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Sneak Peak: Object Desktop v1.5

Stardock Systems is nearing completion of the first significant overhaul of its flagship corporate product, Object Desktop. Scheduled to be released on April 29, OD v1.5 will add a slew of functionality and performance enhancements to the "Next Generation" operating environment. Company officials claim that systems with 16 meg or more will actually run faster with OD v1.5 than without it!

We had a chance to look at a preliminary beta copy of OD v1.5 and play with some of its features. What will these new features be, you ask? Read on... Please keep in mind though that this is only a preliminary copy! Things can and do change in the software industry and we can not make any guarantees about what features will or will not make it into the GA release.

Object Navigator

The Object Navigator has been reworked to make an already great file/object manager even better. New in this version are multiple "roots" (Desktop, Drives object, Network, etc.) in the tree pane of the Navigator to use as starting points for trees and the ability to delete or add new ones to customize things to suit the way you work.

The Object Navigator interface (gif 11.6k) has also been enhanced with new toolbar buttons for common operations such as copy and move, and new operations such as select objects, create folder or change file attributes. Toolbars also now have fly-over help

Control Center

In response to requests from users with limited screen real-estate Stardock has added the ability to automatically hide the Control Center on use, lock it to an edge of the screen and stop other applications from overlapping it.

Object Packages

Possibly the most significant new feature of Object Desktop v1.5 is the Object Package. Object Packages are simply files that contain Workplace Shell objects--sort of like zip files except they can contain objects as well as normal files. They seem to work well and are quite simple to use. With Object Packages users have the potential to easily package folders or the entire desktop (gif 10k) and quickly and easily share them with other users!

Not included in the beta we looked at but promised for the GA release are what Stardock calls Common Desktop Folder Packages. These will be "canned" Object Packages for restoring all or part of the OS/2 System, Templates, Information, OS/2 Warp BonusPak, and Object Desktop folders. The intent of Common Desktop Folder Packages is to provide a convenient way to restore objects that are accidentally deleted.

Stardock Web Shell

Building on the Object Package technology, Stardock has undertaken a project to catalog Web sites of interest to OS/2 users. The Stardock Web Shell (gif 5k) is an object package containing a multitude of interesting URL objects. Of course, with the way the Internet works, these could become outdated fairly quickly, but since the package is portable it would be child's play for Stardock to maintain a current version for download from a web or FTP site.

Other things

The street price of Object Desktop will be going up with the new release but there is a bright side to this. Users who buy OD v1 after April 1st but before April 29th can upgrade to v1.5 free. So if you are thinking of buying it, don't wait, you'll get a better deal by picking it up now and getting the higher priced v1.5 at no charge later--but get it before all the copies of v1.0 already in retail channels disappear! For those of you who already own OD but bought it before April, the upgrade price to v1.5 will be US$37.

Stardock also promises overall speed improvements as well as tuning of the performance of individual features such as Object Archives and the Object Navigator. On top of this there are many minor enhancements promised that we haven't mentioned here. Suffice it to say that the Object Desktop development team has been busy and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future.

* Object Desktop v1.5
Stardock Systems, Incorporated
Release Date: April 29, 1996

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