations and sounds that add zero productivity benefit but make users think the product must be better than it actually is?  ''They have an absolutely perfect track record on software,'' Wenham says sarcastically.  Lets make this egg a hard boiled one.

I think I should just as well offer the whole bloody farm to PC Week who, in their (http://www.pcweek.com/sr/1216/16tech.html) 1996's technical disappointments article, temporarily forget that it was a story about technical failures and instead use it as a forum to whip Warp's performance from a marketing perspective.  Notice also that they dismiss the tight VoiceType dictation and navigation in a manner so cavalier you'd think it was trivial.  Well, the first PC operating system with fully integrated voice navigation was also the first commercial operating system in the world that had Java fully integrated too.  Any mention of that in their technical article?  Nooo.  So here's a joke: How many PC Week journalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  Only one, if he puts the right spin on it.

Which brings me to the last recipient of the Egg-on-your-face awards.  This one goes to the rather brash OS/2 journalist who last month came off sounding like the authority on (http://www.haligonian.com/os2/v1n14/modplyrs.htm) MOD players, but actually goofed in several places including leaving one major OS/2 MOD player out of the review entirely.  He actually had Muse/2 ready to review but left it out because it didn't work when he tested it.  It turns out that the turkey only tested one file during the rush to meet the deadline, and it just happened to be one of the few files that Muse/2 does crash on.  To my readers who put up with such drivel, I apologize.  I made up for it this month.  Oh, and on a leaving note, I do not have a Gravis Ultrasound but I'm sure UltiMOD works wonders with one anyway.

Keep your ears and eyes peeled for more candidates next year, because it's my sole prediction that I'll have no trouble at all writing this column again in 1998. There's just too much material to work with.

---

(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.

***********************************

the Rave: EBCScheduler v0.9

-----

There are many great OS/2 products worth raving about but possibly the most worthy are those that take advantage of OS/2's unique strengths.  These need not always be massive multipurpose mega-suites and, in fact, rarely are.  A much better example of the beauty and power of OS/2 is the mini-application or, more accurately, the WPS enhancement--the software that doesn't try to be a whole new program, but instead makes the familiar OS/2 even more usable by adding functionality to it.

Some familiar examples of this type of application are Object Desktop and NPS WPS to name just a few.  A not so familiar example, however, may be EBCScheduler v0.9, an absolutely magical WPS enhancement written by Earl B. Crowder which is currently free of charge but would be a bargain at any price!

Scheduling programs are not unique to OS/2 and EBCScheduler is not even unique in the OS/2 world.  There are many schedulers available for Warp, from VXREXX based utilities to WPS enhancements similar in function to EBCScheduler.  I know this because I have been testing out various schedulers for many months now, looking for the one that is just right.  Until now I had not found one that was simple, unobtrusive and inexpensive enough (and that would run in Warp 4) to satisfy me.  Then I found EBCScheduler.

As I mentioned, this little piece of magic works as a WPS enhancement, modifying the base WPProgram class of the WPS.  What this means to you is that you practically don't have to read any instructions to start using it.

EBCScheduler adds a new "Schedule" tab to the notebook of every program object on your system.  (Optionally you can choose not to enhance your default program objects, instead installing a new class of "EBCScheduler objects" to allow you to schedule events, but there seems no reason to choose this option.  Modifying the base WPProgram class on my system had no discernible adverse effects.)

With this "Schedule" tab, you can easily and intuitively schedule any program object to run at any time of any day with a fair amount of flexibility for regularly or irregularly recurring tasks.  It couldn't be simpler!

Installation of this marvel is as efficient as its operation is.  The "program" consists of one file (a DLL) which is installed (registered actually) by a simple command line executable.  Deinstallation can be accomplished by the same executable.  For a work in progress by a lone programmer, EBCScheduler is awfully well thought out and easy to use.

But the really amazing thing about EBCScheduler is that is just works.  There is no "monitoring program" that needs to be run in your Startup folder, no central list of all the objects you've scheduled to run, it just works.  In fact, there is no evident indication that your system is doing anything.  But as soon as you set an object to be "scheduled" and close its properties notebook, bam! it springs to life at the specified time.

This is how software should work!

Again, EBCScheduler is a work in progress.  There are still a few rough edges to the software and users with more demanding scheduling needs might not be satisfied by the lack of a logging feature or a central listing of all objects on the system scheduled to be run.  But EBCScheduler is a dream come true for the casual user who needs to have a few tasks operating automatically on his or her OS/2 system.

Kudos to Mr. Crowder.

---

* EBCScheduler v0.9
by (75472.3314@compuserve.com) Earl B. Crowder
download from the (http://www.os2ss.com/wpsutil/schedb2.zip) OS/2 Supersite (ZIP, 79k)
Registration: Freeware

***********************************

Packaging 101	- by Gilbert Pili

-----

As the holidays leave us, and having done my share of gift wrapping this year, I got to thinking about how the software industry has refined the art of packaging.  Microsoft has it down to perfection; so do Lotus and Corel.  Just take a look at the Microsoft Office box.  Impressive, isn't it?  And how about those beautiful colors in the SmartSuite package?  Makes you want to dig in and start flipping through the manuals, registration coupons and special offers almost as much as throwing in the CD-ROM and watching that nifty blue "percent installed" line cross the screen.  When it comes right down to it, the software packager gets to play Santa year round--a fun job, but one that takes a good deal of thought and work.

So why doesn't IBM and much of the OS/2 community get it?  What's missing in the OS/2 "package?"  Picture the following scenarios:

o  "Warp Office," which includes the complete SmartSuite for OS/2 (voice-enabled, of course) shipped together with a copy of Warp 4.  Make sure the mic is included with Warp, and this is as far as you'd need to go to dispel any illusions that there are no native office apps for OS/2.  Also make sure there's a complete set of "Getting Started" manuals that lead the new user through the entire installation and give him or her a chance to explore all the goodies.

o  A slick Star Office, complete with a full set of manuals and a dandy tutorial.

o  A brand new Pentium Pro Aptiva, complete with a Boot Manager configuration, and a host of native OS/2 apps, including:

- Object Desktop

- A multimedia encyclopedia

- SmartSuite or Star Office for OS/2

- The OS/2 internet suite (close to as it is now, but more integrated)

- Galactic Civilizations, Avarice and/or Trials of Battle

- Complete MWave support

- Netscape for OS/2

- A professional looking PIM and money manager

- OS/2 versions of same type of extra stuff that comes on the Win95 preload (i.e., educational games, Wav/Mod players, a cool multimedia introduction to OS/2)

In other words, load the sucker up!

Some would call me a dreamer for asking for this stuff.  I say anyone who doesn't provide this stuff is dreaming if they think OS/2 will sell without it.

IBM seems to be full of dreamers.

They believe that if they preload Windows 95 and NT, and that if they take their time getting the mix and match Windows/Warp pieces of SmartSuite released, and that if they ignore all the ISV's who want to do good work for the OS/2 platform, that Warp will sell anyway.  They believe that consumers must not want a nice box of OS/2 stuff under the Christmas tree, and that even if they did, consumers aren't a good way to gain anything more than a small piece of the market.

Let's get one thing straight here: did Microsoft grab 90% of the PC software market by selling their software only to business?  Nope.  They made it pretty, packaged it, and sold it to the home user.  When all your workers are raving about the fun (yes, fun) platform they have on their home PCs, the pressure is on the business to use it in the workplace.  IBM has it 100% backwards when they say it's foolish to sell to the consumer.

One user on comp.os.os2.advacacy put it nicely: even business users want their applications to be fun, nice-looking and useful.  It's what makes them want to use the apps in the first place.  Really, the biggest difference between Microsoft and IBM's software approach is that Microsoft isn't arrogant enough to believe that software should sell itself.

If they really want to succeed with consumer software, IBM (or more specifically, PSP) could easily create as slick an OS/2 preload package for the Aptiva as the Win95 package.  If the stuff works out of the box, the customer isn't going to complain about having OS/2 instead of Win95 on their machine.  Lou Gerstner should direct Software Solutions and PSP to do the up-front work for the PC Co.; let them create the Ultimate OS/2 Preload Package and get it on their own machines, and maybe, just maybe, the other companies might start preloading it, too.

If IBM isn't willing to get behind this simple--and realistic--goal, they should get out of consumer software altogether, and stick to programming mainframes.

When it comes down to it, success with OS/2 should come from one simple idea: make opening the package just like Christmas morning.

---

(gpili@tiac.net) Gilbert Pili prefers his operating systems fun and his computers like Christmas presents.  He's been futzing around with OS/2 since version 2.1.

***********************************

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 (feedback@haligonian.com) drop us a note!

***

To start off this month, the long awaited Money Tree from (http://www.mt-baker.com/) Mt. Baker Software has officially entered beta testing!  Initial plans were for this phase of the extensive beta test to run until mid-January or possibly early February.  At press time the developers planned to have a public demo available by the end of January and to release the finished product some time in the first quarter of 1997.

Money Tree, for those who have not been anticipating it, is a full featured, 32 bit, multithreaded, WPS aware OS/2 financial application.  It will feature support for every type of financial need you might have including an extensive set of budgeting features, "what if" abilities and .QIF file input support.

The suggested retail price for the final version of Money Tree will be US$59 when it hits the street.  For a limited time, however, Mt. Baker is offering a "pre release special".  Customers who order before the general release will get an early preview version and a US$10 discount on the final product.  There will also be a competitive upgrade special.  Current owners of In Charge, Check + and E-Teller will receive US$15 off Money Tree's suggested retail price.  (These specials apply only to direct orders from Mt. Baker Software.)

The beta test for Money Tree is closed so unfortunately, if you want to participate, you'll be limited to examining the demo or ordering the pre release specials.

***

Turning to (http://www.adobe.com/) Adobe, the final beta of their popular platform-independent file reader has been released.  The ongoing beta test of Adobe Acrobat has been extensive and public with many rallying cries on the Internet for OS/2 users to show their support by downloading the latest beta of Acrobat.

The bad news regarding Acrobat is that there has not been enough interest to do a port of the authoring product that Adobe sells to produce .PDF files.  The good news is that the Acrobat reader will be released, and it should be done no later than end of February, according to Adobe employees.  There will be European international versions as well.

This latest and last beta release is freeware, and does not expire.  The same will apply to the "final" version when it is released.  As of January 12th, OS/2 users could (http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html) download the file from Adobe's web site, but it's a biggie--almost 4 megabytes.  This version features Netscape integration and forms capabilities.  Unfortunately for users of older version of OS/2, this product requires Warp 3 or Warp 4.

***

For those of you looking to spice up your Warp Desktop or just manage that forest full of fonts you've accumulated, PVsoft is hoping to ease your burden with their latest beta test of Font Folder v3.0.

Font Folder is an OS/2 Font Manager which allows easy access to all your fonts while only keeping a small number installed (which makes OS/2 boot faster and shortens the font lists in your applications).  It features the ability to:

o  point and click install and uninstall fonts; browse fonts to see what they look like without having to install them

o  build groups of fonts used in repetitive tasks and install and uninstall the entire group with a single click

o  print samples of fonts (whether they are installed or not) and

o  use fonts directly from a CDROM.

Version 3.0 adds support for TrueType fonts, drag-and-drop font operations and access to the technical specs of each font.

Primary developer (ccullum@ibm.net) Cliff Cullum tells us that this is an open beta so anyone is welcome to download the file from Hobbes, Walnut Creek or Leo (file name is fntfbeta.zip) and participate.

The general availability release is scheduled to be ready on February 1, 1997.  It will be shareware and cost US$30 to register.  Registered users of earlier versions will receive a free upgrade.

In the June 1996 OS/2 Magazine one reviewer wrote that Font Folder had, "Every font management function I could possibly use."  In Cullum's own words, "If you own a font CDROM, you need this product."

***

And what Beta File would be complete without an Internet application to round things out?

(ralf.christen@ibm.net) Ralf Christen brings us news that the beta test of (http://www.dataline.ch/~rch/) The Binary Newsreader (BNR) is just wrapping up.  The beta ends January 31st and the final release is due at that time.  More than 1000 people have downloaded the six beta revisions of BNR since September 1996.

BNR is designed for easy downloading and decoding of single- and multipart binary files which are UUE- or BASE-64 (Mime format) encoded from Internet newsgroups.

Exactly! It's made for all those alt.binaries... newsgroups.

BNR features multithreading, drag/drop, object oriented execution, a user-friendly configuration notebook and a filter feature (eg. get articles containing the words JPG or GIF).  Users can stop and restart any time during a news download or even disconnect from the network and continue working after reconnecting without restarting the reader or reloading the newsgroup.  And of course, BNR has the ability to connect and decode multipart UUE- and BASE64 (Mime format) coded files.

This shareware product will carry a registration fee of US$25 after it's "official" release.

***********************************

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, (feedback@haligonian.com) send it in!

-----

Q -- The window roll up was a nice feature of the Merlin Beta.  Could you tell me if there is such a feature in the release version of Warp 4 without any added utility?

A -- Unfortunately, there is not.  Apparently the feature was too unstable and IBM removed it from the final release of Warp 4.  The good news is that popular utilities such as "X it" work just fine with Warp 4, perform the "window roll up" feature (and many others) and are a bargain as well.

- (editor@haligonian.com) OS/2 e-Zine! Staff

---

Q -- In the c:\tcpip\bin directory there are many different network
applications, however, there is no information about them.  Where can I find out what each of the programs does?  I have played with each of them somewhat and been able to get the basics working--ftp, telnet--but host.exe, hostname.exe, nslookup.exe and others are nonintuitive.

Also, in the Internet Connection folder there is an icon titled "Retrieve Software Updates", which apparently works through a gopher connection, but I have found that whatever server it is supposed to connect to is no longer there.  Do you know what server it should be connecting to or should I just look to Hobbes to get software updates?

A -- The "TCP/IP Command Reference" would be the best place to look for information on host.exe, hostname.exe, nslookup.exe and other applications in the X:\tcpip\bin directory.  On a Warp 4 system, you can find the "TCP/IP Command Reference" on-line manual in the Assistance Center -> Information -> Reference and Commands.

For "Retrieve Software Updates" try putting UPDATE /h ftp.ibm.net in the settings notebook.  IBM is supposed to be using a new mechanism for distributing updates in the future so I would expect RSU to not matter shortly.  Hobbes should not have the updates that would be available via these means.  Look only on official IBM sites for updates.
                
- (kwilas@uiuc.edu) Kris Kwilas

---

Q -- I have PKUnzip but can't get any OS/2 ZIP files unzipped with it.  Do you know where I can get an unzip utility that I can unzip with?

A -- Absolutely!  Use your web browser to visit:

(http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/Info-ZIP/) http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/Info-ZIP/

and you'll find the latest zip.exe and unzip.exe for OS/2 from Info-ZIP.  These files are free and are the ones that everyone uses for OS/2.

Files zipped with zip.exe from Info-ZIP are not compatible with PKUnzip, but the good news is that unzip.exe from Info-ZIP will easily unzip any file compressed by the DOS program PKZip.

- (editor@haligonian.com) OS/2 e-Zine! Staff

---

Q -- We just installed Warp Connect about 10 days ago on a few machines at work.  One of the most powerful features we use is the Peer to Peer for OS/2.

An idea dawned on me this morning, but I didn't get the results I had expected.  I created a folder containing Web URLs and made it shared.  I then made a connection from another machine to the new resource.  What I had expected to get was a collection of URL objects that we could share across the LAN.  What happened was that we had objects on the newly mapped shared drive, but they were not recognized by the remote system as URL objects that could be dropped onto the WebExplorer client area.  The objects appeared identical on the remote machine as they did on the local system except they had the "unassociated" icon rather than the URL object icon.

Could you perhaps shed some light on this problem?

A -- Possibility #1:

The Workplace Shell is an object-oriented user interface.  What this means is that the icons you can click on the Desktop are "objects" within the Workplace Shell.  Simple, right?

Well, the problem with this design is that most programs are not object-oriented.  And if a program isn't object-oriented like the Workplace Shell, then it can't 'see" Workplace Shell objects.  And... you guessed it... neither OS/2 Warp Connect's nor OS/2 Warp 4's peer-to-peer services are object-oriented.

At this point you may be saying to yourself, "But I can still see folder and data objects with peer-to-peer... this guy is way off base."  Well, yes and no.  OS/2 Peer to Peer can not see folder or data objects.  However, some objects are also partly files and directories.  So OS/2 Peer to Peer sees these files and directories and shows them as folder and data objects.  But not all the information about the object is there... some of it is in the folder or file, but the rest of it is in the other system's OS2.INI file, which OS/2 Peer to Peer doesn't look at.

So, to make a long story short, that's why your remote URL objects aren't behaving entirely like objects... to OS/2 Peer, they're not objects, they're just files.

Possibility #2:

You may want to try reinstalling WebExplorer on both machines (make sure they're both using the same version).  If you have a WPS class browser, make sure that the WebExplorer_URL (or similarly named) class is installed on both machines as well.

- (jiml@teleport.com)) Jim Little

---

That's it for this month.  If you have a tip or question that you don't see covered here, don't forget to (feedback@haligonian.com) send it in!

***********************************

Chris' ColorWorks PowerTips	- by Chris Wenham

-----

Punched Text Effect

Carsten Whimster, Editor-In-Chief of EDM/2, gives us this month's hot tip, allowing me to take a break for a while (I feel guilty already).  This month also brings us some more big news for ColorWorks V2 users: Modular Dreams Incorporated recently gave us the first ever set of third party ColorWorks effects plug-ins which I've reviewed separately in this issue.

Q&A Center

"I'd like to associate my image files with ColorWorks so I can launch them from a file's OPEN menu.  ColorWorks will start, but it won't load the picture.  How do I fix this?"

- Joe Anybody, Somewhere, Idano

Joe, SPG recently released a fixpack available from their (http://www.spg-net.com/) web site that corrects a few problems that ColorWorks has with Warp 4.  This fixpack (which Warp 3 users can also install) just happens to fix the problem you're referring to.  You can now associate your image files with ColorWorks, and upon double-click (if ColorWorks is the default association) or by selecting ColorWorks from the right-click popup menu, ColorWorks will start AND load the image automatically.  This works for both ColorWorks 2.0 and 1+

Reader's Tips

Tip works in ColorWorks V2 only

This punched text effect is pretty easy to do and makes a surprising use of the motion blur plug-in effect.

1. Create a new canvas.
2. Colour it black (or your shadow colour).
3. Choose text tool, font, and type in your text.
4. Enable Anti-aliasing of filled objects in Effects/Drawing Merge Control.
5. Choose colour of text, and apply text to canvas.
6. Go into mask mode and create a box around text.
7. Choose Edit/Save and Float Image Mask.
8. Choose Edit/Float Merge Control, and choose Use Floating Image/If Darker, Floating Image Opacity 45%, and Edges 5, and choose Ok.
9. Click the floated image, and use cursor keys to move it down and right about 5 pixels each way, until it is where you want it.
10. Now choose Edit/Paste Floating, and leave mask mode or go to the last optional steps.

11. Choose Image/Plug-in Effects/Motion Blur, and choose Left, Down, and about
    Velocity 5, then Apply.
12. Choose Edit/Paste Floating, and leave mask mode.

You are done.  You can experiment a bit with the settings, but these should get you a nice effect.  Big font sizes, and fat font faces work best.

- Carsten Whimster - (http://www.iqpac.com/edm2/) EDM/2 Editor-In-Chief

News

Boom!  Out of nowhere comes (http://www.modulardreams.com/) Modular Dreams Incorporated and their MD+F Plug-in Effects (Volume 1) for ColorWorks V2 (suggesting more volumes are on the way, and indeed they are--volume 2, an animated GIF writer plug-in, was recently announced).  Check out the review of the effects plug-ins in this issue.  I'll probably be finding ways to use these plug-ins for upcoming PowerTips columns too.

