OS/2 e-Zine! - Vanity in the Workplace (Shell)

Vanity in the Workplace (Shell)

- by Chris Wenham

-or- How I Created My "Drooltop"

Everybody likes to look good, everybody wants to be in style, everybody wants to impress their friends, and everybody wants to show off. So why are you using an operating system critically acclaimed for it's ugly industrial appearance?

I'm here to tell you that there's more to your favorite OS than crash resistance and High Performance File Systems. Yes, you can make Warp look pretty. I know, because I have done it. Here is how I turned a clunky WPS into the ultimate desktop--my Drooltop.

The Beauticians Tools

For this makeover I used the following tools. Hairbrush, lipstick, perfume, and...

Change the Controls

My first step was to get rid of those ugly default buttons that ship with Warp. To do this, I used CHG_CTLS, a nifty little program that makes alterations to the bitmaps found in the PMMERGE.DLL file in your /os2/dll directory. This changes the appearance of the maximize, minimize, hide, restore, system-menu, scrollbar, check-box, radio-button and drop-down list buttons. Plus it contains an alternate close button bitmap for NPS WPS (which I highly recommend). Users can pick the default set of icons, go with some of the others that I or many other users worldwide have created, or even make their own.

With CHG_CTLS it is possible to make your windows look almost like Windows 95, or Object Desktop, or anything else you please. It's that simple.

Since its release, it has been speculated that CHG_CTLS may cause some problems with applying Fixpacks or future versions of OS/2. This is a technical possibility, but in practice (thanks to the recent release of Fixpack 16) I found this not to be the case. All the Fixpack does is replace the PMMERGE.DLL file, to which you have to reapply the CHG_CTLS program if you want to get your fancy new icons back. You may wish to reserve judgement on that for yourself though, I can't guarantee that the program won't cause any problems.

"Change Controls" is not a memory resident program, it eats up no more RAM than is required for the new bitmaps (remember, they replace the current bitmaps, so you don't have two sets in memory). You won't suffer any performance hit, unless a few extra pixels is really distressing to you!

Buttonize the Heck Out of Those Titlebars

Next on my list was adding some extra buttons to my titlebars. We're talking heavy gratuitous use of buttons here! Xit used to be a utility that just added an "X" button to the titlebar of every window; clicking on it closed the window. Now it's evolved into something a tad more. In addition to the "X" button, there are others for rolling up a window (a-la Corel Draw style), popping up a task list, opening parent folders, sorting icons and more. Plus users can assign their own command to a button, for example I have one that opens an OS/2 windowed session.

From a vain point of view these buttons do look very cool, and if you "roll up" a few windows the effect is just fantastic! There's more than one set of buttons to chose from, and the author is even running a contest to encourage people to design more (sets of alternative buttons have started appearing on hobbes). Xit's other talents include a bucketful of handy shortcuts, but that's not the focus of this article. Suffice to say, it's extraordinarily configurable.

Throw Up a Cool Shadow

NPS WPS makes a very nice contribution to my ultimate desktop by placing a shadow behind every window. This shadow is adjustable in both "depth" and darkness. It gives windows a distinct 3D effect that looks excruciatingly cool. Many have called NPS WPS the "Object Desktop Killer" or more politically correctly, the "Windows 95 killer". Actually, NPS WPS works in harmony with Object Desktop. Windows 95 is another story.

Give Your Icons More Sex Appeal

OS/2's default icons aren't the cool 3D-ified ones you've seen in Windows 95 or the Mac, and that just wasn't good enough for me. The beauty of OS/2 is that you can change your icons around as you please though, so I did. In the icon pack I assembled for this article you'll find examples of what I consider to be the most beautiful in their class. There are icons (gif 12.7k) to replace most of the default OS/2 icons, as well as ones for many popular applications and several different file types. Changing application and Workplace Shell object icons is easy, just click the "General" tab in the settings notebook of the object to be changed and drag a new icon to the page. Changing all a data file's icons is harder though, since you'd normally have to do them all separately. Instead of doing this, I used Drop Zone.

Drop Zone is a collection of utilities for the Workplace Shell, one of which (the one we're most interested in here), is a program for assigning icons to data file types. It's simple enough to use; define the extension you wish to assign an icon to, select the drives you wish it to scan, drop an icon into the drop-box, and click "Assign". The utility will scan the drives for files with the specified extension and assign the new icon to them. The only disadvantage to this is that every now and then you need to run it again for any new files that have been created or downloaded in the meantime.

To partially allay this, I changed the default icon that Warp assigns to unassociated file formats. For this I used the WPS folder extensions, downloadable from hobbes. After installing these you'll find a new settings object in your System Setup folder. Among other useful customization features you can set the default icon used for folders and data files.

Pointers In Question

Next on my list were the mouse pointers. Warp provides a couple of sets, mainly two sizes of black and white and a few alternate hourglass cursors. However, the /multimedia/pointer directory of Hobbes has a good set of alternatives, including Windows 95 cursor look-alikes, gloved hands, and something for Star-Trek fans.

Backgrounds and Schemes

You'd be surprised what you can do with just a few color changes. In many cases you won't even need a bitmapped background, just a soothing dark purple, blue, red or green. I don't like grey backgrounds myself, they're drab and unexciting. With OS/2 you have the power to change the colors of each folder individually or system-wide in one big gulp but I tried to pick a different color for each folder. Color-coding helps identify in a flash which ones I have open. Here's my folder scheme:

Applications: Dark sky blue.
Graphics applications: Dark green.
Utilities: Light sky blue.
Games: Dark red.
Internet Apps: Dark orange.

You'll notice I picked mostly dark colors, I find this easier on the eye. Bright colors, when used for backgrounds, glare too much.

Warp provides a scheme palette for editing all the colors of the WPS in one place, plus it allows you to edit some elements that can't be changed by the regular drag-and-drop methods of the color and font palettes. For example the border width of your windows can be changed. I tried making those a few pixels wider or thinner to see if the appearance was agreeable or not. People inexperienced with the mouse might appreciate a wider border that's easier to "grab". Myself, I found that a border width of 3 pixels looks best.

You might also want to try using a bitmap for your backgrounds. Warp comes with a few good ones, but there's a lot of really nice ones to be found in the /multimedia/bmp directory of hobbes (Try the huge "backgrnd.zip" file). Worrying about my limited memory (12 meg) I left the bitmaps off my desktop.

But Don't Take My Word For It...

While creating my "drooltop" and finishing up this article, I dropped in to #OS/2 on IRC to get some ideas from others. Here's what was suggested:

"mikecd: I set my background color to black and have all of the desktop titles set as white on black... looks pretty slick."

"stiltner: Yeah, if you have the Pinky and the Brain .BMP on your desktop, you are more productive :)"

Well, maybe they weren't all that helpful after all...

What Now?

Of course, I realize that my desktop setup will not appeal to everyone. That's the best thing about Warp though, the WPS is so flexible that anyone can achieve as much or as little customization as they want. So if the tips I've provided above aren't enough to cure your desktop blues, what are you waiting for? Okay boys and girls, get to 'em!

Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company--Wenham's Web Works. He has been writing all sorts of strange things from comedy to sci-fi to this.

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