ColorWorks 3 is coming soon, so I hear.  Although I can't say much about it The Rumors From A Reliable Source (tm) say that ColorWorks just ain't ColorWorks anymore--or at least not as we know it now.  ColorWorks, the image editor, is now going to be part of a much bigger product that features oodles of other goodies.  Like what?  Well an End-All/Be-All thumbnail browser is promised along with a very high degree of Internet/Web connectivity--such as the ability to load and save files over the Internet seamlessly.  But it's not just features that's going to be new, SPG is reportedly making the new user interface "as sexy as [they] can make it."

Schwing.

---

(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.

***********************************

Object Desktop Tips	- by Alexander Antoniades

-----

Since its initial release, Stardock Systems' Object Desktop has been among the best selling OS/2 applications in the world.  Many OS/2 users enjoy greater productivity thanks to Object Desktop's helpful features.

Something many Object Desktop users don't know, however, is that there are many undocumented or often overlooked features of Object Desktop that can make your OS/2 system even more productive and fun to use.  We've gathered together a few of them to share with you here.

From Command Prompt to GUI with one (or two) commands

Object Desktop has two commands that allow you to open Workplace Shell objects from any OS/2 command prompt.  These commands are "open" and "navigate".

Simply put, the "open" command allows you to view any object you specify from the command line, and the "navigate" command opens any folder using the Object Navigator.

The "open" command's uses, however, don't end with being able to open folders in the Workplace Shell, because the open command opens any object's default view in the Workplace Shell.  That means that you can open anything essentially the same as double clicking it in the Workplace Shell.  This "opens" up a number of uses when you combine this ability with other Object Desktop features.

Uses for the open command include:

"Open ." would open the current folder's default view in the Workplace Shell.

"Open incoming" would open the incoming directory if it was a sub directory from the current command prompt location.

"Open zipfile.zip" would open the Object Archive view of zipfile.zip.

"Open tob.exe" would start the program tob.exe (this is redundant, but it does work).

"Open word.doc" would open whatever application you have associated with *.doc files or, if you have Object Desktop Professional, it would view word.doc using Object Viewers.  Note: the association and Object Viewers for this object can overridden by Extended Attributes saved with the program by another application.  This is done by some OS/2 applications such as Star Office and DeScribe.

"Open incoming d"  would open the details view of the incoming directory.  This is an example of the parameters Open uses to force certain views.  These non-case sensitive parameters are:

o  D or DETAILS for Details View
o  S or SETTINGS for the Settings Notebook
o  T or TREE/TEXT for Tree View
o  I or ICON for Icon View
o  N or NAVIGATE to open the Object Navigator with that object.

The navigate command while not as flexible as the open command is nonetheless useful for accessing the Workplace Shell in a hurry.  The syntax for the navigate command is:

"Navigate ." to start Object Navigator in the current directory.

"Navigate incoming" to start Object Navigator in the incoming directory, where the incoming directory is a subdirectory of your current path.

Don't use Shadows in the Tab LaunchPad

One performance problem that most people don't know about is having shadows of objects on your Tab LaunchPad.  This increases your system overhead at load time or whenever the Tab LaunchPad is loaded.

The problem is related to how objects store their icons in OS/2.  Normal objects store their icon information in the OS2.INI files.  However, a shadow is only a reference to the original object, so every time the Workplace Shell has to look for that object's icon information, it has to go to the directory where that object resides and query the object to find out what it does.  To stop this from happening, always make sure you place the original object in the Tab LaunchPad and not a shadow.

Creating WPS Objects using Object Navigator

One of the more annoying short comings of the Workplace Shell, in my opinion, has been its inability to easily create Workplace Shell objects from files on your hard drive.  While it's fairly trivial to create shadows (hold down CTRL-SHIFT while dragging) and copies (hold down CTRL while dragging), creating an object requires the use of either "Create Another" or the Program Template, both of which require one step to create the object and another to set its parameters.

Object Navigator eliminates one step of this process by allowing you to create an object with the particulars for a program in one action.

To do this simply select the program or file you want to create the object for in the Navigator's main window.  Once the program is selected click in the button on the Object Navigator button bar that looks like a template.  This will bring up the "object creation dialog" which will ask you to name the object and where to place it.  Fill out the information and you're done.

Clear the /tmp directory

Like many other OS/2 programs, Object Desktop uses the directory assigned for temporary storage (specified by the tmp variable in the config.sys) to temporarily store the decompressed files for object archives.  If this directory becomes clogged (by a program such as WebExplorer that uses this directory for caching) the performance of Object Archives will suffer.  To alleviate this, first check your config.sys to see what directory is set as temporary storage (look for the SET TMP= statement--usually x:/tcpip/tmp where x: is your OS/2 boot drive) then delete all files from that directory.


That's it for this month.  Next month we'll feature even more undocumented and useful tips and tricks for Object Desktop.

---

(sander@stardock.com) Alexander Antoniades is the former Associate Editor of OS/2 Magazine and the current Vice President of Marketing at Stardock Systems.

***********************************

The Need For Speed	- by Jon Cochran

-----

Creative Labs and More Sound Cards

You know, it seems that whenever the OS/2 community receives a boost, something has to come along to negate it.  You could even write a paper on it.  Seriously.

Case in point: the last month or so.  First of all, OS/2 users everywhere let out a collective thanks when Netscape Navigator/2 went GA.  Finally we had a web browser that is part of a universal standard.  And as an added bonus, IBM gave us a native plug-in package for Navigator/2, with software MPEG!  It seemed it couldn't get a whole lot better than that.

But, to support my thesis, some bad news had to come along, and it did.  Creative Labs, the main supplier of the sound card community, discontinued support for OS/2.  They will no longer be developing new drivers, or refining existing drivers.  From what I can gather, they seem to be merely holding the line.

Creative went on to blame IBM for their decision to drop OS/2 support, and attacked MMPM/2 in general, saying it couldn't support features such as full-duplex sound cards.

Wow.  Sounds impressive.  Too bad Creative didn't do their homework.

Other Options

For starters, there are at least two sound cards with full duplex support under OS/2.  The MWave would be the first of these cards, and the second is a nifty little card that you probably haven't heard of, and that's a shame.  Actually, to call it a card is wrong; it's really a chip.  And the cards based on the chip can be bought for less than US$50 at most computer stores.

The chip is from ESS: the 1868.  The card I worked with was sold by a company called Precision Instruments, who seem to take goods, slap their own name on them, and ship them out the door.  But, as long as you know it's the ESS chip, you're in business.

When I first saw this package, I was a bit dubious.  "How good could it be, it's only $50?" I thought.  But seeing the promise of OS/2 support right on the box, I decided to give it a try.

"OS/2 support out of the box" is a bit misleading.  The card comes with instructions on how to install it under OS/2, but comes with no drivers in the box, which is a unpleasant.  However, OS/2 itself comes with drivers for the ESS 1868, and you might even want to use them.  Notice I said might.  It seems that the drivers that come with Warp 4 are designed to work with VTD, and don't support the full duplex features of the sound card.  So if you want VTD, you've got to use the Warp 4 drivers but if you're not using VTD, go to the (http://www.esstech.com/) ESS website and download their drivers.  Not only are their OS/2 drivers full duplex, but they're WinOS2 aware, and they'll share the sound card with Windows applications.  Those are two very nice bonuses for a $50 sound card.

To install the card, I simply backed up my config.sys and my mmpm2.ini, took out the old Sound Blaster, and inserted the new card.  I rebooted, ran the install program, and rebooted again.  No problems, no worries, no hassles.  And it sounds as good as the old SB16 it replaced.  Peaches and cream, right?

Wrong.  Being the intrepid soul that I am, I decided to try the IDE port on the sound card.  I hooked up my CD-ROM and rebooted.  Or tried to reboot.  The system wouldn't boot with the CD-ROM attached to the card.  I took the CD-ROM off; no problems.  Quite odd.

I checked DMAs, IRQs, and ports, and still had no luck.  The IDE interface wasn't something that was necessary, but it bothered me that the card wouldn't work entirely right.  I sent a message to ESS Technical support and received no reply.  I tried calling Precision Instruments, got a feeble response about checking a page in the manual (which has nothing to do with OS/2).  I played around with the DOS configuration program.  Nothing.

My final conclusion?  Apparently, the configuration program stores its options directly onto the chip (when you run it, you'll see it telling you that it's "WRITING 512 BYTES TO CHIP" or some such nonsense).  Evidently, OS/2 destroys whatever information is stored on the chip when it boots, which is no problem because the OS/2 drivers take care of everything--except the IDE port.  Of course, it could be a hundred different other things, but after days of experimentation, this is all I can seem to come up with.  Disappointing.

So, if you need a new sound card, and don't need the IDE connector included with most sound cards, by all means go get an ESS 1868 based card.  If you do need that IDE connector, you're still better off with a SB16 (or getting a separate CD-ROM interface card).

---

(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.

***********************************

the REXX Files	- by Dr. Dirk Terrell

-----

This month I thought we would look at a utility written some time ago by Jeff Elkins called DAB.  DAB stands for "delete all but" and is a REXX script that I use all the time.  It is particularly useful when examining ZIP archives.  After unzipping the archive and doing something, I want to delete all of the files except for the archive and DAB is just the tool to use.  DAB is useful and illustrates some uses of the REXXUTIL library that comes with OS/2 REXX.

Since DAB uses the REXXUTIL library, it is necessary to ensure that the library has been loaded before we start:

CALL RxFuncAdd 'SysFileTree', 'RexxUtil', 'SysFileTree'
CALL RxFuncAdd 'SysFileDelete', 'RexxUtil', 'SysFileDelete'

Next we need to parse the arguments from the user.  The calling form will be:

dab argument1 argument2 ... argument10

where argument1, argument2, etc. represent file specifications for the files that the user does not want to be deleted.  The file specifications can have wildcards like * and ? just as you use from the OS/2 command line.  For example, if the user wanted to delete all files except for ZIP files, the command would be:

dab *.zip

The program, as written, will accept up to ten arguments on the command line.  I have never found this to be a limitation, but it could easily be rewritten to handle an arbitrary number of arguments.  The code from DAB.CMD is:

ARG ext1 ext2 ext3 ext4 ext5 ext6 ext7 ext8 ext9 ext10

Once the arguments have been processed, the next thing to do is hide the files that match the arguments.  This feat is accomplished with the SysFileTree function from the REXXUTIL library.  The calling form for this function is:

SysFileTree(filespec,stem,options,target_attribute,new_attribute)

where filespec is file specification such as *.zip, stem is a stem variable to hold the results, and options is a string that specifies various options for the search.  In options, F searches for files only, D searches for directories only, B searches for both files and directories, S recursively searches subdirectories, T returns dates in the form YY/MM/DD/HH/MM, and O returns only file names as opposed to dates, times, sizes, attributes and file names.  FO for example would return only the names of the files in the current directory, while DO would return only the directory names.

The target_attribute and new_attribute options are masks that are used to match or set the file system attributes of the files.  These attributes are:

o  A - Archive
o  D - Directory
o  H - Hidden
o  R - Read-only
o  S - System

The masks have a form like **+*- where + means the attribute is set, - means the attribute is not set, and * means either value.  The order of the attributes in the mask is as given in the above list, ADHRS. So **+** for the target_attribute would only match files that had the hidden attribute set, and would set the hidden attribute of the matched files if it were specified as a new_attribute.

What we want to do is search for the files that the user has specified and set their hidden attribute so that we can delete everything else.  The user has specified filespec, so all we need to do is call SysFileTree with options set to "F" (files only), target_attribute set to ***** (find all files) and new_attibute set to **-*** (set the matching files' hidden attribute).  At this point all the files that the user specified are hidden.

Now we need to get a list of all the files that are left.  Again we use SysFileTree, except this time we set filespec to *.*, target_attribute to **-** (only files that do not have the hidden attribute set), and new_attribute to ***** (don't change anything).  With this list we can delete all of the files using the SysFileDelete function.  The relevant code from DAB.CMD is:

rc=SysFileTree('*.*', del_file, 'FO', '**-**','*****')

df = del_file.0

DO x = 1 TO df
        rc = SysFileDelete(del_file.x)
        SAY del_file.x '........' file_error.RC
END

The last step is to use SysFileTree to make the hidden files visible again.  This we do with target_attribute set to **+** and new_attribute set to **-**.

I made a modification to Jeff's code a while back that makes sure that at least one file in the current directory matches what the user has specified on the command line.  I did this to prevent a typo from deleting all of the files in the directory.  For example if the user mistakenly enters *.xip instead of *.zip, and there are no files that match *.xip, then everything in the directory would be deleted.  The code to do this is commented in DAB.CMD,  and you shouldn't have any problem following it.  A nice modification might be to add a command line option that would list all of the files to be deleted and ask the user whether or not to proceed.

I have included my modifcations to the original DAB.CMD here for you to download.  Enjoy!

---

(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.

***********************************

/*  delete all but for OS/2  */
/*  Jeff Elkins 1992 */

/* Modified by Dirk Terrell to check for calls with no */
/* files matching the exclusion criteria */

CALL RxFuncAdd 'SysFileTree', 'RexxUtil', 'SysFileTree'
CALL RxFuncAdd 'SysFileDelete', 'RexxUtil', 'SysFileDelete'

ARG ext1 ext2 ext3 ext4 ext5 ext6 ext7 ext8 ext9 ext10

IF STRIP(ext1,'B') = '' THEN
	DO 
             SAY 'You must enter a argument holding 1 to 10 file templates'
             SAY
             SAY 'I.E. *.exe *.cmd *.com passed as a template string'
             SAY 'would delete all files which don''t match the'
             SAY 'supplied file extensions'
             EXIT 3
	END

t.1  = ext1
t.2  = ext2
t.3  = ext3
t.4  = ext4
t.5  = ext5
t.6  = ext6
t.7  = ext7
t.8  = ext8
t.9  = ext9
t.10 = ext10


file_error.0   = 'File deleted successfully. '
file_error.2   = 'Error.  File not found. '
file_error.3   = 'Error.  Path not found. '
file_error.5   = 'Error.  Access denied. '
file_error.26  = 'Error.  Not DOS disk. '
file_error.32  = 'Error.  Sharing violation. '
file_error.36  = 'Error.  Sharing buffer exceeded. '
file_error.87  = 'Error.  Invalid parameter. '
file_error.206 = 'Error.  Filename exceeds range error. '


/***********************************************************/
/* hide the files to be kept                               */
/***********************************************************/

Found=0 /* Added by DT */
DO x = 1 TO 10
ext = t.x
IF STRIP(ext,'B') <> '' THEN DO
   rc=SysFileTree(ext, dir_list, 'F', '*****','**+**')
   If dir_list.0<>0 then Found=1 /* Added by DT */
   END
END

/***********************************************************/
/* See if any files match the exclusion criteria           */
/* Added by DT  January, 1996                              */
/***********************************************************/

If Found=0 then do
   Say " "
   Say "WARNING: No files matched the specified exclusion criteria."
   Exit
end  /* Do */

/**************************************************************/
/* pull the files to be deleted into a stem, then delete them */
/**************************************************************/


rc=SysFileTree('*.*', del_file, 'FO', '**-**','*****')

df = del_file.0

DO x = 1 TO df
        rc = SysFileDelete(del_file.x)
        SAY del_file.x '........' file_error.RC
END


/**************************************************************/
/* unhide the hidden files                                    */
/**************************************************************/



DO x = 1 TO 10
ext = t.x
IF STRIP(ext,'B') <> '' THEN
   rc=SysFileTree(ext, dir_list, 'F', '**+**','**-**')
END

say
say df 'files deleted'
exit

***********************************

How Do I?	- by Eric Slaats

-----

Hi, welcome to the next lesson on PM programming.  In this column simple Presentation Manager programming problems and philosophies will be discussed.  This column is aimed at people who are interested in PM programming or are simply curious what makes PM programs tick.  To understand this column a little programming experience (preferably in C++) is recommended.

Last month we took a small peek at resources.  We found that resources can make life a lot easier.  For example, we don't have to program menus, we simply define them and let the PM do the rest.  Before we delve further into the possibilities of other resources, we will explore the resource MENU some more.

Menu's are a very important part of your application.  They must be treated with some respect and usually require some thinking before they are created.  Most of you will have experience with mastodon programs like WordPerfect or Microsoft Word.  These programs have enormous menu trees and it's often very hard (if not impossible) to find what you're looking for.  The menus of a lot of programs are overfull, illogical, devoid of accelerator hints, have no key shortcuts, etc.

In this months article we will take a look at techniques that will make menus more attractive and easier to use.  But before we do that, let's find out something about the CUA guidelines.

CUA stands for Common User Access.  CUA is a set of guidelines that are a piece of IBM's SAA (System Application Architecture).  These guidelines were introduced in 1987 and have seen a number of changes through the years.  New controls are invented constantly and the way they should look is added to the CUA guidelines.  Basically, CUA is an attempt to make user interfaces look coherent in such a way that users will find what they have come to expect.

CUA also describes menu appearances.  An example of this is that CUA says that a menu that will invoke a dialog should be followed by three dots (...).  In the samples handled in this article we will try to follow the CUA guidelines.

Back to menus.  What do we have available to make menus?  Unfortunately not everything can be handled with resources, but the amount of code needed will be kept to an absolute minimum.  Remember, don't do anything the system can do for you.  In addition to what's handled in last month's column, we will take a look at the following:

o  Mnemonic keys
o  Separators
o  Breaks and break separators
o  Bitmaps in menus
o  Columns in menus (adding accelerator hints)
o  Cascades
o  No-dismiss (handled next month)

The following topics will also be covered (next month), but they will need a little programming:

o  Checked menu items
o  Conditional cascades
o  Disabling/enabling menus

It's handy to start the sample (sample4.exe in the ZIP file at http://www.haligonian.com/os2/v2n1/sample4.zip [ZIP, 16k]) when you're reading this.  This way, all the discussed styles can be viewed as you are reading about them.  If you're also viewing the RC file, some notes may be in place.  Now, let's take the above items one at the time.

Mnemonic Keys

Mnemonic keys work almost like accelerators; they activate a menu with keystrokes.  The difference here is that an accelerator will immediately trigger the attached action.  A mnemonic key will only trigger the menu action it is attached to when its menu is visible.  Mnemonic keys can be recognized in menus because they are underlined.  In most cases it's the first letter of the menu item and that menu item can then be triggered by pressing the underlined key.  If two items in a menu have the same mnemonic, the key won't activate a menu option so doubles should be avoided.  This effect can be observed in the separators menu where there are two "8" mnemonic keys.

Mnemonics are very easy to create, just place a ~ (tilde) before the letter of the menu item you want to be the mnemonic key.  It's a good practice to implement mnemonics for all your menu items.

Note: mnemonics can also be used in dialogs for buttons, etc.

Separators

Separators are lines between menu items.  OS/2 resources support three different kinds of separators.  (As a fourth one the normal BREAK can also be regarded as a separator).

MENUITEM SEPARATOR  - a separator is usually used to draw a line between sets of menu items that form a functional cluster.  For example, in an edit submenu the items clear, copy, cut and paste are separated from other menu items by a separator line.  In the separators submenu these lines can be observed.  Such a line can be placed by creating a menu item with the name "separator".

MIS_BUTTONSEPARATOR - a separator that most programs use to give the Help menu item a place on the right side of the menu with a small line in front of it.  The Help submenu in sample4.exe is placed this way.  CUA says the menus must be done this way, but personally I think it's a matter of taste (Smalled doesn't have this).

MIS_BUTTONSEPARATOR is a menu-item-style component.  (That is why it begins with a MIS_ prefix.)  The SEPARATOR is a real menu item, although one that can't be selected.  MIS_ items can only be applied to existing menu items.

MIS_BREAKSEPARATOR - breaks a submenu before the item to which it is applied.  This way more columns (or menu lines) can be created.  The BREAKSEPARATOR draws a line between the columns.  It's also possible to use MIS_BREAK.  With this option the line won't be drawn.  In the separators submenu in Sample4, both styles are displayed.
 
Bitmaps / Framed items 

One of the nice things about menus is that they can also contain bitmaps.  This makes an easy way to implement the buttonbars we see on many applets today.  (The Smalled buttonbar is a nice sample of this.  It's a menu with bitmaps and acts as such.  If you're interested in how that was done, check EDM/2 3.4, "Building custom controls" and EDM/2 3.8, "Easy buttonbars".)  In a future column I will discuss how to easily build a buttonbar; for now we will look at simply putting a bitmap in a menu.

Bitmaps can also be treated as resources.  For this month's sample I created two bitmaps with the standard icon editor and included them in the RC file.  To do this the following lines were added:

   // Bitmap identifiers 
        BITMAP 1001   "FILEBUT.BMP"
        BITMAP 1002   "DIRBUT.BMP"
        
With these lines inserted, the bitmaps can be handled as resources.  To place these bitmaps on a menu item the first thing that has to be done is create a menu item with the bitmap style.  Two of the menu items in the Bitmaps submenu are created like this.  The text-items are added to show that text and bitmaps can be combined.  Also you can observe that a bitmapped menu is sized according to the bitmap it contains.

SUBMENU "~Bitmaps", IDM_MENU
        BEGIN
                MENUITEM "Text", IDM_ITEM
                MENUITEM "#1001", IDM_ITEM, MIS_BITMAP
                MENUITEM "#1002", IDM_ITEM, MIS_BITMAP, MIA_FRAMED
                MENUITEM "Text", IDM_ITEM
        END

In the sample you can see that the text for the bitmapped menu items contain a # sign followed by the ID of the bitmap placed on it.  The # is a directive for the resource compiler that tells it which bitmap to use.

The second bitmapped item also has an attribute attached to it.  This is the MIA_FRAMED attribute.  If the bitmap submenu is examined, the effect of this attribute can be observed, it draws a small line around the menu item.  This gives a nice visual effect that is especially useful with bitmapped items.

Columns in menus

In most applications, accelerator keys are used.  It's good practice to mention these keys with the menu items that can trigger the same action.  Usually the menu name is displayed on the left and the accelerator key is listed on the right side.  The OS/2 resource compiler supports two ways of handling this.  In the columns menu these two methods can be observed.  In short, it comes down to left-align the right column (the left example) or right-align the right column (the right example).

To left align a piece of text, we add a \t in the declaration.  (You may recognize this as the escape sequence for a Tab in the C/C++ printf() statement.)  To right align a column, add a \a in the declaration.

SUBMENU "~Columns", IDM_MENU
        BEGIN
                MENUITEM "1 \t****", IDM_ITEM
                MENUITEM "22 \t***", IDM_ITEM
                MENUITEM "333 \t**", IDM_ITEM
                MENUITEM "4444 \t*", IDM_ITEM
                MENUITEM "5 \a****", IDM_ITEM, MIS_BREAKSEPARATOR
                MENUITEM "66 \a***", IDM_ITEM
                MENUITEM "777 \a**", IDM_ITEM
                MENUITEM "8888 \a*", IDM_ITEM
        END

Simple cascaded menus

Menu cascades are a way to elegantly add sub-sub-menus with a visual clue that there is a submenu available.  The clue is given by a small arrow on the right side of the menu item.  These arrows come in two flavors, a simple bitmap and one that's also a button.  If you pop up the Desktop popup menu there are samples of both.  The "Select" item has a simple arrow, the "Open" item has a small button.  The first one is a normal (or simple) cascade, the one with the button is called a conditional cascade.  Each reacts differently when selected: the normal cascade simply displays the submenu that is attached; the conditional cascade will activate the first item in the submenu without showing it.  To display the submenu on a conditional cascade menu item, the small button has to be clicked.  This month we only deal with the normal cascade.  (The conditional cascade needs a little additional programming and will be covered next month.)

What do we have to do to create a cascade menu?  Well, nothing.  If we create a submenu in a submenu the resource compiler will automatically add the little arrow and so provide us with the visual clue that another submenu exists.

That's all for now.  Next month we'll delve further into the possibilities of menus.  A little programming will be added and we will see that a lot more can be done with menu resources.

---

(eric.slaats@pi.net) Eric Slaats holds a degree in Computer Science and teaches computer technology in Eindhoven.  He is the creator of the (http://www.bmtmicro.com/catalog/smalled/) Smalled utilities.

***********************************

Editor's Note on Hardware Reviews

-----

After hundreds of reader requests over the last year, we have finally begun a regular series of reviews of PCs by manufacturers who preload OS/2.  That's right!  Each month in our pages you will find reviews of PCs by a variety of manufacturers that will preload Warp on your new computer and ship it to your door!

While many readers might assume that there aren't that many companies willing to do this, the truth is there are.  In fact, we probably will not be able to dig up every one of them in the course of the next year.  But if you would like to do some digging of your own, we recommend the (http://www.budgetweb.com/os2/) OS/2 pre-load list as a great starting place.

A Note about Benchmarks

In order to give readers an empirical starting point from which to compare machines from month to month, or against their own machines, we realized that we would need a scientific measure of various system components.  After much deliberations, we settled on Sysbench 0.9.1c as a standard.

There are many arguments for and against various benchmarking programs but we decided that the most important feature for our purposes is wide availability.  Sysbench 0.9.1c is a freeware program (http://www.os2ss.com/wpsutil/sysb091c.zip) available on the OS/2 Supersite (ZIP, 277k).  Any OS/2 user can download Sysbench and test his or her system as a basis of comparison with the machines reviewed in our pages.  (Source code is included with Sysbench as well!)

Sysbench is simple to use but, at the same time, comprehensive.  It tests a variety of hardware in a PC and reports on their performance.  It is also relatively up to date with indications that the author intends to continue improving and supporting the software.

Overall Ratings

Each month, our hardware reviews will also be accompanied by a loose rating system as follows:

* * * * *

(5 out of 5 -- Excellent)

* * * *

(4 out of 5 -- Good Buy)

* * *

(3 out of 5 --Average Quality)

* *

(2 out of 5 -- Inferior Machine)

*

(1 out of 5 -- Worthless)

These ratings are not meant to be exact quantitative measures of PCs.  For example, we will not be awarding 4.35 out of 5 to one machine and 4.49 out of 5 to another because we do not believe that anyone can decide conclusively that one machine is absolutely right for every user.  We believe that with a consumer item such as a computer, there are many factors that combine to affect the overall value of the PC.  Accordingly, these ratings are meant to be used only as recommendations so that readers can quickly compare machines from different companies reviewed in different issues.

As always, please feel free to (feedback@haligonian.com) send us your feedback on our benchmark decisions, review criteria or any of our articles.  We are listening!

***********************************

Pentium 133 System from MCA

-----

Mercede Computer Associates (MCA), in Stamford, Connecticut, are a great example of the many smaller computer companies that have sprung up across North America to fill the demand for quality systems with OS/2 preloaded.  This month we had a look at a Pentium 133 system from MCA with Warp 4 preloaded and were pleased with what we saw--with a few reservations.

Arrival and Unpacking

MCA is an company which normally sells and ships either locally or through mail/Internet order within the U.S.A.  Since shipment to Canada is not their normal practice, there was some initial difficulty getting the test system past our ever fierce and bureaucratic Canadian customs agents, but with some perseverance, it was done.  Possibly because of our unfriendly customs department, MCA has no plans at this time to make Canadian shipments a regular business practice.

Once we did get the machine though, we were slightly concerned since it appeared that it was non-functional.  This was a fairly serious strike against MCA's machine for our review purposes but, happily, it turned out to be a very simple problem.

It was, in fact, just a loose video card.  After setting up, the computer could be heard starting (and complaining that something was amiss) but no video information was being transmitted to the monitor.  So we were forced to open the case of our new toy--something a new user should not have to do (although, admittedly, many want to do).

When we got the case off, we were even more alarmed.  Inside, as mentioned above, we found that the video card was not inserted all the way into its slot.  We fixed this in a few seconds and were relieved when the machine booted normally afterwards.  However, while we had the case open, we also noticed that the modem was not properly seated and both the floppy disk drive and the CD-ROM controller cables were dangling loose!  The system also shipped with two serial port plugs of different sizes but the 9-pin connector that we needed was not plugged in so we had to do a quick switch there too.

In fairness to MCA, there was a great deal of pressure involved in sending this test machine due to press deadlines and it is possible that the components were jarred loose during shipping.  But we were left wondering if equivalent pressure in normal business situations might not cause similar mix-ups for real customers.

Regardless, these problems were superficial and easily corrected.  The motherboard manual indicated exactly where to plug the floppy disk cable and the CD-ROM cable connector was easily located on the sound card.

Since our problems were so easily fixed, we did not call MCA at the time to resolve them.  However, Gregg Mercede, the owner of MCA, later assured us that it is his company's policy to immediately replace any MCA system a user receives in less than perfect condition.  He told us:

Our policy is: Immediate replacement using cross shipment and we would then deal with any problems caused by the shipping services.  MCA is founded on the principle of 100% customer satisfaction.

The positive side of this inconvenience was that it allowed us to view the arrangement of the "guts" of the machine.  While the case was a typical mini-tower configuration, inside it had a convenient slide-in hard drive mounting bracket in the rear of the case instead of the front which is more common.  This would make changing hard drives a snap since the whole unit pulls out for easy access and would also make it easier to work with the floppy disk or CD-ROM since it is less congested in that area.  Other than the slide-out mounting bracket, the inside case configuration was fairly standard.  The only notable inconvenience was that, as with every machine we have ever seen, the memory banks were hidden under impenetrable hardware and wiring, next to the power supply.

From the outside, the machine also looked typical with two 5 1/4" and two 3 1/2" drive bays, one of each occupied with the CD-ROM and floppy disk drive, respectively.  There was a normal selection of power, turbo and reset buttons with standard information lights as well.

The Hardware

This machine was equipped with a Pentium chip from Intel running at 133 MHz (although the motherboard will accept other brands or speeds), 512K cache and an AMI BIOS dated 7/15/95.  It featured "green" power management functions compatible with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Energy Star program (these features were enabled when we received the machine, which we liked quite a bit).  The motherboard had two 16 Megabyte 72-pin simms in one of two memory banks for a total of 32 Meg of RAM (maximum 512 Meg of RAM).  The Western Digital Caviar 21600 EIDE hard drive had a capacity of approximately 1.5 Gigabytes.  The CD-ROM was a 12x Mitsumi drive (partially) plugged into a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 PnP sound card.  The only really generic item inside the box seemed to be the 28.8 modem, which we had trouble finding a model or brand name for (we later discovered it was a ZOOM V.34 28.8 fax/modem).

The motherboard featured 3 ISA slots (two of which were taken by the modem and sound card) and 4 PCI slots (one of which was occupied by the video card).

But the real joy of this system was the Matrox Millennium graphics card with 2 Meg of on-board WRAM.  We had not seen one in action until we tested this system and were pleased to find that the high recommendations of Matrox customers seem well founded.

Manuals and Documentation

The Matrox driver disks and manuals were included in the box, as were manuals and disks for all the other hardware included in the system.  While most of it, of course, had little mention of OS/2 (with the Matrox Millennium manual a nice exception) this certainly was not a concern since everything was set up and humming along nicely when the machine first booted.  Also, the motherboard manual was unusually clearly written and helpful for a "clone" machine.

A Warped Machine

As required for our review purposes, this machine was preloaded with Warp 4, including all the bells and whistles of that operating system.  Java (the Beta 1.02 version shipped with Netscape Navigator 2.02 for OS/2) was installed as was VoiceType Navigation and Dictation.  However, OpenDoc support was not.  MCA took the trouble to divide the ample hard drive into two partitions: an empty FAT partition, C: (about 500 Meg), and an HPFS partition, D: (the boot drive; about 1 Gig).  Boot Manager was also installed in case the user should want to install DOS or Windows on the C: drive.  This is an excellent configuration and should satisfy the needs of most users.

MCA obviously spends some time making sure their machines are user friendly "out of the box" so we were surprised to find that they had not modified the initial swap file settings.  This should not be a concern for any Warp user with more than a month's experience but it would have been nice for the swap file to have been tweaked before shipping.

Our test machine also had the StarOffice Internet Pak v3.1 Beta installed with the StarOffice Manager object in the Startup folder.  For those readers who are not familiar with StarOffice, it is a world calibre office suite for OS/2 with word processor, spreadsheet, drawing, image and charting applications included.

The other extra installed by MCA staff was Netscape Navigator 2.02E for OS/2.  Finding the Navigator object on the Desktop instead of WebEx was a pleasant surprise since it saved us installing the application; for customers owning only one computer it would also save them a long download via the Internet.

All the preloaded software worked without complaint and as expected.  There were no discernible system problems and the overall setup was well done.

Performance Impressions

If you have been waiting to upgrade from that old clunker of a 486, using this machine for an hour would convince you to do it now.  It was a pleasure to use: boot times were minimal, every subsystem from hard drive to video was snappy.  Even hard drive-hogging applications jumped to life and the video response left us smiling.  Folders opened and populated briskly and using the WarpCenter was a pleasure instead of a chore.  Even opening and using multimedia files or the usually sluggish IBM Works apps was quick.

The one time in our testing that we had this PC crash was when we were testing the multimedia.  It appeared that MMOS/2 on this machine was unusually stable, even allowing us to smoothly play a MIDI file and an AVI with sound simultaneously.  However, this was misleading and we subsequently experienced a few crashes while using MMOS/2.  We are almost certain that this has nothing to do with the MCA machine and everything to do with Warp's multimedia abilities.

As standard practice we installed a few of our most used applications to make sure nothing in the system was too unconventional to cohabitate with Warp or typical software.  The first thing we did was install the Iomega Zip drivers v2.34 and plug in a parallel port Zip drive.  This installation went flawlessly and allowed us to install the programs mentioned above.  We installed DragText v2.0, PMMail v1.53, Smalled v1.4, Info-ZIP's UnZip v5.20, NPS WPS v1.82, PMView v0.93 and (OK, you caught us) Trials of Battle v1.0.

This regimen was by no means comprehensive but it allowed us to install software from floppy, Zip and CD-ROM drives, using the standard IBM installation program and nonstandard installation programs.  We encountered no problems and every application we tried performed well on this system with no conflicts.

If you are interested in more concrete performance measurements, compare the Sysbench 0.9.1c results for this machine (see below) to your own.  (For details of what Sysbench is and where to get it, see the Editor's note above on hardware reviews.)

Conclusions and Recommendations

Despite a shaky start with some loose cables, we liked this machine.  It was well set up, had ample room for expansion, plenty of resources and performed quickly and solidly.  It was a pleasure to use and proved to be an excellent machine for running OS/2 Warp.  With a price of US$1,920 (without monitor) it is a good deal for a loaded mid- or budget level PC purchase.

---

Rating: * * * *

(4 out of 5 -- Good Buy)

---

* System Configuration:

CPU: Intel Pentium 133 MHz
Cache: 512 K
RAM: 32 Meg
Video: Matrox Millennium w/ 2 Meg WRAM
Hard Drive: 1.5 Gig Western Digital Caviar 21600
CD-ROM: Mitsumi 12x
Floppy: 3 1/2"
Sound Card: Sound Blaster 16 PnP
Modem: ZOOM V.34 28.8 fax/modem

Price as tested: US$1,920
w/ CTX 15" monitor: US$2,295
Shipping Area: Anywhere in the U.S.A.
Applicable Taxes: CT Sales Tax is 6% on Computer Equipment until July 97, when it gets reduced to 5%, then every year, it will go down 1% until there is not tax on Computers.

Manufacturer:
Mercede Computer Associates (MCA)
880 Canal Street
Stamford, CT 06902
U.S.A.

Voice: (203) 975-0555
Fax: (203) 972-3445
e-mail: (sales@mercede.com) sales@mercede.com
WWW: (http://www.mercede.com/) http://www.mercede.com/

***********************************

Sysbench 0.9.1c result file created Fri Jan 17 22:05:09 1997
Machine name    - MCA P133
Manufacturer    - Mercede Computer Associates (MCA)
Motherboard     - AP53
Chipset         - Unknown motherboard chipset
Processor       - Pentium 133MHz
External cache  - 512 K
Graphics card   - Matrox Millenium
Disk Controller - Unknown disk controller
Machine data
Coprocessor     = Yes
RAM             = 32.00 MB
Priority        = Dynamic
Maxwait         = 2
Timeslice       = (33,59)
Swap file size  = 7.00MB
  ...initially  = 2.00MB
Video data
Resolution      = 800x600x16 bits/pixel
Number planes   = 0
Screen Access   = Direct
Bank Switched   = No
Bytes/scanline  = 1600
Aperture size   = 960000
 Graphics
   BitBlt S->S cpy       :       66.747    Mpixels/s
   BitBlt M->S cpy       :       13.509    Mpixels/s
   Filled Rectangle      :      431.918    Mpixels/s
   Pattern Fill          :      431.918    Mpixels/s
   Vertical Lines        :       18.794    Mpixels/s
   Horizontal Lines      :       26.827    Mpixels/s
   Diagonal Lines        :       27.975    Mpixels/s
   Text Render           :       31.536    Mpixels/s
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :      119.979    PM-marks
 CPU integer
   Dhrystone             :      103.651    VAX 11/780 MIPS
   Hanoi                 :       85.635    moves/25 usec
   Heapsort              :       59.274    MIPS
   Sieve                 :      118.273    MIPS
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       94.389    CPUint-marks
 CPU float
   Linpack               :        9.195    MFLOPS
   Flops                 :       20.509    MFLOPS
   Fast Fourier Tr.      :       13.396    VAX FFT's
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       15.967    CPUfloat-marks
 Direct Interface to video extensions - DIVE
   Video bus bandw.      :       47.191    MB/s
   DIVE fun              :      172.149    fps at 640x480x256
   M->S, DD,   1.00:1    :      157.386    fps at 640x480x256
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       60.120    DIVE-marks
 Disk I/O - disk 1:  1547 MB
   Avg. data access time :       16.900    ms
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :        6.734    MB/s
   Average Transfer rate :        5.060    MB/s
   Disk use CPU load     :       97.851    percent
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       36.622    DiskIO-marks
 File I/O - cache read - Drive D:
   4Kb seq.   N     N    :     3310.575    KB/sec
   4Kb seq.   N     Y    :     3858.933    KB/sec
   4Kb random N     N    :      374.933    KB/sec
   4Kb random N     Y    :      777.333    KB/sec
   4Kb seq.   Y     N    :     5126.876    KB/sec
   4Kb seq.   Y     Y    :     3495.733    KB/sec
   4Kb random Y     N    :      628.594    KB/sec
   4Kb random Y     Y    :      145.981    KB/sec
   8Kb seq.   N     N    :     4186.133    KB/sec
   8Kb seq.   N     Y    :     3708.356    KB/sec
   8Kb random N     N    :      685.867    KB/sec
   8Kb random N     Y    :     1335.467    KB/sec
   8Kb seq.   Y     N    :     5141.116    KB/sec
   8Kb seq.   Y     Y    :     3970.993    KB/sec
   8Kb random Y     N    :     1306.479    KB/sec
   8Kb random Y     Y    :      932.923    KB/sec
   16K seq.   N     N    :     4490.667    KB/sec
   16K seq.   N     Y    :     3739.733    KB/sec
   16K random N     N    :     1261.867    KB/sec
   16K random N     Y    :     2387.200    KB/sec
   16K seq.   Y     N    :     5118.045    KB/sec
   16K seq.   Y     Y    :     3997.867    KB/sec
   16K random Y     N    :     2246.400    KB/sec
   16K random Y     Y    :     1958.180    KB/sec
   32K seq.   N     N    :     4836.267    KB/sec
   32K seq.   N     Y    :     4130.133    KB/sec
   32K random N     N    :     2144.000    KB/sec
   32K random N     Y    :     2916.267    KB/sec
   32K seq.   Y     N    :     5086.022    KB/sec
   32K seq.   Y     Y    :     9122.133    KB/sec
   32K random Y     N    :     3338.168    KB/sec
   32K random Y     Y    :     3548.667    KB/sec
   64K seq.   N     N    :     5499.733    KB/sec
   64K seq.   N     Y    :     3178.667    KB/sec
   64K random N     N    :     3136.000    KB/sec
   64K random N     Y    :     2837.333    KB/sec
   64K seq.   Y     N    :     5134.988    KB/sec
   64K seq.   Y     Y    :     3404.800    KB/sec
   64K random Y     N    :     4979.950    KB/sec
   64K random Y     Y    :     4908.277    KB/sec
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :     3309.691    File I/O-marks
 Memory
   5    kB copy          :      483.734    MB/s
   10   kB copy          :      132.629    MB/s
   20   kB copy          :       67.026    MB/s
   40   kB copy          :       62.805    MB/s
   80   kB copy          :       57.418    MB/s
   160  kB copy          :       57.392    MB/s
   320  kB copy          :       52.407    MB/s
   640  kB copy          :       45.183    MB/s
   1280 kB copy          :       36.860    MB/s
   5    kB read          :      163.374    MB/s
   10   kB read          :      121.382    MB/s
   20   kB read          :      105.643    MB/s
   40   kB read          :      105.662    MB/s
   80   kB read          :      105.658    MB/s
   160  kB read          :       97.857    MB/s
   320  kB read          :       82.264    MB/s
   640  kB read          :       68.422    MB/s
   1280 kB read          :       60.159    MB/s
   5    kB write         :       73.782    MB/s
   10   kB write         :       83.748    MB/s
   20   kB write         :       83.841    MB/s
   40   kB write         :       83.877    MB/s
   80   kB write         :       83.887    MB/s
   160  kB write         :       83.989    MB/s
   320  kB write         :       83.549    MB/s
   640  kB write         :       83.549    MB/s
   1280 kB write         :       83.556    MB/s
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       76.549    Mem-marks

***********************************

Indelible Blue Einstein Series Cyrix 6x86 P150+

-----

Over the years, as Indelible Blue's software business has grown, they have taken the logical and welcome step of carrying a complete line of PCs preloaded with OS/2.  While they have been preloading and selling machines since Warp 3 was the standard, the systems now come fully loaded with Warp 4 and a few other notable goodies.  Our test system from I.B. this month was a Cyrix 6x86 P150+ Einstein series machine.

Receiving the System

Indelible Blue sells and ships their machines throughout the U.S.A. and Canada so we had no problems getting our test machine sent to our offices in Canada.  Canadian customers should be aware though, that Indelible Blue's on-site warranty is only available in the U.S.  Other international orders are not available at this time.

The shipping box that Indelible Blue's machine came in was efficiently designed to contain the computer itself, the keyboard, mouse, all cables and manuals and the speakers for the system.  This made the box a little larger than normal but meant the shippers had less chance of losing extra pieces--always a plus.

When we unpacked the Einstein, our initial impression was that it was a "mid" tower case.  In fact, the box was 17" high (instead of 13" or 14" for a "normal" mini-tower case).  This extra 3" made a lot of difference inside.  First, there were three 5 1/4" drive bays instead of only two, leaving two free (one was filled with the CD-ROM).  (There were also two 3 1/2" drive bays, filled with the hard disk and the floppy drive.)  Second, digging around inside the case looked like it would be much easier than with many cramped mini-tower cases.  The roomy case was a definite asset.

Another nice feature of the Einstein case was its unusual method of access.  On the rear of the machine were the typical screws, but the side panels were actually separate from each other.  We were able to remove just two screws and pop off one side, giving us as much access to the innards as we would have had if we had removed a more awkward one-piece shell from a normal machine.

The mouse shipped with our test system was light and responsive and the buttons had a nice tactile feel.  The keyboard (Win95 variety) was also pleasant to use although it was slightly stiff.

The Hardware

Under the hood, our test machine was built for speed--with economy in mind.  As with all our review machines, this one had 32 Meg of RAM installed in one 4 slot bank (a total of 256 Megabytes of RAM was possible on the motherboard).  The machine was powered by Cyrix's 6x86 P150+ chip, which boasts Pentium level speeds, and featured a Western Digital Caviar 21600 hard drive.  The BIOS was manufactured by Award (dated 9/9/96), the motherboard supported EPA Energy Star specifications and had a 256 Kilobyte cache.  The modem was an OEM USRobotics Sportster 28.8 fax/modem; the video card was an S3 Trio64 V+ video card with 2 Meg RAM.  To round things out there, was an ESS 1868 sound card (discussed in this month's Need for Speed column) with a Panasonic CR-583-J 8x CD-ROM and a pair of MLi 691H speakers attached to it.

Manuals and Documentation

The Einstein systems that are sold by Indelible Blue are actually manufactured by another company, Diamond Flower Inc., and bought in bulk by Indelible Blue.  I.B. puts their name on the machines and installs all the software that an OS/2 user needs to get up and running.

The manuals and other documentation are left practically untouched from when they are shipped out by DFI, with the exception of slapping an Einstein sticker on the front of the binder which holds the motherboard, video card and CD-ROM manuals.  These manuals are, as most are, more or less Windows oriented and offer little help to OS/2 users.  Of course, our test machine was shipped already configured so this was not a problem.  Just in case, floppies and CDs containing drivers for the various hardware items were also included.

Machine Configuration

The test system shipped with its Western Digital hard disk partitioned into two drives, a 788 Meg HPFS C: drive (the boot drive) and an empty 794 Meg HPFS D: drive.  Boot Manager was also installed in case we preferred to install other OS's, but OS/2 was (unfortunately) put on the first hard drive.  This meant that either repartitioning or the use of Partition Magic would have been necessary if we had wanted DOS/Windows on the first partition.

The machine shipped with a few extras worth mentioning.  Indelible Blue preloaded Ray Gwinn's SIO communications drivers but, unfortunately, they were not the registered version.  This meant that after a trial period they "expired" and we were forced to wait an extra 30 seconds each time we booted (we could have registered or removed the drivers, of course).

There were also demo applications from Oberon Software and Hilgraeve installed.  The Oberon demos were TE/2 Pro!, DiskStat PLUS! and Phone Log; the Hilgraeve app was the KopyKat demo.

The Einstein's claim to preload fame (after Warp 4 itself) was the licensed copy of Object Desktop v1.5.  Stardock's best selling WPS enhancer was standard on the Indelible Blue machine we tested and was a great bargain as well as very useful.

The preloaded software worked largely as intended with only one noticeable problem.  When we first booted the machine and began preliminary inspection, we found that it would frequently "stall": the machine would not quite hang but there were periods of significant system unresponsiveness.  Noticing that Object Desktop's Control Center was enabled by default and that both it and the WarpCenter had their CPU meters displayed, we remembered hearing about a conflict inherent in this setup.  We disabled the Control Center and the problem disappeared (turning off the CPU monitor while leaving the Control Center enabled had the same effect).  This was a minor inconvenience but a novice user might spend some time pulling his or her hair trying to figure out the problem.

Indelible Blue did not modify the CONFIG.SYS file in any noticeable way before shipping.  The swap file's initial size was left at a meager 2 Megabytes and Maxwait was left at 3.  Also, Netscape Navigator for OS/2 was not installed on this system so we were required to install it ourselves.  Users without the Navigator archive file on disk would also have to sit through the tedious download.

Performance Impressions

Installing our standard array of "most used applications" revealed no unexpected problems.  The first thing we did was install the Iomega Zip drivers (v2.34) and plug a parallel port Zip drive into the system.  This caused no problems and soon we had access to the rest of our sample applications: DragText v2.0, PMMail v1.53, Smalled v1.4, Info-ZIP's UnZip v5.20, NPS WPS v1.82, PMView v0.93 and (naturally) Trials of Battle v1.0.

As usual, we do not mean to imply that this battery of installation tests is a comprehensive representation of "typical" OS/2 systems.  It merely allowed us to test installing software from floppy, Zip and CD-ROM drives, using the standard IBM installation program and nonstandard installation programs.  We encountered no compatibility problems in any of our installations or subsequent use of these applications.

The Cyrix 6x86 chip had no problem keeping up with OS/2 and our applications.  Trials of Battle played with smooth animation; playback of multimedia AVIs and MIDI files was crisp (although when attempting to pump a MIDI and an AVI file through the CPU at the same time, the AVI showed some slight jerkiness).  We had no crashes at any time with this system.  Overall, performance was very good.

Video performance, however, was not as sharp as it could have been.  Although the S3 Trio64 V+ card was speedy due to its PCI bus interface, at 800x600 screen redraws were not instantaneous and could have been better.  A good card but not as good as the Matrox Millennium.

Many of you are probably wondering, "but what about VoiceType?  Did it work on the Cyrix chip?"  The answer is, yes.

We tested VoiceType Navigation and Dictation on the Einstein machine and both worked reasonably well.  There was a great deal of hard disk activity, even with the 32 Meg of RAM, but there was no doubt that the CPU could handle the task.  We did not have a high degree of accuracy but this could be due to the short time we used VoiceType on this system (or a microphone problem).

Have a look at the Sysbench 0.9.1c results below for this machine to compare with your own or any of our other review machines.  (For details of what Sysbench is and where to get it, see above for the Editor's note on hardware reviews.)

Conclusions and Recommendations

The Indelible Blue Einstein review system was a very good machine.  At a bargain price of US$1,599 (without monitor), this is both an economical machine and a fast one.  Plenty of hard disk space, ample processing power and good expansion capabilities, not to mention Indelible Blue's on-site service warranty in the U.S.A., make this machine a great value.

---

Rating: * * * *

(4 out of 5 -- Good Buy)

---

* System Configuration:

CPU: Cyrix 6x86 P150+
Cache: 256 K
RAM: 32 Meg
Video: S3 Trio64 V+ w/ 2 Meg RAM
Hard Drive: 1.5 Gig Western Digital Caviar 21600
CD-ROM: Panasonic 8x
Floppy: 3 1/2"
Sound Card: ESS 1868
Modem: USRobotics Sportster V.34 28.8 fax/modem

Price as tested: US$1,599
w/ 15" monitor: US$1,968
Shipping Area: U.S.A. and Canada (on-site warranty available in U.S. only)
Applicable Taxes: North Carolina residents must pay a 6% sales tax.
 
Manufacturer:
Indelible Blue, Inc.
3209 Gresham Lake Road, Ste. 135
Raleigh, NC   27615
U.S.A.

Voice: (800) 776-8284
Fax: (919) 878-7479
e-mail: (sales@indelible-blue.com) sales@indelible-blue.com or (hardware@indelible-blue.com) hardware@indelible-blue.com
WWW: (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/

***********************************

Sysbench 0.9.1c result file created Fri Jan 17 15:25:08 1997
Machine name    - Indelible Blue Einstein
Manufacturer    - Indelible Blue
Motherboard     - G586VPM/CP2
Chipset         - Unknown motherboard chipset
Processor       - Cyrix 6x86 P150+
External cache  - 256 K
Graphics card   - S3 Trio64 V+
Disk Controller - Unknown disk controller
Machine data
Coprocessor     = Yes
RAM             = 32.00 MB
Priority        = Dynamic
Maxwait         = 3
Timeslice       = (32,32)
Swap file size  = 16.00MB
  ...initially  = 2.00MB
Video data
Resolution      = 800x600x16 bits/pixel
Number planes   = 0
Screen Access   = Direct
Bank Switched   = No
Bytes/scanline  = 1600
Aperture size   = 2097152
 Graphics
   BitBlt S->S cpy       :       41.722    Mpixels/s
   BitBlt M->S cpy       :        1.598    Mpixels/s
   Filled Rectangle      :       58.271    Mpixels/s
   Pattern Fill          :       60.327    Mpixels/s
   Vertical Lines        :        7.060    Mpixels/s
   Horizontal Lines      :       11.337    Mpixels/s
   Diagonal Lines        :        8.671    Mpixels/s
   Text Render           :        5.310    Mpixels/s
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       24.478    PM-marks
 CPU integer
   Dhrystone             :      119.991    VAX 11/780 MIPS
   Hanoi                 :       75.562    moves/25 usec
   Heapsort              :       63.679    MIPS
   Sieve                 :       93.809    MIPS
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       95.263    CPUint-marks
 CPU float
   Linpack               :       11.266    MFLOPS
   Flops                 :       10.875    MFLOPS
   Fast Fourier Tr.      :        8.774    VAX FFT's
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       10.491    CPUfloat-marks
 Direct Interface to video extensions - DIVE
   Video bus bandw.      :       10.673    MB/s
   DIVE fun              :       36.963    fps at 640x480x256
   M->S, DD,   1.00:1    :       36.430    fps at 640x480x256
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       13.654    DIVE-marks
 Disk I/O - disk 1:  1547 MB
   Avg. data access time :       17.000    ms
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :        1.546    MB/s
   Average Transfer rate :        1.538    MB/s
   Disk use CPU load     :       99.448    percent
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       12.652    DiskIO-marks
 File I/O - cache read - Drive C:
   4Kb seq.   N     N    :     1486.672    KB/sec
   4Kb seq.   N     Y    :     1408.529    KB/sec
   4Kb random N     N    :      396.267    KB/sec
   4Kb random N     Y    :      667.200    KB/sec
   4Kb seq.   Y     N    :      400.897    KB/sec
   4Kb seq.   Y     Y    :     1483.636    KB/sec
   4Kb random Y     N    :      599.349    KB/sec
   4Kb random Y     Y    :      151.513    KB/sec
   8Kb seq.   N     N    :     1649.600    KB/sec
   8Kb seq.   N     Y    :     1396.487    KB/sec
   8Kb random N     N    :      738.667    KB/sec
   8Kb random N     Y    :     1024.000    KB/sec
   8Kb seq.   Y     N    :      642.048    KB/sec
   8Kb seq.   Y     Y    :     1520.533    KB/sec
   8Kb random Y     N    :     1195.901    KB/sec
   8Kb random Y     Y    :      756.764    KB/sec
   16K seq.   N     N    :     1696.000    KB/sec
   16K seq.   N     Y    :     1363.872    KB/sec
   16K random N     N    :     1367.467    KB/sec
   16K random N     Y    :     1561.600    KB/sec
   16K seq.   Y     N    :      913.691    KB/sec
   16K seq.   Y     Y    :     1526.120    KB/sec
   16K random Y     N    :     1838.203    KB/sec
   16K random Y     Y    :     1286.470    KB/sec
   32K seq.   N     N    :     1811.200    KB/sec
   32K seq.   N     Y    :     2169.383    KB/sec
   32K random N     N    :     1376.000    KB/sec
   32K random N     Y    :     1785.600    KB/sec
   32K seq.   Y     N    :     1356.831    KB/sec
   32K seq.   Y     Y    :     2730.667    KB/sec
   32K random Y     N    :     2395.654    KB/sec
   32K random Y     Y    :     1846.236    KB/sec
   64K seq.   N     N    :     1803.648    KB/sec
   64K seq.   N     Y    :     1920.298    KB/sec
   64K random N     N    :     1707.405    KB/sec
   64K random N     Y    :     1774.933    KB/sec
   64K seq.   Y     N    :     1454.353    KB/sec
   64K seq.   Y     Y    :     1915.733    KB/sec
   64K random Y     N    :     2761.679    KB/sec
   64K random Y     Y    :     2030.933    KB/sec
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :     1447.801    File I/O-marks
 Memory
   5    kB copy          :      435.227    MB/s
   10   kB copy          :      445.919    MB/s
   20   kB copy          :       45.955    MB/s
   40   kB copy          :       45.788    MB/s
   80   kB copy          :       41.661    MB/s
   160  kB copy          :       31.975    MB/s
   320  kB copy          :       27.387    MB/s
   640  kB copy          :       23.802    MB/s
   1280 kB copy          :       22.888    MB/s
   5    kB read          :      150.989    MB/s
   10   kB read          :      151.222    MB/s
   20   kB read          :      128.537    MB/s
   40   kB read          :      107.194    MB/s
   80   kB read          :      107.476    MB/s
   160  kB read          :       96.150    MB/s
   320  kB read          :       83.333    MB/s
   640  kB read          :       75.503    MB/s
   1280 kB read          :       72.897    MB/s
   5    kB write         :      150.895    MB/s
   10   kB write         :      150.826    MB/s
   20   kB write         :       65.806    MB/s
   40   kB write         :       41.667    MB/s
   80   kB write         :       36.693    MB/s
   160  kB write         :       36.599    MB/s
   320  kB write         :       33.926    MB/s
   640  kB write         :       31.250    MB/s
   1280 kB write         :       30.521    MB/s
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       83.239    Mem-marks

***********************************

OS/2 e-Zine! - 1996 Readers' Choice Awards

To vote for the 1996 Readers' Choice Awards, copy the form below, fill in your votes beside the categories and mail to vote@haligonian.com with the words "vote 1996" (withou the quotes) in the subject line.  You will receive an automated reply telling you that your vote has been received.

NOTE: only one vote per category per person can be accepted.
      
(See below for notes on categories;  voting instructions; and deadline for votes.)

-----

Your Name (required):
Your e-mail address (required):

-----
Developer Awards
      
  Best Freeware or Shareware Developer
  Best Commercial Software Developer

-----
Internet Applications

  Best e-mail Client
  Best Web Browser
  Best News Reader
  Best FTP Client
  Best IRC Client

-----
Business/Producitivity Applications
      
  Best Word Processor
  Best Spreadsheet
  Best Database
  Best PIM/Scheduler
  Best Communications Application
  Best Graphics Application
  Best Disk/File Utility or Suite
  Best WPS Enhancement

-----
Development/System Tools
      
  Best Programming Environment or Compiler
  Best System Utility/Tool
  Best Text Editor or Programming Editor
  Best HTML Editor

-----
Games/Edutainment

  Best Game
  Best Edutainment or Multimedia Application

***********************************

OS/2 e-Zine! 1996 Readers' Choice Awards

-----

How We Chose Our Categories

We have chosen the various categories in the OS/2 e-Zine! 1996 Readers' Choice Awards to represent a broad cross section of the OS/2 market.  Each category is meant to include many applications so readers can vote on which of those applications they feel is best.

Because of the nature of the OS/2 market, however, some categories may not include many applications.  We chose to include categories such as "Best Spreadsheet" and others in spite of this because we felt that these categories themselves were important enough to warrant doing so.

Voting Instructions

To enter your vote(s) in the OS/2 e-Zine! 1996 Readers' Choice Awards, you must either use the form provided or e-mail your votes to (votes@haligonian.com) votes@haligonian.com with "vote 1996" (with the quotes) in the subject line.

To use the on-line form:

1. enter your name and e-mail address (these are required to authenticate the uniqueness of your vote)

2. in the appropriate category, enter the company or product that you believe was the best of its kind in 1996

3. repeat step #2 for every category you wish to vote in

4. if you have no opinion in a category, leave the field blank

5. when you have entered all your votes, click the "Send Us Your Votes" button at the bottom of the form one time

Note: Only one vote per category per person will be accepted.

Readers may enter votes in as few as one category or as many as all categories.  Please remember though, only one vote per category per person. Duplicate votes made by the same person in one category will be discarded.

To be eligible for the OS/2 e-Zine! 1996 Readers' Choice Awards, companies must have been operating and products must have been publicly available on or before December 31, 1996.

Voting Deadline

Votes must be received by Haligonian Media on or before midnight February 13th, 1997, Eastern Standard Time.  Due to the nature of the Internet, we recommend you send in your vote as early as possible.  Haligonian Media can not be responsible for lost or incompletely transmitted votes.  Votes received after midnight February 13th, 1997 (EST) will be discarded.

Results of the OS/2 e-Zine! 1996 Readers' Choice Awards will be calculated and reported in our February 16th, 1997 issue along with summaries of the winning products and companies.

***********************************

Mod Players Revisited	- by Chris Wenham

-----

My (http://www.haligonian.com/os2/v1n14/modplyrs.htm) December review of Mod players brought by far the most feedback that I've ever had for anything I've written for OS/2 e-Zine!.  Most of the letters pointed out mistakes and omissions which made the review unfair.

It's also true that since that review, at least one major MOD player has been updated; UltiMod 1.5 has been rewritten to use SOM (IBM's Object technology that's built into OS/2 and the Workplace Shell) and an OS/2 port of another player has been released too.  December's review also missed covering Muse/2, a player that would have been reviewed if it wasn't for technical reasons and a deadline that I had to meet.  The other discrepancy in last month's review was that many players were optimized for the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) sound cards, but little was mentioned of the higher performance these players achieve when used with one.  Unfortunately, I cannot reasonably judge this feature seeing as I don't have a GUS to test them on.

But since human ineptitude is no reason not to provide the absolute best service for our readers, here's my follow-up review to help tie a few loose ends.

Muse/2 1.3 by Jason Gunthorpe

The DART enabled Muse/2 was released first as an OS/2 S3M player, appearing as the music engine for the "Ethos Peripheral Evolution Demo"--a program that entertainingly shows off the skills of a team of programmers, artists and musicians.  Later it was released separately and now boasts the ability to play more digital music formats than any other player for OS/2.  Its most notable feature is support for IT and IT2 formats--not seen in any other OS/2 player I've reviewed--and very welcome considering the number of excellent quality songs written in this format.

Muse/2 runs in text-mode and does not have a PM front end, however its interface does provide better flexibility for controlling playback than any other current OS/2 music player.  However, this extra flexibility can be confusing for users who don't understand what many of the features do and the documentation doesn't go very far to explain everything either.

On the Digital Mixer Control Panel you'll find a number of filters for improving the playback quality of music files, mostly noise reduction though and nothing like the special effects filters you get in DMP for OS/2.

Aside from the filters there is something called Dynamic Scaling Control, a system for adjusting the scaling and amplification of the song on the fly during playback to help bring out the richness of the music.  It's this part which is a little foggy to understand and not covered very well in the documentation.  The 'Auto Spike' setting can noticeably improve the playback of the more advanced digital music formats like .XM and .IT, which can support a wider number of output channels.  On some music files this doesn't seem like a good idea to have switched on, since it can amplify in the wrong places and give you a bit of a shock if you have the volume up high.

Playback of .IT digital music files is outstanding, crisp and clear at 44khz sampling rate.  MOD files, however, sound a little 'out of tune' compared to other players.  A big problem with Muse/2 is that there doesn't seem to be any way in which one can increase the size of the DART buffer, meaning that when you run it in the background alongside other applications you could experience annoying pauses in the music.  This doesn't seem to be too much of a problem for songs that are inherently low on CPU drain (the more channels the music file demands then the more processor power is needed to play it) or if you're playing them back at 22khz.

Fans of Muse/2 enjoy its support for the entire .S3M digital music format, plus the unique ability it has for playing files stored in .ZIP or .RAR archives.  Muse/2 will seamlessly extract the song from the archive, play it and then delete it before moving on to the next one.  Considering that digital music files compress very well it's a valuable feature for those conscious of disk space.

Supported file formats: MOD, STM, MTM, 669, S3M, XM, ULT, FAR, WOW, IT, IT2

Ratings:
Play Quality: For .IT and most other formats; 10  For .MOD format: 8
User Interface: 7
CPU Load: 8 (Also has GUS support)


Refresh of UltiMod 1.5

Even though the version number hasn't changed (although the minor revision number has) UltiMod was recently re-released having been retrofitted with IBM's SOM technology.  The features and play quality remain unchanged but the user interface has been updated a little, inheriting the colored notebook tabs of Warp 4.0 and adding the ability to associate your music files with the player.  According to the author, this lays down the base for more interesting features to come, such as further WPS integration.  With future versions of UltiMod we can expect the ability to create song lists just by dragging and dropping them into a Desktop folder.

Ratings (from last month):
Play Quality: 8
User Interface: 7
CPU Load: PM Front-end: 9  Text mode: 8

MikMod 2.09b for OS/2 MMPM

This is a simple recompile of an existing DOS player with drivers added to support OS/2's MMPM.  It has no DART support and the user interface is command-line and as bare-bones as it gets.  The author of the port, Stefan Tibus, has included the source code for his OS/2 drivers so the user can recompile the player with newer versions of the original program.

Ratings:
Play Quality: 7
User Interface: 3
CPU Load: 6

---

* Muse/2 v1.3
by Jason Gunthorpe
download from (http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/mmedia/mus2v131.zip) Hobbes (ZIP, 270k)
Registration: Freeware

* UltiMOD
download from the (http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/Henry/Sander/) UltiMOD homepage
Registration: GUS version is Shareware, DART/MMPM version is freeware.

* MikMod v2.09b
download from (http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/mmedia/mikmos2.zip) Hobbes (ZIP, 202k)
Registration: MMOS/2 Drivers freeware, original package Shareware (US$25)

---

(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.

***********************************

MD+F Special Effects(Volume 1) for ColorWorks V2	- by Chris Wenham

-----

Modular Dreams Incorporated is the first company outside of SPG to produce a set of effects plug-ins for ColorWorks 2.  Their first volume of 8 plug-in effects include some simple retouching filters plus a couple of "Woah, cool!" type effects that are fun to play with.

Equate Exposure and Flicker

Equate Exposure will correct image brightness and contrast at a localized level while Flicker will "flicker image pixels" or redraw them using their primary color components while maintaining original brightness.

Halo

The Halo filter will straightforwardly add a cartoon-like 'halo' effect around the edges of the image you're working on.  There's not much to configure here; you can't specify the thickness of the halo or how widely it is spaced from the edges.

Offcolor

This effect can actually be quite useful in day-to-day image work.  It works just like the 'Offset' filter in PhotoShop, but here you can control the offset of the Red, Green and Blue channels independently.  In this example I've offset the red channel horizontally by 20 pixels.  The effect looks a little bit like those '3D' pictures you have to view with special glasses.  I could just as easily offset the blue channel -10 pixels vertically, or vertically and horizontally, or I could offset all three channels in any direction all in one go.  It's a very powerful tool since you can achieve the regular offset effect just by entering the same pixel values for all three channels.

Picasso

The Picasso effect does what other filters (named after famous painters with a particular style) of similar monickers do.  That is it re-creates your image to look as if it was painted in the same style as the famous Pablo Picasso himself (or in the programmer's opinion anyway).  This effect will paint with circular swirls of the brush, looking like multicolored pencil shavings as seen from above. The effect is startling and actually looks a bit like a flower mural.

This plug-in gives you the ability to control the X and Y spacing as well as the radius of the swirls.  The plug-in dialog does not, however, show you what the values of these variables are.  You just get a slider-bar control for each and have to guess the optimal settings by trial and error.

Spiral

Spiral is the first of the "warping effect" plug-ins.  This one will give you a spiral effect much like as if your image was being flushed down a vortex, very similar to the spiral warping of clouds seen in some OS/2 commercials and background bitmaps.  The spiral can be limited to just one instance of the source image, or you can tile it to continue forever.

Swirl

Swirl can best be described as, "stretching your picture down a spiral staircase."  You can specify the number of degrees, both in positive and negative measurements, that the image is swirled through.

Waves

MD+F's Waves effect is probably the most configurable that I've seen, although it's very easy to produce chaos with it.  It's also the most powerful effect in the set, with the ability to control the number of waves, rings and their height percentages, the number of wiggles and their percentage, something called a "Spider Multiplier", and more.  In fact, it's so configurable and powerful that I had a hard time trying to get just an ordinary waves effect like the one possible with Impos/2.

Complaints

I did find one problem with the package: it doesn't seem to be very well multithreaded.  A complex Wave effect run on a large canvas will give you the "wait" cursor for a while and slow down any other program you have running in the background.  I have Process Commander installed on my system and the PC Assistant would usually complain after an MD+F effect was finished running.

Summary

If you're a serious ColorWorks user, GET THIS.  It's only US$27.99 and it adds so much to ColorWorks that you'll soon wonder how you did without it.

---

* MD+F Special Effects (Volume 1)
by (http://www.modulardreams.com/) Modular Dreams Incorporated
MSRP: US$27.99

---

(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.

***********************************

Another View of Archivers	- by Joey Lindstrom

-----

The main reason I decided to write this article was that I felt there were a few "underdog" products available to OS/2 users that I'm quite sure they'd be using regularly, if only they knew about them.  As we all know, OS/2 itself is one such "underdog"--so I felt I'd be speaking to a receptive audience.

Specifically, I'm talking about compression products.  We're all familiar with the ubiquitous "zip" files that we see on myriad FTP sites all over the world.  It seems that nearly all shareware is distributed as a .ZIP file these days... and I feel it's a shame that we, as enlightened OS/2 users, should blindly follow along with the rest of the lemmings on this.  Why do I feel that way?  Two reasons:

1. Like VHS, the Atari 2600, and Windows 95, the PKZIP format is certainly the "consumers choice" yet far from the best available choice.  There are a number of superior archivers available.

2. PKWare has all but abandoned us poor OS/2 users (editor's note: At press time, PKWare confirmed that the long awaited next versions of PKZip/PKUnzip for OS/2 were entering beta testing ).  While it's true there are work-alike programs such as Info-ZIP's Zip and Unzip available, the fact is that the people who define the standard don't want a blasted thing to do with you and me.

OK, OK, I know... another OS/2 user blasts "the way things are".  I accept my weakness.  I'm not going to say that we must rally the troops and insist upon better standards.  Well, OK, maybe we should do that, but let's talk about that later.  For today, I'd like you to consider that just because programs are distributed to you in ZIP format, does not mean you need to keep them that way.  Similarly, when you're archiving files for your own purposes, why settle for second best?

In contemplating how I'd go about writing this article, I initially decided I'd do a "round up" of all available archivers and put each one through its paces.  But then I said to myself, "hey, Joey, there's nothing new and interesting about an archiver round up... others have done this work already".  Ignoring for the moment the dangers of talking to myself, I decided the simplest and best approach was to compare these products with the existing standard (PKZip) and highlight the advantages of the made-for-OS/2 alternatives.  Hey, it beats working for a living.

RAR v2.00 - By Eugene Roshal

This program appeared in the MS-DOS world a few years ago, and has recently been joined by OS/2, Windows, and Unix versions, with additional platform support still to come.  Quite simply, this is a product that, unlike PKZIP, continues to evolve, and already contains more bells and whistles than you probably need.  Most of them are unobtrusive and don't get in your way though: they can be ignored when all you want to do is a quick-and-dirty archive of the latest news articles you've downloaded from usenet.

Like PKZIP, you use simple easy-to-remember commands to invoke the program to begin archiving, extract files, create self-extracting files, etc., although with RAR you don't have to remember "it's ZIP for making an archive, and UNZIP to unpack it"--it's all done with the main RAR.EXE program.  But some of us find remembering command-line switches to be something to be avoided.  Enter Interactive Mode.

No Front-End Needed

Everybody and his brother has invented and released as shareware the latest, greatest, front-end for handling ZIP files.  I think this tells us something: people want that front end, and it's missing from the base product.  RAR doesn't have this limitation.  Simply typing RAR at the command line provides your front-end.  From this menu-driven interface, you can do it all: Pack.  Unpack.  Set various options.  Slice.  Dice.  Whip and puree.  Truly the dream product of the 21st century.

But there are some who despise front-ends and continue to rely on command-line switches.  After all, menus are for wimps, right?.  But wait: RAR is so feature-packed, you'd never remember all the switches to configure it for, let's say, "maximum compression, solid mode, multimedia compression enabled".  No problem.  Invoke the RAR menu program once (honest, you only have to do it once!) and set those options as default behaviour.  From then on, you can:

RAR A ARCHIVENAME filename filename etc.

to your heart's content, and RAR will behave the way you want it.  Every time.  And, best of all, all these options can still be overridden by command-line switches, so if you want to disable multimedia compression just this one time, one switch is all you need.  Typing "RAR -?" gives you a list of 'em at the drop of a hat: no looking through manual files (which, if you're like me, are stored in the most out-of-the-way directory possible).

But What Else, Joey?

So far, RAR sounds like a cool archiver with a cool front end.  But ZIP is the standard and there are some pretty funky front ends available for it.  Gimme some more reasons to use RAR!

OK, how about overall compression?  RAR can use five different compression levels, ranging from "fast, minimal compression" (level 1) to "slow, maximal compression" (level 5).  When set to level 2, RAR performs essentially on a par with Info-ZIP.  When set to any level higher than 2 (I use 5 as my default), the result is slower compression but much better compression than Info-ZIP can manage.  In addition to boasting a better basic compression engine, RAR has two additional features that can greatly increase its ability to reduce archive size.

"SOLID MODE" - When you activate solid mode, RAR operates slightly differently.  Assuming you were to create an archive using several different types of files (i.e.: some .TXT files, a few .DOCS and .HLPS, and maybe one or two .WAVS), RAR will group files with identical extensions together and then compress them together.  I won't get into a long-winded discussion of how file compressors work internally, but basically they're looking for patterns.  Files of similar type will usually have similar patterns, and unlike Info-ZIP, RAR can take advantage of those patterns in common between separate files to create smaller archives.

Here's an example: let's say you've got a 23K text file.  You compress it with Info-ZIP and it reduces to 10K.  Now, make a copy of the uncompressed file and compress them both together into one archive.  Because you're now compressing 46K of data, Info-ZIP will yield a 20K archive.  But watch what happens when RAR discovers that the two files are identical:

  RAR 2.00     Copyright (c) 1993-96 Eugene Roshal     8 May 1996
  Shareware version        Type RAR -? for help

 Solid archive test2.rar

 Name             Size   Packed  Ratio   Date   Time  Attr   CRC-32   Meth Ver
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 temp.txt        23553    10077   42%  01-01-97 19:49 .....A 378F052C  m5a 2.0
 temp2.txt       23553       54    0%  01-01-97 19:49 .....A 378F052C  m5a 2.0
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    2            47106    10131   21%

The second file takes up a whopping 54 bytes.  Now, obviously, you're unlikely to be compressing two identical (but differently named) files together that often, but RAR will note similarities (i.e.: common words, phrases, etc.) between successive files and use those patterns to make better reduction possible.  The result is that using solid mode will, in real world situations, reduce file sizes from 5% to 50% compared with regular, non-solid compression.

There is a downside to this though.  Solid files are not easy to manipulate once built.  That is, it's difficult to update them, add new files to them, or even selectively extract individual files from them.  Previous versions of RAR, and most other archivers that offer "solid mode", did not have the ability to modify solid-archives.  However, RAR 2.00 can do so, although you do take a performance hit.
 So, if you're going to be building archives to actually work with, it's best to disable solid mode (unless you've got a really fast machine).  For storage purposes, solid mode is the way to go.

Another nice compression feature of RAR is that it has not one but two compression engines.  The first one handles most real-world files, but the second zooms in on multimedia files, primarily bitmap and sound files.  While not the first archiver to sport this feature (that kudo belongs to the UC2 archiver for DOS), it's the first one to do it at a reasonable speed.  In fact, it's nearly as fast as Info-ZIP in dealing with .WAV files, yet consistently yields savings of 30%-50% compared to Info-ZIP (and that's not counting additional savings if you use solid mode).

Again, there's a trade-off... in using multimedia mode, you take a slight performance hit on every file you archive, since the archiver must check every file and determine which engine to use.

RAR also comes with a utility called RCVT, which allows you to convert archives from one format to another (RAR to ZIP, ZIP to RAR, pretty much all formats are covered providing you have a copy of the relevant archiver).  It will, optionally, invoke a virus-scanner during the conversion process, which makes it very valuable to people who run bulletin boards, maintain FTP sites, etc.

Summary

RAR is a feature-laden archiver, including:

o  Creation of multivolume archives (perfect for backing up to floppies, zip-drives, and the like)
o  Creation of self-extracting archives
o  Handling of archives from multiple platforms
o  Authenticity Verification (registered version only)
o  Superior compression engines
o  Built-in front-end
o  Format conversion utility included
o  Everything else you'll find in PKZIP/PKUNZIP and comparable archivers

It is shareware but does not require registration unless you want the ability to create "secure" archives for distribution (authenticity verification).  In short, it costs you nothing to use it other than the willpower to try something new.

ZipStream v1.20 - Carbon Based Software

If you think my opinions regarding RAR are biased, well... OK, you're right.  But only because I truly believe it's an excellent product, one that I use every day.  The second program I want to feature here is one that I helped beta-test for Mick Grey of CBS (no, not the network).  This also gives me an automatic bias, but again, I recommend it now because I truly believe in it.  There are only a few "must-have" programs out there: this is definitely one of them.

ZipStream, like RAR and Info-ZIP, is an archiver.  But not the way you think it is.

ZipStream, like DCF/2 and Stacker, is a disk compression utility.  But not the way you think it is.

Based on PKZip (and using code licensed from PKWare), ZipStream combines the best of both worlds.  After installation, you can define "zip volumes": literally, a drive letter that points to a particular directory on one of your hard drives.  For example, I've got drive W: pointed at G:\ZIPVOL-W.  Your OS/2 system will then believe that W: is a networked drive, and will allow you to perform any file operation on any file contained in that drive.  But the beauty is: ZipStream will compress and decompress those files on-the-fly, allowing you the ability to simultaneously compress your files and be able to use them without having to unpack them first.

No Container Files

The biggest drawback to conventional disk compression utilities is that they use a "container file".  That is, a large file is built on your hard drive to hold all the compressed files: then the disk compressor builds a "virtual" hard drive volume inside this container.  It's invisible to you but results in a lot of work for the compressor.  The main problem is this: what happens if the power fails, or the system crashes, while files are being written?  Answer: it will corrupt the container file, and depending on the type of damage done, it could damage some or all of the files contained in the virtual disk.  And that really sucks.

ZipStream doesn't have this drawback.  Every file is stored as a separate file, using the original filename, in the "container" directory that you defined.  Files can then be transported via floppy disk, modem, or whatever, to another system in compressed form, simply by copying the files from the container directory.  In my example, if I wanted to give you a disk of compressed files, I'd just copy those files to drive W:, and then:

COPY G:\ZIPVOL-W\*.* A:

Or, alternately:

ZSATTACH Z: A:\
COPY Z: Q:
ZSATTACH Z: /D

In the second example, I created a new ZipStream volume, drive Z:, and pointed it at drive A:'s root directory.  After doing so, the COPY operation caused ZipStream to decompress the files on-the-fly before copying them to drive Q: (at which point they'd be compressed again - but you could just as easily have copied them to a non-compressed drive).  Finally, I destroyed the Z: drive (using the /D flag).

ZipStream features a handy status window which 
minimizes to get out of your way quickly.

Performance

When I bought my 486DX/33 machine about 5 years ago, it was state-of-the-art.  I told myself then that it would be all the computer I'd ever need.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Today, of course, this beast on my desktop is badly outdated and badly underpowered.  Today's software tends to be extremely bloated, requiring 12 megs of dynamic link libraries just to draw a window.  If those 12 megs are compressed, and have to be decompressed before being loaded into your system's memory, that's only going to increase loading time.

While this is a concern, ZipStream's decompression engine is extremely efficient.  In real-world application, I've found that it has added between 10%-30% to my program load times.  On my machine, powered as it is by a little hamster on a spinning wheel, I barely notice the extra delay.  Anyone using a faster machine very definitely won't notice any difference.

The only time I run into problems is when manipulating very large database files in unusual ways (specifically, using the "Squish" mail processor that comes with the Maximus BBS system), which forces ZipStream to load and decompress the entire file into memory.  While the developer managed to resolve that particular problem, it's still best to leave large files that will continually be modified on uncompressed drives (or set a low byte ceiling, described below).

ZipStream is a made-for-OS/2 application.  It supports both FAT and HPFS drives, including extended attributes.  It was designed from the ground up to use multithreading and to take full advantage of the fact that it is operating in a multitasking environment.  One big bonus of this attitude is file writing.  If you copy 20 files to a ZipStream volume, those 20 files are copied immediately, in uncompressed form.  ZipStream will then, one by one, reload each file, compress it, and save it.  It does this as a low-priority background task, using up CPU time that would otherwise be unused.  The upshot is that there is absolutely no performance hit when writing files to ZipStream volumes.  In fact the only way you'd even know the files were being compressed was if you looked up at the CPU meter on the WarpCenter and saw it maxed out at 100%.  Even then, because the compression thread runs at low priority, your other applications will continue to run at normal speed.  The only performance hit you'll ever see is when reading files (as mentioned earlier), because ZipStream must decompress the files before it gives them to OS/2.

ZipStream is based on the PKZIP v2.04g code, meaning file compression efficiency should be pretty much identical to what you regularly expect from PKZIP.

Because files are compressed on an individual basis, the worst that could happen during a power failure or system crash is that the file currently being written to disk may be corrupted.  You face this risk all the time anyways, so in effect ZipStream adds zero risk to you and your data.  There's no container file to corrupt.  And, if there were several file compressions pending before the crash, you can resume compression after you reboot

ZipStream doesn't care if the files in a ZipStream archive are compressed or uncompressed: if they're uncompressed, they're simply handed off to the OS/2 file system as-is.

ZipStream is intelligent.  It will:

o  Not try to compress already-compressed files.

o  Allow you to set a byte-ceiling, which is a good way around the problem I mentioned earlier regarding large databases.  The default ceiling is 16 megabytes: it will not attempt to compress any file that exceeds that user-adjustable ceiling.

o  Cache frequently-used files, meaning it won't have to repeatedly decompress a file you use often.  Thresholds are user adjustable.

Drawbacks

There are a few drawbacks to ZipStream, but these generally apply to all disk compression utilities and are difficult to get around (but the work continues).

o  As a general rule you should avoid putting anything in a ZipSream volume that must be loaded at boot time, such as device drivers.  Some of them may load, others won't because the system will attempt to load them before the ZipStream compression engine is loaded.  This restriction also, of course, applies to the OS/2 swapper file.

o  While there are many ways to lessen performance hits, it is still a good idea to leave high-performance programs such as games on uncompressed drives, because they are "tuned" to expect full control of the CPU.  If they try loading files in the background while running something processor-intensive in the foreground, you'll see a definite performance hit as the file is loaded (decompression needs CPU time after all).  Another example is playing high-frequency .WAV files: my system can playback such a file recorded at 44.1 KHz, but not if it's been compressed on a ZipStream volume (playback has to occur in real time, as does decompression, and the two combined are too much for my poor underpowered CPU).

o  It has all the limitations of the PKZip standard.  If disk space is scarce, the best choice is to use a good archiver (like... oh, I dunno... maybe RAR?) to archive your seldom-used files, while putting programs you do use regularly on ZipStream volumes.

o  There seems to be a small buglet in the IBM default "INSTALL" program, which you'll frequently find shipped with third-party programs.  This install program recognizes ZipStream volumes and will attempt to install to them... but the installer will usually fail about 15 seconds into the operation.  I do not know whether other networked and/or compressed drives trigger the same bug: hopefully a fix will be released soon.

Summary

ZipStream is shareware, allowing you to try it for 45 days before it stops functioning (however, the ZSUNPACK utility will still function, so you won't lose any files if it expires before you register).  A fully-packaged product with manual carries an SRP of US$99.95 and the software can be ordered in the US from Indelible Blue.

ZipStream offers no-risk compression of files on an individual basis, completely invisible to the user, requiring nothing more than the user simply copying the files to a ZipStream volume.  Decompression is similarly invisible and unobtrusive: you simply access the file as you normally would and decompression is handled automatically.  It supports FAT and HPFS and creates files that are transportable to other machines.

The only thing ZipStream needs is a major compression-engine overhaul... maybe we could call the new version "RARStream".

---

* RAR v2.00
by Eugene Roshal
download from the (http://www.os2ss.com/archiver/rar200p.exe) OS/2 Supersite (ZIP, 239k)
MSRP: US$35 

* ZipStream v1.20
by (http://www.carbonbased.com.au/) Carbon Based Software
download from Carbon Based Software (ftp://ftp.onthenet.com.au/pub/carbon/zs120d.zip) Australia or (http://www.zgc.com/carbon/zs120d.zip) USA (ZIP, 540k)
MSRP: US$99.95

---

(numanoid@netway.ab.ca) Joey Lindstrom's main claim to fame, other than this article, is as author of (http://www.netway.ab.ca/worldwidewebb/) the largest Gary Numan fan site in the world.  He's an aspiring radio producer but in his current capacity as a taxi driver in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he enjoys being told where to go and how to get there.

***********************************

Seagate CTT8000 & BackAgain/2 Professional v4.0d	- by Donovan Long

-----

Those seeking a simple but capable backup solution take note; from Indelible Blue comes a bundle of a Seagate CTT 8000 Travan 4 tape drive, BackAgain/2 Professional v4.0d, and a 4GB (8GB compressed) tape cartridge.  As reviewed, the tape drive was an internal IDE unit (external and SCSI units are available).

Installation

Setting up the package to test it reinforced a valuable lesson for me: RTFM, it saves you time.  While it was not the most technically complicated installation in the world, the casual user might have a hard time of it.

Using the "skim the manual approach," I wasted a lot of time trying to install the tape drive.  For starters, the pin 1 position is not marked on the tape drive itself.  On page 7, the manual states that, "the interface cable is keyed to prohibit incorrect installation.  Make sure that the blocked pin in the interface connector coincides with the missing pin on the interface card connection."  In skimming this, I assumed they were taking about connecting the cable to the optional interface card AND tape drive.  Unfortunately, the interface cable does not have any blocked pins, so I was at a loss as to how to proceed.  Had I read the manual step by step, I would have arrived at page 10 where a diagram indicates that pin 1 is beside the power connection.  D'oh!  Hey, someone should idiot-proof this stuff. <grin>

This agonizing may not be necessary for all users though.  As an IDE based tape drive, you could just plug the Seagate CTT8000 onto your regular IDE connector.  However, Seagate advises you to not share the IDE cable with a hard drive, so if you have more than 2 IDE hard drives, or have an older machine with only one IDE cable, you'll want to use the small IDE adaptor card that comes with this package.

Selecting an unconflicting IRQ and address is also a bit of a pain, and may be beyond the realm of understanding for most people.  Needless to say, it took me a while to get a proper setting.  My first selection of IRQ & address interfered with one of my BBS' modems (however, I did not notice this until the day after I installed it).  Later I noticed that my second IRQ/address choice was conflicting with the second IDE adaptor on my motherboard.

Make sure you get someone knowledgeable with OS/2, IRQs and the like to install this card for you if you aren't up to it!

During the software installation, BackAgain/2 Pro asked me for the IRQ and address of the tape drive, however, it failed to update the IBM1S506.ADD driver in my config.sys to enable the tape drive's IDE adaptor card.  Eventually I came to page 12 of the BackAgain/2 Pro manual which tells you how to get OS/2 to recognize the additional IDE adaptor.

Wanting to give BackAgain/2 Pro a second chance, I deleted it from my system and removed all traces of it from my ini files and proceeded to reinstall.  At this point I was still trying to find the perfect IRQ/address combination.  The best I was able to achieve was to use the drive and loose access to my third hard disk.  I changed the jumper settings and installed BackAgain/2 Pro telling it the new settings.

This time it did add an additional IBM1S506.ADD statement, pointing to the IDE adapter card.  This TRAP'd beautifully on boot up.  Thinking it was the chosen IRQ/address I had selected, I tried others to the same effect.  Eventually I concluded that either the additional IBM1S506.ADD statement needed to be higher up in the config.sys (it was at the bottom) or there should only be the one statement, so I just added the parameters to recognize the IDE adapter card onto the end of my original IBM1S506.ADD statement, and it worked without a hitch.  This is something that should hopefully be more idiot-proof in a future version.

Perhaps due to the tape drive's bland exterior (with absolutely no markings on it whatsoever) I initially installed the drive upside down.  Whilst reading the manual I found that the drive can be installed upside down or on its side.  Perhaps that is why there are no exterior markings.  Actually, the drive I reviewed was in 5 1/4" adaptor with a blank face plate, but if you were to install the drive in a 3 1/2" bay, the slot for the cartridge would consume the entire space, so I guess it is a moot point.

Another small irritation for me was that you have to supply your own mounting screws--Seagate recommends M3.0 metric screws.  I know we all have these labelled, right?  Nonetheless, I found a screw to hold the drive in place.

The BackAgain/2 Professional Software itself installed perfectly except for the aforementioned failure to update IBM1S506.ADD.

Drive Operation
With the installation hassles out of the way, it was time to see how well this duo performed.   One thing I do not like about my present tape unit, a CMS Jumbo 250 (a dinosaur compared to this unit), is that it has a rather annoying whine while it operates.  In contrast, the Seagate reviewed here is amazingly quiet; the only notable noise besides a quiet hum is the occasional direction change.

The drive does tend to do a lot of seeking before actually getting down to business, but once it starts writing data to tape, it achieves an impressive 27-30MB/minute transfer rate with compression!

Normally if I was to backup every file on my system, it would take 4 hours (without verify) and four 125MB tapes, which I would have to change every hour.  The Seagate accomplished the same task in only 31 minutes, with a single 4GB tape (8GB with compression)!  In fact, after my backup I still had room for another four and a half full backups!  Needless to say, I was impressed.

With my current tape drive I only back up about 75MB of what I consider to be critical files; with this drive I could back up my entire OS/2 system in less than half the time it takes me to back up the 75MB with my current setup.  With speed this fast, it is a lot easier (not to mention less painful) to do regular, full backups.

BackAgain/2 Professional v4.0d
BA/2 Pro was easy to use, with all the usual options available, with a long list of supported backup devices (see below).

Novices will appreciate a Quick Start dialogue that allows for easy backing up of one or more drives without selecting files or having to understand the various options.  For file selection you can select "Advanced" or disable the quick start option altogether if you'd like.

The advanced selection dialogue allows you to set up include and exclude lists for backups.  With these, you can simply drag and drop a backup template and from the selection dialogue select which files you do and do not wish to be included in this particular backup set.

For example, you may wish to always back up everything on your hard disk except a couple files here and there.  Rather than select the files each time you perform a backup, with BackAgain/2 you would just create a backup set which INCLUDES *, but EXCLUDES those few you don't want.  Now, whenever you want to back up, a double click backs up the desired files using the compression settings, etc. that you assigned.  Very handy.

Naturally, networks are supported, so you can backup networked drives on remote machines.

Business or special needs customers will find the ability to launch REXX scripts both before and after a backup handy, perhaps, for example, to warn network users.  As well, a command line version of the program allows you to do backups without the GUI, perhaps this version might be more appropriate for automated scripts, as it allows you to specify all your options on the command line.  Or you can just tell it to use a specific backup set.  This is yet another powerful and flexible option.

Drag and drop integration means you can back up a drive, folder, or file by simply dropping the object on the "backup device" icon.  To test this feature, I selected some pictures that were on the desktop (dragged from Netscape) and dropped them onto the device object, but it complained (after seeking the tape) that no files had been selected.  However, dragging a directory from the Drives tree worked perfectly.  I suspect the drag-n-drop as programmed only accepts single objects: single drives, directories, or files.

There is a Scheduler Folder provided with BA/2, which allows the objects in it (not necessarily backup sets) to be executed at specified times.  This is a very useful and flexible feature which should prevent most users from ever having to resort to the command line version of the backup software.

A stand-alone restore utility is included in the package in case your OS/2 partition is scrambled and you really need that backup.  Just run the program to update your OS/2 utility disks, and if you have a backup of your OS/2 system files, you can restore it without reinstalling OS/2 and all your Desktop settings manually!

All in all, great stuff.

The Downside

On the downside, BA/2 Pro does tend to take over the CPU at times, most notably when asking it for the contents of a directory when selecting files.  If there are not a lot of files in a directory, you are looking at only a two to five second freeze up.  But when I tried going into my BBS' message base directory, with 4,385 files (62MB compressed), there was a delay of about 15 seconds.  To see this CPU hogging in action, pick a large directory, ask BA/2 Pro to display it and then click on the OS/2 window option on the Warp Center.  The window opens, but the prompt does not appear until BA/2 Pro has finished loading the directory.  This is something that could be worked on for v4.1.

Also, the read.me file says a new feature of v4.0 is that you can uninstall all or part of the software, but in practice this utility was extremely difficult to locate.  There was no icon in the Desktop folder, nor any directions in the .INF, read.me or manual.  An inspection of the BA/2 directory revealed an uninstl.exe file which obviously is the file in question but it could certainly be easier to find.  After you do find the uninstall utility, it does not work as smoothly as it could.

Closing Comments

This is a great package, and while noting the cost, I would recommend it to any OS/2 user who needs a solid, fast backup solution.  This bundle just can't be beat!

---

System Requirements:
OS/2 v2.1 or later*
A mouse or other pointing device
4MB of disk space
3.5" floppy disk drive (to install software)

* OS/2 Warp v3.0 or higher suggested, otherwise:
- no WPS backup device objects (no drag-n-drop functionality)
- utility to create crash recovery diskettes may not find all files
- an updated IBM1S506.ADD driver may be required for ATAPI/IDE tape drives

---

* BackAgain/2 Pro v4
by (http://www.cds-inc.com/) Computer Data Strategies (CDS)

* Seagate CTT8000
by (http://www.seagate.com/) Seagate

MSRP:US$399.00 (package of drive and software; IDE, internal)

---

(tsst@isisnet.com) Donovan Long is an avid Team OS/2 member in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.  He has run versions of OS/2 dating back to v2.0.

***********************************

BackAgain/2 Professional v4.0d Supported Backup Devices

-----

o Logical devices
       Any hard disk supported by OS/2
       Network-attached drive
       Floppy diskette drive
       SyQuest(tm) removable media drives
       Iomega Bernoulli, Jaz, and Zip drives
       Magneto-optical and PD-CD optical drives

 o ATAPI/IDE tape drives
       APS Technologies APS HyperQIC ATAPI/IDE Minicartridge Drive
       Conner CTMA4000 ATAPI/IDE Minicartridge Drive
       Conner CTT8000 ATAPI/IDE Minicartridge Drive

 o SCSI tape drives
       APS Technologies DLT20, DLT30, DLT40 DLT
       APS Technologies APS DAT 4mm DAT
       APS Technologies APS HyperDAT DDS-2 4mm DAT
       APS Technologies APS HyperDAT Pro DDS-2 4mm DAT
       APS Technologies APS HyperQIC SCSI Minicartridge Drive
       Archive Viper 2060S QIC-60
       Archive Viper 2150S QIC-150
       Archive Viper 2525S QIC-525
       Archive Anaconda QIC-1000
       Archive 4320, 4340, 4520 Python 4mm DAT
       Archive 4324, 4524 Turbo Python 4mm DAT
       Archive 4326, 4526 Turbo Python DDS-2 4mm DAT
       Colorado PowerTape 1100 QIC-525
       Colorado PowerTape 2400 QIC-1000
       Colorado PowerDAT 4000 4mm DAT
       Conner MS2000 4mm DAT
       Conner MS4000 4mm DAT
       Conner MS8000 DDS-2 4mm DAT
       Conner CTMS3200 SCSI Minicartridge Drive
       Conner CTT8000 SCSI Minicartridge Drive
       Compaq 525 QIC-525
       Compaq 10GB/20GB DLT
       Exabyte 2501t/2501c
       Exabyte 4200/4200c 4mm DAT
       Exabyte 8500 8mm HS
       Exabyte 8505 8mm HS
       Exabyte 8505XL 8mm HS
       Exabyte 8700 8mm HS
       Hewlett-Packard 35450 4mm DAT
       Hewlett-Packard 35470A 4mm DAT
       Hewlett-Packard 35480A 4mm DAT
       Hewlett-Packard C1533A 4mm DDS-2 DAT
       Hewlett-Packard C1534 4mm DDS DAT
       Hewlett-Packard C1536 4mm DDS/DC DAT
       Hewlett-Packard JetStore 2000 4mm DAT
       Hewlett-Packard JetStore 6000 DDS-2 4mm DAT
       IBM 4-10GB DDS-2 4mm DAT
       IBM ThinkPad SCSI Tape Drive Option
       Maynard MaynStream 525Q QIC-525
       Micro Design SCSI Express 1300 4mm DAT
       Micro Design SCSI Express 2000D 4mm DAT
       Micro Design SCSI Express 2000DF DDS-2 4mm DAT
       PCX PortaTape 4mm DAT
       Sony SDT2000 4mm DAT
       Sony SDT4000 4mm DAT
       Sony SDT5000 DDS-2 4mm DAT
       Sony SDT5200 DDS-2 4mm DAT
       Sony SDT7000 DDS-2 4mm DAT
       Tandberg 3660 QIC-150
       Tandberg 3800 QIC-525
       Tandberg 4120 QIC-1000
       Tandberg 4200 QIC-2000
       WangDAT 3100 4mm DAT
       WangDAT 3200 4mm DAT
       WangDAT 3400 DDS-2 4mm DAT
       Wangtek 5099ES QIC-60
       Wangtek 5150ES QIC-150
       Wangtek 5525ES QIC-525
       Wangtek 51000 QIC-1000
       Wangtek 6130 4mm DAT
       Wangtek 6200 4mm DAT

***********************************

Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for OS/2	- by Noah Sumner

-----

If you are like the vast majority of OS/2 users you think you don't need an anti-virus program.  We all know that DOS viruses can't affect OS/2, right?  Wrong.  The experts tell me that there are probably somewhere around 200 viruses that can and will affect you even if you are running OS/2 under HPFS.  If you are running under FAT that number is much higher.

Well, at least none of them will really attack OS/2, right?  Wrong again.  There are currently three known viruses that are designed to attack OS/2 users only, and if Warp 4 is a success that number will start to rise.

Now you are probably saying, "Well, maybe I should protect myself from viruses."  That is where our good friend from Dr. Solomon comes in to play.  Why should you use Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus for OS/2?  Here are three good reasons:

1. it detects the OS/2 viruses (IBM's Anti-Virus doesn't)
2. it has a nice PM interface
3. it is truly 32 bit.

Personally, I don't want to have 100 command line switches to play with for my anti-virus program.  That is why I like the simple and easy to understand PM interface that is used in Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus.  You can perform a virus scan right from that screen, unless you want to choose advanced options.  You can also run all the programs from a command line interface, however, it is slightly more complicated, due to the dreaded switches.

At the top of the screen you should be able to see a few options for pull down menus, all of which are self explanatory and, indeed, even expected in an anti-virus program.  Except for one: "network".  Unlike with most programs, with Dr. Solomon's you can scan network drives without buying a more expensive "networking" version of the program.

You will also see two large buttons on the right hand side of the Dr. Solomon's screen.  These are a "scan and repair" button and a list of all drives.  The most important thing is that Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus is filled with lots of options for use when searching for viruses.  You can search compressed files, executable files, and even use Heuretics.  Heuretics searches for common patterns in viruses which will even allow you to find a new virus that hasn't been discovered yet.

Searching for viruses is very quick compared to the other programs and seems to be extremely effective.  If checked, the repair button will remove the virus from you computer and repair any damage caused to files by that virus.

You will also notice three large buttons at the bottom of the screen. They are "check for
changes", "virus information" and, very simply, "exit".  Checking for changes is a very important feature that you can and should take advantage of.  Checking for changes creates a "finger print" for all files contained on your computer.  You can later verify your fingerprints and if there has been a change made, you will be informed--a very effective way to determine if a virus is at work.  The fingerprints are safe because they are created using a password that only you will know so a virus can not evade this search.

There is one other button in the main screen, which is perhaps the biggest advantage of Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus over all its competition!  This button leads to a virus encyclopedia, which tells you about the various known viruses.  This encyclopedia tells you what a virus does, gives you a clue as to its capabilities (whether it is encrypted, stealth, etc.), tells you whether the virus is memory resident and gives any known variants on the virus.  You will also be told how damaging the virus is and the approximate repair time--if the damage can be repaired.

Unfortunately, this is the one area where I have found a "bug" in the product; if you select some viruses, instead of displaying information, you will drop out of the virus encyclopedia and be brought back to the main interface.  When it works though, this feature can be very useful in many situations.

Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus includes many other features that you will appreciate in the
event that you are hit by a virus.  In fact, I used a program to compress all files on my disk and from that point on, Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus wouldn't run because it knew the files had been changed (IBMAV would run).

Possibly the greatest part of Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus is the thought process that went into the product.  Most people don't have a clean boot diskette to use in case of a system crash due to a virus.  So Dr. Solomon includes a special program called Magic Bullet, which is a bootable diskette containing their own operating system which will read your FAT drives and boot sector, search for viruses and clean them if needed.

Finally, one of the best features of Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus is the documentation that comes with the product.  In the box you receive a short manual for the OS/2 software, which is very  well written and easy to understand.  You also receive a manual for the DOS version of the software (which is included in the OS/2 package), which is much more detailed and also tells you what to do in the event that you find a virus.  The best thing about the manuals is that they include a virus encyclopedia much like the one included in the software.  However you can carry this one around with you so it is easy to use when a friend has a virus; you can open up the book and find what the virus does and how to remove it.  This manual is so good I have actually been offered $50 for it; I refused.

---

* Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit
by (http://www.drsolomon.com/) Dr. Solomon's Software Ltd.
MSRP: US$130 (approximate price)

---

(http://www.pr.uoguelph.ca/noah/) Noah Sumner is a member of TeamOS/2 and the Toronto OS/2 Users Group.

***********************************

Family Tree v1.1b	- by Bob Smith

-----

Family Tree v1.1b (11/16/96) is a shareware Presentation Manager, 32-bit, multi-threaded program for organizing and displaying one's family tree written by (meier2@athene.informatik.uni-bonn.de) Nils Meier of Lohmar, Germany.  For those wanting to organize their family's genealogy without resorting to using a Windows or DOS program, it may be the answer.

Installation

Installation of Family Tree is simple and straightforward.  The ZIP file is unzipped into its final subdirectory and an INSTALL.CMD file creates a program object on the Desktop and initializes language-specific DLL and HLP files.  Users have the choice of English, Dutch, French or German as operating language.  The program takes up about 1.7 MB of space in total.

Program Operation

The first time you run Family Tree you are presented with a plain white field with a single entry: "ADAM".  This isn't meant to imply that we should go that far back in our family tree; it is just a place marker for the first entry.  Included with the program is a copy of the author's family tree which can be used as an example of what a growing tree looks like.  (There are 46 individuals in five generations in family tree).

Almost all operations on entries in Family Tree can be accomplished with the mouse.  The right mouse button (RMB) brings up a context menu which allows a wide range of operations.  To start off, one would click the RMB on ADAM and click EDIT to start one's tree.  The data that can be entered includes: name, birth place & date, death place & date, marriage place & date & ending date (a sign of our times I guess, as the program is built to allow a multitude of partners) and miscellaneous information, including a picture.

The help file states that you can drag and drop PCX, GIF or BMP files to the entry field for pictures, but I discovered that if you provide the path to a TIFF file it will also work.

Family Tree allows editing of personal information such as sex, name, and various dates which can be dangerous if one is not careful.  For example, I added an entry for my second wife without making an entry for the divorce from spouse #1.  The program accepted the change but showed an error entry for my second wife's marriage until I put an ending date in for marriage #1.

Documentation is extensive and all on-line; no printed manual.  The on-line help can be printed out, but at a big cost in paper.  In general, the help files are useful and tell you what you need to know.

The interface is rather obvious.  A family tree should show as a tree and it does.  It can be aligned either vertically or horizontally--quite helpful depending on how wide your family tree is or how many generations you have chased back.  One very nice thing is the program's ability to use colors to delineate different relationships.  This makes a lot of things much more visible when looking at the tree on-screen.

Perhaps the most useful thing about Family Tree though is its REXX hooks.  There are a full range of pre-prepared REXX scripts which will do a lot of useful things: print out a list of birthdays, death anniversaries, a birth order of the entire tree or several other neat things.  It also allows you to check the validity of the tree; that your grandmother was not dead before your parents were born and other impossibilities like that.

Included in the standard REXX scripts are ones to import and export your family tree in the GENCOM format, a standard format for genealogy programs.  This allows you to share data with others who are not using the same program.  (A big help for those of us who use OS/2!)  Also, if you are at all handy in REXX, you can write your own scripts to do almost anything with the data in your family tree.

I tested Family Tree on a Pentium 90 with 32 MB of memory, a 1 GB hard drive and a HP 660Cse printer and found the performance to be very good.

Family Tree is shareware and can by found on most popular FTP sites.  The cost to register is 20DM or US$15 and it can be registered through BMT Micro.

Conclusions

Family Tree will not help you find your relatives.  It will help you organize data, display it in a rational manner and extract relationships from that data though.  It is not a "cadillac" program like Broderbund's Family Tree Maker for Windows, but for the hobbyist genealogist who is only trying to find some branches of their family tree, it does the job quite nicely.

---

* Family Treev 1.1b
by (meier2@athene.informatik.uni-bonn.de) Nils Meier
download from (ftp://ftp.bmtmicro.com/bmtmicro/ftree11a.zip) BMT Micro (ZIP, 970k)
Registration: US$15

---

(bsmith@ccis.com) Bob Smith is a 15 year veteran of USAF as Transport Pilot and Planner; he has also spent 15 years in Fire Service in small a California community.  He retired as Fire chief in 1995 and has been using OS/2 since v2.0.

***********************************

Type/2 v1.2	- by Stephen Turk

-----

In the past, OS/2 users searching for a typing tutor program have found themselves relying on OS/2's backward compatibility with DOS and Windows apps.  There were no native OS/2 alternatives.

That has now changed with the introduction of Type/2 by IcaruSoft, a relatively new OS/2 software vendor.  Quoting from the Type/2 manual, "Currently, [Type/2] is the only option for people who want a program to assist them in learning or improving their typing skills while maintaining an OS/2 only system."

Installation and other trivia

Type/2 is of the breed of programs that is a cross between shareware and commercial software.  Users can download or register the shareware product from BMT Micro but the review copy sent to OS/2 e-Zine! was a fully registered version of the program with a printed manual and therefore was slightly different.

Regardless which version of the program you happen to have, installation is as simple as unzipping the ZIP file (or copying the files from the floppy disk in my case).  The user can also run a simple REXX program to create a folder and program object for Type/2 on the Desktop.  Other than this, no changes are made to your system so should you decide that Type/2 is not for you, uninstalling is as simple as deleting the files and the folder on your Desktop.

Features

Type/2 is a very simple program.  It is more of an learning assistant than an actual tutor.  As the manual states, this means the program requires very little hard disk or RAM resources.  However, this simplicity also means that it is not the most full-featured typing program in existence.

Starting Type/2 from either the command line or program object reveals the main interface which is where students will do most of their interaction with the program.  This screen consists of a large text window containing the text you are required to type, a smaller window where your keystrokes are displayed and a diagram of the keyboard.

As you type, the next key to be pressed and the key you have just pressed are highlighted on the keyboard diagram.  If you strike the wrong key, a "warning" sound is played through the MMOS/2 subsystem and a "*" is displayed in the keystroke window.  Type/2 keeps track of your speed in words per minute and your accuracy as well as displaying a "progress bar" that indicates how much of the current line you have typed.

Basically, using the program consists of typing what you see in the top window as quickly and accurately as you can.

What lessons appear in this top window can be determined by the student by selecting various files from the "Settings" pop-up menu.  Type/2 data files are plain text file with each line beginning with an indication of the speed and accuracy the student should be aiming for.  This means that anyone can create sample files as easy or as hard as they prefer, just by downloading plain text from the 'net (or their local hard drive) and adding speed and accuracy ratings.  When shipped, the ZIP file includes some beginner and advanced test files.

Also from the "Settings" menu the user can select what skill level he or she is (Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced) and select whether to use a normal or Dvorak keyboard layout.  (A Dvorak keyboard is a different keyboard layout that allows fast touch-typists to type faster than a conventional keyboard will.)

Problems

While Type/2 is a capable learning aid, it is just that--an aid rather than a teacher.  The most noticeable shortcoming for beginners is probably that nowhere did I find any instruction on how to type.  Having used an old DOS typing tutor to learn, I knew which finger is "supposed" to strike which key, but if you wanted to learn this, Type/2 would not teach you.  It seems to me that this is a logical piece of information to include in the manual or the readme file but it does not appear there. 

More importantly, for all levels of users, there is no in-depth monitoring of your typing habits or shortcomings.  The rudimentary scheme for allowing users to jump ahead or be sent back in a lesson works to an extent, but it does not monitor your typing for common problems such as transposition (hitting keys in the wrong order), missing a row (hitting a key above or below the one you meant to) or mirroring (hitting a key with the correct finger but the wrong hand).  Nor does Type/2 monitor if you have particular difficulty with the "q", ";" or number keys.  A feature to track these habits and offer lessons accordingly would be a big improvement.

Since there is none of this monitoring, of course, you can not get detailed graphical or statistical feedback about your typing habits either.  I remember the DOS program I mentioned above would illustrate how fast you typed with each finger, how good you were at each letter on the keyboard, etc.  That old DOS program also allowed users to save their results over time so they could see how they were progressing; Type/2 does not have this feature.

The above complaints are more wish-list items than actual problems, however.  For the most part, the program does what it is intended to do and does it well.

But there were a few small glitches: at one point, I was flying through the sample lesson/instructions in the shareware version of the product and I seemed to "lose the text".  I'm still not sure what happened (I would like to think that I was just too fast for the computer but that's probably not true), but the program just would not advance through the lesson as if it had "forgotten" where I was.  I tried pressing every key on the keyboard but none were accepted as the "next key".  I was not able to reproduce this problem though.

Really fast typists will also note that MMOS/2 can not keep up with its "warning beeps" if you start to make mistakes while typing at high speeds.  Also, when you mistakenly hit an incorrect key, the program does not advance until you strike the correct one.  If you are typing quickly and miss just one key, it is very likely that you will type many more before you realize what has happened, thus throwing off the accuracy rating the computer gives you.

Finally, when looking through the settings menu I tried entering a new file name for the test file to work on.  When I entered a file name that did not exist, Type/2 alerted me of the error and then my entire system locked, necessitating a reboot.  I was able duplicate this problem so it appears not to be just a random occurrence.

Recommendation

Despite the above show-stopper and my wish that Type/2 had more robust teaching features, it is still a great practice program.  If you have already learned the basics of touch typing, Type/2 is a very good way to gauge your speed and accuracy and practice the fundamentals.

---

* Type/2 v1.2
by (etchri@ibm.net) IcaruSoft
download from (ftp://ftp.bmtmicro.com/bmtmicro/type2v1.zip) BMT Micro
Registration: US$17.95

---

(steve@haligonian.com) Stephen Turk is a salesman at a small computer retailer and part time trouble shooter.  He has been using OS/2 for about two years and is Haligonian Media's local typing expert.

***********************************

Partition Magic v3.0	- by Noah Sumner

-----

Partition Magic is a wonderful package that makes "impossible" tasks extremely easy to
accomplish.  Partition Magic is a replacement for the antiquated DOS (and OS/2) FDISK, and includes many additional features, enabling you to do many difficult partition management tasks "on the fly".  Partition Magic is a dynamite utility especially if you run more than one operating system.

Partitioning 101

To understand the value of Partition Magic, you need to understand exactly what a partition is.  To explain this, I am going to steal the definition that was included in the Partition Magic 2.0 manual.  Imagine you have a very large house with absolutely no internal walls, it would be very hard to organize things in your house and would not be very efficient.  So we put up some walls (partitions) which help organize our house and make things more efficient.  A hard drive is much like a big house and comes with no internal walls; so we build our own walls.  We call these internal walls "partitions".  Like a wall in a house it is not easy to change the location of a partition.

Partitions make it easier for us to organize data.  Using partitions we can keep our
operating systems, data, and applications separate.  On today's bigger hard drives, partitions are almost required, especially if you use the FAT (used in DOS and Windows 95) file system.  The FAT file system is very wasteful; on my hard drive if I had a single 2 gigabyte (2,000 megabyte) partition, I would be wasting 38% of my disk space!  HPFS, by contrast, is not very wasteful and you may have larger than 2 gig partitions.  However, you should still partition your disk to organize your data.  If you are using more then one operating system, it is very beneficial to partition and keep the operating systems separate.

Version 3.0

Partition Magic v3.0 allows us to easily convert FAT partitions to HPFS, resize partitions, move partitions and even copy a partition; all without losing valuable data.  Some people might say, "So what.  I can do all that with FDISK, can't I?"  NO!  This is a truly amazing trick; earlier I said it would be like moving a wall in your house and that's what it is!  Before Partition Magic, to resize or move partitions required a lot of time and a very detailed knowledge of computers and partitioning, unless you wanted to delete all your data.  (My father once resized a partition, and it and took over 6 days.)  So you can imagine how useful this utility really is.

Partition Magic v3.0 also allows you to do all the things that FDISK allows you to do: create, delete, label partitions, etc.

When creating partition with Partition Magic you can not create a blank partition, you
will be asked what format you wish the partition to be.  You have the choice of FAT, FAT32, HPFS, NTFS or Extended.  If you select FAT, Partition Magic will help you choose how large to make your partition so you are still using drive space efficiently.  For Instance if you were planning to make a 260 meg partition you would be wiser to create a 255 meg partition (about 5.5% more efficient or able to store 10 meg more data).  You are also able to get this information when resizing a FAT partition or selecting the cluster option.

Partition Magic includes a very nice graphical interface that can be used under OS/2, DOS, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95.  With this graphical interface it is extremely easy to create, delete, resize, move or copy partitions.  However, in case of an emergency, there is a text mode version of Partition Magic which will also run under the same operating systems as the graphical interface.  The text version is small enough to be included on an emergency boot diskette.

New Features

There are a few important changes (since version 2.0) to Partition Magic's interface.  The "check" option button is no longer present; that option can be selected from the "Options" pull down menu and is now built into the "Info" screen.  The "Convert" option has also disappeared and must now be accessed from the "Options" menu.  Users of v2.0 will also notice two new buttons that took these places: the first is the "Cluster" button which gives various information about FAT partitions like how much space is being wasted and suggested cluster size.

As well there is a new "Copy" option.  This feature allows you to copy a partition to free-space on any of the hard drives installed.  This is as simple as clicking where free space is and clicking the "Copy" button.  This is a great feature for a corporation that needs to set up a large number of identical machines in a uniform fashion.

Boot Manager Now Included

Partition Magic v3.0 for the first time also includes Boot Manager, a utility which allows you to choose your operating system every time you turn on your computer.  OS/2 users will be very familiar with this feature since it is included with every version of Warp.  (PowerQuest has licensed Boot Manager from IBM.)  The inclusion of Boot Manager means that when you want to add a new operating system you don't have to load FDISK to add that operating system to the Boot Manager menu; you cam now do so from within Partition Magic.

As well, for users who don't yet have Boot Manager installed, Partition Magic can install Boot Manager for you and it will automatically create a partition on which to do so.

There is another utility called PQBoot which is used to change which partition should be "active" at boot up, however, this program is very basic and requires OS/2 to be on a primary partition.

Flaws

The only negative feature of Partition Magic is that you can't create a blank partition.  This normally doesn't matter, however, if you wish to install something like Linux, you may be better off loading FDISK and creating blank partitions from there.

I also have to admit that I have encountered one minor bug where DOS and Windows report an error on my second hard drive.  However, the error doesn't occur if I am running Partition Magic from OS/2.  The error is minor and doesn't create any problems and tech support at PowerQuest has been working with me on the problem.

There are also two small features which OS/2 users will not get the benefit of.  There is a utility called Drive Mapper which will update all references for Windows when a drive letter changes.  As well, there is an application mover included that also only works with Windows.  They work very well, however, obviously they are not for OS/2.

Conclusions

If you are worried about Partition Magic causing problems with your hard drive you shouldn't be.  I have done a large amount of partitioning using Partition Magic since version 1.0 and to this day I still have not had any data loss.  And I can assure you that before Partition Magic v3.0 was released it went through a long and extensive beta cycle to eliminate any bugs.

Partition Magic v3.0 is more of the same solid, useful product that PowerQuest has built their reputation on.

---

* Partition Magic v3.0
by (http://www.powerquest.com/) PowerQuest
MSRP: US$69.95

---

(http://www.pr.uoguelph.ca/noah/) Noah Sumner is a member of TeamOS/2 and the Toronto OS/2 Users Group.

***********************************

Internet World Expo Fall 96 Report	- by Jon Winters

-----

I recently had a chance to visit the Internet World Expo Fall 96 produced by Mecklermedia for joint work/reporting purposes.  This convention's organizers claim it to be the world's best Internet related show.  Of course, I spent time looking for OS/2 related Internet news, and here is my report:

The convention center was "massive"; at one point, it was booths for as far as you could see.

I'm sad to report though, that in all those booths, I did not see one single computer running OS/2 anywhere at the show.  The folks at the IBM booth told me (with a smile), "They are letting us run Win95 now."

The IBM folks also suggested that I look at the JAVA part of the IBM booth since the Java stuff should run on OS/2.  I took their advice and asked a lot of other vendors about possible Java versions of their software.  It seems like there will be a lot of Java based software for us next year.  Hopefully the IBMers were right and it will all "run on OS/2".

While at the show, I was invited to attend a luncheon by the Intel folks about "connected applications".  The most interesting thing there was definitely Marimba and the Castanet tuner, transmitter, and bongo development environment.  I've been running Marimba on my computer at work (Win95) for a couple of months now and it is a great new way to distribute software.  Basically, you write a "channel" for your company and that channel is automatically updated at specified times.  It is a totally open system that gives you a lot of freedom.  From the user perspective software updated by Marimba is always current and up to date; a true "install and forget" system.

Marimba is being ported for OS/2 and should be ready soon.  It is not 100% Java though because it needs to do some things that Java is not allowed to do.  Keep an eye on Marimba.  The developers have partnered with Netscape and are being used a lot in Constellation.

Constellation is Netscape's next big thing.  They didn't have anything at the show about it but you can mine their home page for a preview.  In a nutshell, Constellation will be a desktop or partial desktop that runs on top of your operating system and has both traditional applications and special "connected" apps.  (Marimba is doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff here.)  You should be able to share a Constellation desktop between your OS/2 machine at work and at home and even a friend's Mac or Windows box.  Your Constellation desktop should be available wherever you are and eliminate a lot of confusion for mobile professionals or anyone who uses more than one computer.

Netscape told me that their popular WWW servers won't get ported to the OS/2 platform unless IBM or someone else does it.  As you know, IBM ported Navigator 2.02 to OS/2 with help from Netscape.  On a more positive note, I was told that the OS/2 version of Communicator (Netscape's new browser/communications suite, aka Galileo) will have all the functionality of the Windows version and then some (eg. VoiceType).

I spent time with the Lotus SmartSuite folks at the show.  They assured me that SmartSuite '97 will be feature for feature the same as the Win95 version and gave me a demonstration of the software.  It is HTTP-upload and FTP compatible when publishing documents to a web server and conversion from anything to HTML is a snap.  Very nice indeed.  While I didn't get an exact date on when the initial OS/2 version of SmartSuite is shipping, I'm sold on the product.  It is very nice.  (editor's note: By press time, Lotus had told us that SmartSuite '96 for OS/2 was shipping.  It should be available to stores near you soon. )

After seeing all the stuff at the show that is being developed in Java I would recommend to readers to download and try some Java apps.  You're going to be seeing a lot of them in the future.

---

Jon Winters is the owner and operator of (http://www.obscurasite.com/) Obscura!  With the help of a few good friends he is up to all kinds of mischief on the web.

***********************************

REXX Reference Summary Handbook, 4th ed.	- by Dr. Dirk Terrell

-----

As is so often the case, IBM has developed a very powerful tool (OS/2 REXX) and provided it to OS/2 users with only minimal documentation.  I, and many others, have spent countless hours searching for information on how to use a particular REXX function--especially those in the REXXUTIL library that comes with OS/2 REXX.  What I, and many other REXX users, have always wanted is comprehensive REXX documentation.

Dick Goran's REXX Reference Summary Handbook is the documentation that IBM should have given us.  OS/2 Magazine readers know Goran as the author of the REXX Column where he gave invaluable tips on using REXX under OS/2.  His REXX Reference Summary Handbook concisely documents the REXX language as well as the OS/2 specific extensions to the language and gives useful tidbits of information that would be nearly impossible to find elsewhere.  The latest version is an extensive update that covers many of the new REXX features of OS/2 Warp 4, including Object REXX.

Contents

The book begins with a brief summary of the language.  Next is a list of the REXX keywords and functions with a short description of the keyword or function and its calling syntax.  Most of the information in this chapter is also available in the online REXX help file that comes with OS/2, but the book includes are some valuable notes and examples that are not in the online documentation.

Chapter Two is where the book begins to really reveal its usefulness.  This chapter deals with the REXUTIL library of functions that make it possible to interact with the rest of the OS/2 system such as the Workplace Shell.  IBM's documentation of these functions is dismal and the REXX Handbook is a welcome supplement.

This is probably best illustrated by an example.  The SysCreateObject function is used, as you might guess, to create WPS objects, and it can be very handy.  Look up the SysCreateObject function in the online documentation or the REXX Reference Summary Handbook, and you will find that the calling form is:

SysCreateObject(class_name,title,location,setup_string,option)

Now, you can probably make a good guess as to what some of these things mean, but good documentation eliminates the guesswork.  Here's what the online documentation says about class_name:

The name of the object class.

Gee, I never would have guessed that.  Now look at what the REXX Reference Summary Handbook has to say:

Class_name is the name of the WPS class of which the object is a member and  title is the new object's title.  A new line character, '0A'x, can be included in title.  The occurrence of the escape character ^ ('5E'x) also causes a new line to be created; however, 2nd and subsequent escape characters used for this purpose appear to be ignored.

It's little bits of information like this that make the REXX Reference Summary Handbook so useful.  How many hours would be wasted trying to figure out things like that on your own?  The description of the setup string is an even better example.  IBM's documentation says:

A WinCreateObject setup string.

Say what?  Searching on WinCreateObject reveals nothing.  Here's what the REXX Reference Summary Handbook has to say:

Setup_string optionally must contain a WinCreateObject string which is comprised of a series of "keyname=value" pairs that change the behavior of the object.  "Key names" are separated by semicolons and "values" are separated by commas.
Note: If a value includes a semicolon (; - '3B'x) or a comma (, - '2C'x), it must be "escaped" by preceding it with a caret (^, '5E'x).

and a note directs you to a section later in the book that gives all the details of building a setup string for various objects.

The next chapter deals with the extensive set of functions in the REXXLIB library from (http://www.quercus-sys.com/) Quercus Systems.  This library adds over 150 functions to REXX including mathematical functions, interprocess communications (semaphores, named pipes, etc.), sorting, and functions for performing actions on REXX stems.  (A demo version of REXXLIB is available on the (http://www.os2ss.com/dev32/rexx/rexxlib.zip) OS/2 Supersite [ZIP, 240k].)

Chapter 4 is the gold mine.  This chapter covers the Workplace Shell in such detail that it will leave no REXX programmer unsatisfied.  The first section lists most of the WPS object ID's and titles, including the Java objects that come with OS/2 Warp 4.  Sections 2 through 4 list the WPS class names and corresponding DLL files for OS/2 2.1 and earlier, Warp 3, and Warp 4 respectively.  Section 5 covers the key/value pairs used in the setup string for the SysCreateObject and SySetObjectData functions.

IBM has done a miserable job of documenting these functions, so most of the information in this section has come from detective work by Goran and others outside IBM.  This is the most comprehensive documentation of these functions to be found anywhere.

Chapter 5 documents Henk Kelder's freeware WPTOOLS library.  This library has functions that the advanced REXX programmer needs for cleaning system INI files, backing up the Desktop and more.  It can be found on the (http://www.cfsrexx.com/pub/welcome.htm#wptool) C F S REXX page.

Chapter 6 has documentation for the RXFTP library about which I wrote in the REXX Files (http://www.haligonian.com/os2/v1n11/rexx.htm) not too long ago.  RXFTP lets you transfer files via the FTP protocol from within a REXX program and is included with the TCP/IP package in OS/2 Warp 4.  If you are using an earlier version of OS/2, you can find it on the (ftp://software.watson.ibm.com/pub/os2/ews/rxftp.zip) Watson ftp site (ZIP, 86k). 

Appendix D is also a very useful source of information.  It covers the error codes that one can encounter when running REXX programs.  Not only is each error message explained, in some cases there are suggestions to try to eliminate the source of the error.  IBM's error messages sometimes border on the cryptic; The REXX Reference Summary Handbook does a good job of explaining what is happening.

Conclusions

If your are a REXX programmer, this book is indispensable.  The REXX Reference Summary Handbook is a book that you will want to have right next to you when you are programming.  The book is thorough, well-indexed, and packed with information that would be difficult, if not impossible, to find anywhere else.

---

* REXX Reference Summary Handbook
by (http://www.cfsrexx.com/) Dick Goran
ISBN: 0-9639854-3-4
MSRP: US$31.95

---

(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.

***********************************

Warp Server SMP in the Real World	- by Chris Williams

-----

Want a faster server?  Don't "Just Add Warp", add processors and Warp Server SMP!

A funny thing happened at the office the other day.  At 9:30 in the morning, a colleague of mine was reading some of the marketing stuff found on a recent Microsoft Technet CD about Windows NT Server 4.0.  It was funny because he was reading a quote from it saying that NT Server 4.0 was "...dramatically faster than before!".  Strangely, at 8:30 that same morning, he had just finished reading a printed article to our team from an independent source showing that, in their latest benchmark testing, NT 4.0 is in fact roughly 20% slower than NT Server 3.51, which is already known as one of the slowest servers on the market.  (They went on to say the most likely reason for this was the MS decision to move so many functions to the kernel level in NT 4.0, so it had much more overhead to slow it down.)

Could we have actually caught Microsoft in a lie?  Well, to be completely factual, the Technet article only said dramatically faster thanbefore.  It didn't saybefore what!  So,before could have been before the last beta version; or before they finalized the design spec; or even before anybody decided to really benchmark it against version 3.51.

What came across perfectly clearly in all of this was that the Compaq Dual Processor server sitting across the room quietly screaming along with Warp Server SMP was the fastest server we have ever run.  How much faster?  Well, according to the reports from IBM, the SMP version of Warp Server (already shown in benchmark testing as the fastest on the market) gets roughly a 90% performance boost by moving from one to two processors.  Going from 1 to 4 processors produces a whopping 300% increase in zoom factor!

Those who watch the numbers will recognize that these specs are best of breed in the industry.  In real life though, company sales literature means little.  What counts is how usable that speed is and how well it translates into a more efficient, better performing file and print server for your organization.

Warp Server SMP competes here very well indeed.

We run two Warp Server systems that, aside from an extra processor in one, are identical in hardware configuration.  We loaded one with Warp Server Advanced, the other with Warp Server Advanced SMP.  The vital specifications:

o  Compaq Proliant 4500R
o  Intel Pentium 166 Processor(s)
o  64MB RAM
o  NetFlex-3 Ethernet controller
o  NetFlex Dual-Port Token-Ring controller
o  5 Disk 4.3GB SCSI Disk Drive Array (configured as RAID5)
o  Compaq 15/30 DLT Tape Backup Unit

Both servers are configured as Domain controllers and run NetBEUI, TCP/IP, and TCPBEUI on both adapters.  Both are also configured to accept Telnet and FTP clients.  As they are in active production roles, actual performance benchmarking was not possible, so unfortunately only empirical measurements can be provided.

What's the difference in the appearance of these two systems?  Actually, very little.  In fact, if you don't watch carefully during system startup or know where to look to run the SMP monitor, the interface on both systems looks and feels exactly the same.

The difference between our two servers, though, is roughlydouble.  The SMP server just has a much snappier feel--especially when handling LAN administration duties and performing system backups to a DLT tape drive.  It's roughly twice as fast at everything from server startup (not OS/2 system startup, although this is faster too) to server shutdown.  Watching the performance of a full system backup while keeping a server on-line and performing other duties (and doing it much faster than could be done on a single processor server) is a very telling story.  That's what SMP power can do for you.

Surprisingly, installation of Warp Server SMP is actually a bit cleaner and more convenient than installing the single processor Warp Server Advanced.  This is mainly because IBM decided to include many little fixes and system upgrades that one needs to download and install separately when using the single processor product.  For example, there's no need to upgrade MPTS to use the latest IBM TCPBEUI that supports NetBIOS name service name resolution--important to us since we depend on this heavily where we are.  It's already in there.  All of the other system management tools and utilities you've come to expect from Warp Server are there as well; often tweaked with nice little updates and improvements.

On the other hand, installing Warp Server SMP on a Compaq system is still as difficult as the original.  Neither server wanted to cooperate at first with the installation, and we had to nurse both installation programs along.  Normally this meant things like interrupting the installation process when the server rebooted itself, making corrections to the CONFIG.SYS file and making sure that drivers were not only copied to the disk, but also to the correct directory!

To nobody's surprise, Compaq's OS/2 support is much more lacking than their advertising about their OS/2 support.  Also to nobody's surprise, their advertising is not nearly up to the level that they provide for NetWare and NT Server.  The OS/2 support files and information on the Compaq Web site are ancient compared to that for NetWare and NT.  The utility supplied by Compaq to update the OS/2 system disks with their drivers is sorely lacking.  It didn't even copy all of the driver files to the startup diskette, and made a mess of the diskette's CONFIG.SYS file!

Experience with installing Warp Server on Compaq servers and with Compaq's "labor saving utilities" was the main thing that kept the installations on track.  Basically, we had been through this pain before and knew most of the key places where things can get really messed up.  The only silver lining to this cloud was that, since we also run NT Server on Compaq Proliants, experience has shown us that no Server OS is "no-brainer easy" to install on this series of hardware.  Kids: don't try this at home!

Once properly installed and configured though, Warp Server SMP is simply a joy to run and the Proliant handles it well.  In the time we've had to "abuse" ours so far, it has never had any kind of server related failure.  We have only ever shut it down or restarted it after needing to perform some sort of system update, maintenance, or to change a driver.

My personal favorite utility is the SMP monitor that not only allows us to watch the utilization of each processor on the system, but also take any processor off-line and put it back on-line on the fly!  It's like running a better version of Pulse which graphically reminds you that you've got at least two of 'em in there.  (With one of the two processors disabled, performance on our dual processor server appears to be almost exactly the same as our single processor system.)

Compared to our NT servers (some with dual processors themselves), Warp Server SMP feels faster in every respect (speaking as an administrator).  A single user logging on might never understand the difference until being told the server was handling double the workload as before, or unless he was engaged in some wild server-CPU cycle eating activities on a regular basis.  But the people who manage the systems can tell and keeping the people who actually use the servers happy is the name of this business.  When you can keep twice as many happy as before, you've done your job well.

If you already have Warp Server Advanced, the SMP upgrade is free.  All you need to do is add CPUs and tell IBM where they should ship you your updated software.

My advice: Do it now!  The speed freaks in your office will worship you!

---

(http://privateI.com/~chrisw/) Chris Williams has been actively involved with OS/2 systems for the past six years.  A former IBM employee, OS/2 Ambassador, and long time member of Team OS/2, he is currently a PC and network specialist for Perot Systems Corporation.

***********************************

The Chronicles of (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) John Ominor	- by (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) John Ominor, The Inhuman

-----

I am (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) John Ominor, The Inhuman.  Today, (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor will shower praise upon the most recently worthy of his flock.

It is (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor's will that all send messages to the developers of the Adobe Acrobat, praising their service to (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) John Ominor, a being--nay--a force who bestrides the Earth like an intellectual colossus.  The Inhuman is most pleased with Adobe's "beta two" of the Acrobat reader and its new Netscape Navigator Integration.  The Inhuman is pleased with the font-rendering of this software and knows that great profit awaits the company who is able to create a third-party OS/2 font-rendering add-on package of OS/2 Warp 4.0.  Profit is what drives your company, is it not, Adobe?

Regardless, you may continue to exist.

(dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor is also pleased by the postings and overall Usenet involvement of Martin Warnett of Netscape Communications.  He has recently, for the greater glory of The Inhuman no doubt, started a new (http://home.netscape.com/people/mcw/) Netscape Navigator Unofficial home page for OS/2.  This is of his own free will and on his free time.  Truly the desire to serve (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor will make men strive beyond their limitations.

You too, Martin Warnett, may continue to exist.

Even now, Apple and Practice Corporation, the maker of QuickMotion, are finishing the products that will make QuickTime for OS/2 a full reality for OS/2 Warp 4.0 users.  Soon, (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor's video visage will be available to dazzle and delight all viewers.

Now, (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) John Ominor wishes to acknowledge Snow Storm Software, the makers of EscapeGL, a new OpenGL, three dimensional screensaver product.  The Inhuman has observed the progress of EscapeGL for several weeks and is impressed by its increasing performance and stability.  It is truly a product worthy of OS/2.

Finally, were (dmccoy@mailhost.mnsinc.com) Ominor truly evil, instead of simply amoral, he would smite the very foolish editor of a certain on-line magazine for his insolence.  The Inhuman saw fit to correct one of his rather incompetent and incomplete reviews and this foolish human responded with impertinence as well as an overinflated sense of self-worth.

Woe to he that earns the ire of The Inhuman.  Tread lightly.

---

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.

***********************************

December'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		Partition Magic v3 Personal Ed.	PowerQuest
2		--		FaxWorks Pro v3 UG		Global Village
3		6		Hobbes CD-ROM November Ed.	Walnut Creek
4		--		Process Commander v1.x		Stardock Systems
5		4		IBM AntiVirus v2.4 Desktop Ed.	IBM
6 (tie)		--		Avarice - The Final Saga	Stardock Systems
6 (tie)		--		Colorworks V2 CD		SPG
7		5		System Commander v2.2		V Communications
8		8		BackAgain/2 v4.0 Prof. Ed.	Comp. Data Strat.
9		--		Galactic Civilizations		Stardock Systems
10		12		BackMaster v2.0			MSR Development 
11		14		GammaTech Utilities v3.0	SofTouch Systems
12		7		UniMaint v5.0			SofTouch Systems
13		10		DeScribe Voyager Plus CD	DeScribe
14		13		SofTouch Suite			SofTouch Systems
15 (tie)		--		Quickmotion v1.1		Practice Corporation
15 (tie)		--		Trials of Battle			Stardock Systems
---

Compiled by (http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue, Inc. - Your Single Source for OS/2 Solutions.

***********************************

December's Top Selling Shareware

-----

Note: The following list represents only the top selling OS/2 shareware applications.  The BMT Micro CD is excluded from the figures below to avoid distorting the results.

This Month	Last Month	Product				Developer
1		1		PMMail				SouthSide Software
2		2		PMView				Peter Neilsen
3		4		MR/2 ICE Internet Email		Knightware Software Co.
4		3		InJoy				Bjarne Jensen
5		7		Xit				CodeSmith Software
6		5		ZOC				EmTec Innovative Software
7		6		Emtec Network Suite		EmTec Innovative Software
8		--		FTP Browser			Jason Rushton
9		--		Blanker				Peter Wansch
10		9		FM/2				Mark Kimes
---

This list is compiled by (http://www.bmtmicro.com/) BMT Micro--Your Source for Over 100 Quality Shareware Applications--and represents their monthly registration figures.

***********************************

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***********************************

Corporate Sponsors of OS/2 e-Zine!:

(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.bmtmicro.com/) BMT Micro
Your complete source for over 175 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/os2ezine) 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.

(http://www.emtec.com/) EmTec Innovative Software
EmTec Innovative Software produces state-of-the-art OS/2 ISDN, modem
and telnet communications software.  OS/2 Magazine and Inside OS/2 1995
award winner.

(http://www.hotinc.com/) House of Technology, Inc.
Your Canadian Source For OS/2 Applications.

(http://www.indelible-blue.com/ib/) Indelible Blue
Indelible Blue, a mail order company, provides OS/2 software and hardware solutions to customers worldwide.

(http://www.os2store.com/) J3 Computer Technologies
Serving the Global OS/2 Community, large and small!

(http://www.kssystems.com/) K&S Systems
IBM BesTEAM, NT, and Vinca certified consultants provide HW/SW products, installation, configuration, staging, support, and Web Site Design.

(http://www.kellergroup.com/) Keller Group Inc.
Developers of FaxWorks for OS/2 and PMfax, the fax and voice solution for OS/2, with versions for stand-alone, LAN and Internet Faxing.

(http://nick.secant.com/mr2ice.htm) MR/2 ICE Internet Email Client
Delivering the electronic mail features of the future, today.  A product of Knightware Software Company.

(http://www.Mount-Baker.com/) Mt. Baker Software
Developers of Money Tree, a full featured personal financial package for OS/2.

(http://prairie.lakes.com/~oberon/) Oberon Software, Inc.
Home of TE/2, TE/2 Pro and other fine OS/2 programs.  Specializing in telecommunications and the Internet.

(http://www.pcs-soft.com/) Perez Computing Services
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.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.

(http://www.cfw.com/~shenan/) Shenandoah Equipment Co.
Providers of lifetime warrantied name brand simms, laptop and printer memory at competitive prices.

(http://www.softouch.com) SofTouch Systems, Inc.
Home of the bestselling set of disk and desktop maintenance products for 
OS/2: GammaTech Utilities, UniMaint, and FileStar/2!  ---- Your System's Safe 
and Sound with SofTouch Around

(http://www.stardock.com/) Stardock Systems
Providing quality software for the home and office.

(http://www.aescon.com/innoval/) Surf'nRexx
Use REXX to build powerful Internet utilities using our DLLs.  Package also includes 10 utilities as samples.

***********************************

Readers Who Have Sponsored

-----

The staff and contributors of OS/2 e-Zine! would like to extend special thanks to the following readers who have made significant contributions in the past year:

Dr. Ronald E. Wyllys	Gregory Mobley		Ian W. MacKee
Christopher A. King	Michel Slivitzky		Dennis J. Tuchler
Robert Griswold		Wm. Bradley Read II	R. Edgar Scrutton
Mike Quinn		Ralph Cohen		Robert D. Miller
Jan Schatz		Michael Shillingford	J. McMillan
Vicky Stables		Dennis Hayes		Scott Allen
Craig Sawers		Axel Webers		CLC Innovative Designs Ltd.
James McAfee		Alexander Ling		Bryan Sarty
Michael Andersen	Richard Prytula		Michael Coane
Patrick Gaerlan		Lars Eriksen		Lexington Strategic Associates
Gerry Ryan		Ingo Guenther		Shadow - In Memory of Brothers lost:
						Jack, Hobo, Fatman, Big John
Steinar Johansen	Randall Davis		Myron Prociak
Eric Kintzer		Gerald Thomas		Don Hindenach
Luc Geurts		Charles T. Nardino	Joseph Pena
David Butt		Andrew Choi		Lutz Lennardt
Brian Smither		Teruel de Campo		Daniel & Barbara Riordan
Robert Danvers		Jim Lewis		James Marshall
Nicky Morrow		Jeanine Bouchard	John L. Martin
Ulbe Renema		John R. Craven		Ronald L. Sutton
John Heinrichs		Seymour Lampert	James Gorman
A. Q. Thurston

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Copyright 1997   -   Haligonian Media
ISSN 1203-5696