the Beta File - by Ryan Dill

elcome back to the Beta File, your source for the latest breaking news in OS/2 beta development. Each 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, drop us a note!

We'll start off this month with a few updates to beta programs that we have mentioned in previous issues.

The graphics front-end IPAD (mentioned in July '97), has been updated again (11/3/97), this time to version 5.0.1 (ZIP, 550k). Nick Knight's MR/2 Newsreader (mentioned in June '97), has been updated (10/31/97) to beta #42 (ZIP, 1M). Lastly, an updated version (11/7/97) of the graphics manipulation program Embellish's 2.02a beta (mentioned in July '97) is available (ZIP, 2.4M).

Lotus has released the beta version of SmartSuite for OS/2 Warp 4 (the office suite formerly known as SmartSuite 97 for OS/2) to the public. To install the beta, you first need to have installed a special version of OS/2 Warp 4 FixPak 3 (called FixPak 3 SE, or Special Edition). This FixPak contains certain Open32 code SmartSuite needs to run, code that isn't yet included in normal Warp 4 FixPaks. (Open32 is an IBM Win32 porting library, which greatly aids developers in porting a Windows 32-bit application to an OS/2 32-bit application, as was done with this version of SmartSuite) Lotus representatives have stated that in the future, possibly by the next beta release, these Open32 fixes will be included in normal Warp 4 FixPaks, so you won't have to juggle 'basic' and 'SE' FixPaks.

SmartSuite for Warp 4 includes a word processor (Word Pro), a spreadsheet (1-2-3), a database (Approach), Personal Information Manager (Organizer), and a program for graphical presentations (Freelance Graphics). The suite is designed for Internet/intranet interaction; all your programs can save to Internet drives as easily as local ones. In addition to normal word processing capabilities, Word Pro allows easy generation of HTML pages for the World Wide Web with no HTML knowledge necessary. Lotus 1-2-3 tables can similarly be published directly to the Web, and Approach allows the user to access a wide range of databases, such as Notes or Oracle, no matter where they are.

If you're a licensed Lotus beta tester for SmartSuite for Warp 4, you'll get a copy of the program on CD if you haven't already (the beta kits started shipping to testers on the 12th of November). For everyone else, the beta is freely downloadable from the Internet. The problem is, this beta is BIG. FixPak 3 SE by itself is 29 megabytes ZIPped, while the actual SmartSuite beta is closer to 100 megabytes. Because of this, a number of download options are available, such as downloading twenty 5-megabyte files rather than one huge file. One can also install only the parts of the suite that are desired, rather than the whole thing. (e.g., you can install just Word Pro and Freelance Graphics.)

The beta has been stored on one of OS/2's main archive sites, Hobbes, and Innoval's Hobbes Report now has a SmartSuite beta page which contains various information and download links. To find out more information about SmartSuite for OS/2, see the Suite's page at Lotus. For anyone who doesn't want to bother downloading close to 130 megs of files, resellers such as Indelible Blue and J3 Computer Technologies are also offering the software on CD. (Materials, time and labor bring the cost of the CD to US$10 before shipping.) No word is yet available from Lotus of the final intended price of SmartSuite for Warp 4, but since SmartSuite 96 for is now selling for about US$399 at both of the above places, it's a safe bet that SmartSuite for Warp 4's full price will be above $400 US (less for academic and upgrades).

Christopher Hodges has written a MIDI sequencer which uses OS/2's Real-Time MIDI subsystem, RTMIDI, and he's currently seeking beta testers to help him test it on OS/2 systems other than his own. His current setup is Warp 4 with a Sound Blaster 16 card (yes, it can be used with RTMIDI), so anyone with a different sound card (or cards) is encouraged to e-mail Christopher with details.

The MStation Sequencer has some of the following features:

• An unlimited number of tracks - (Defaults to 24 but user can add)
• Merging of multiple tracks into one
• Transposition on a per-track basis
• Can send program/bank changes on a per-track basis
• Track muting
• A 16-Channel mixer with volume and left-to-right panning
• A metronome
• Uses OS/2's high-resolution timer for accurate timestamping
• Tempo change

Many more features are planned for the final release of the MStation Sequencer, but the author wants to make sure this version is working correctly with a variety of hardware first. At this early stage, no decisions regarding price or final availability date have been made. If you'd like more info or would like to be a tester as MStation develops, e-mail Christopher and let him know.

The members of the FreeType Project have released the first public beta of their TrueType font rendering engine. This freeware product is a cross-platform library which allows you to design font servers (the part of your environment which is responsible for displaying your various fonts) which will display TrueType fonts (as originally developed by Apple and Microsoft) quickly and with quality. Since it's developed wholly from published TrueType documentation and specs rather than ported or derived from the TrueType engines for the Macintosh and Windows, FreeType doesn't have to pay any royalties for using TrueType technology. Hence, the FreeType engine is free for anyone to use and comes with all source code included. Being cross platform, it could be fairly useful to OS/2 developers. (In fact, the majority of engine development is being done on OS/2 and Linux)

The FreeType engine is said to be of a quality equal to the built-in engines of Windows and the Macintosh, plus it brings a variety of features to platforms which use it for development. Some of the interesting ones include gray-level rendering (which can provide smoothed fonts like the anti-aliased ones in Windows 95); a byte-code interpreter which 'hints' at fonts, allowing them to display extremely well even at small sizes; support for collections of TrueType fonts in a single file, and the ability to extend the FreeType engine as needed.

This beta release contains a completely functional API (Application Programming Interface), so the members of the FreeType project encourage any OS/2 developers interested in font display to download it and develop code based on the FreeType engine. In that way, any bugs remaining in the engine will be tracked down and developers will gain a better understanding of what FreeType can do. The beta can be downloaded (ZIP, 347k) from the FreeType Project's home page, where you can also find a FAQ, screen shots, and demo web pages of the engine in action. Any comments on the development of FreeType under OS/2 can be sent to Robert Wilhelm.

Also for developers, Johanne Martin has released his third beta of version 2.0 of his SVGA and VESA Kit for EMX. 'EMX' is Eberhard Mattes' development environment for creating (and running) 32-bit programs for OS/2 2.x, Warp (3.x, 4.x) and DOS. EMX is designed primarily for porting Unix software to OS/2 and DOS, and includes a copy of the GNU C/C++ compiler. Although the EMX environment includes loads of stuff for programmers, one area which it previously glossed over was high-resolution graphics. Johanne has decided to fill the gap by releasing his kit, which will allow programmers writing with EMX to develop programs that use high-resolution VESA and SVGA.

Like the EMX environment itself, the SVGA and VESA Kit is freeware. Version 2.0 has no set release date as of yet, but interested programmers are encouraged to download either the latest release version (v1.9) or the 2.0 b3 and report any problems they find. The source and runtimes for version 1.9, as well as the source for the beta 2.0 (a runtime only version of 2.0 is not yet available) can be downloaded from the Kit's web page. The latest version of EMX (0.9c + FixPak 4) and all of its documentation can be downloaded from Hobbes or the OS/2 Supersite.

PillarSoft, the company that brought OS/2 users the Enhanced E editors and the WarpZip zip management utility, have announced the second beta (v1.01) of a new mini-application, ShowTime/2. ShowTime/2 is a combination background switcher and slide show viewer. For anyone who gets bored with seeing the same background on your OS/2 Desktop, ShowTime/2 will allow you to change it at a prearranged time -- much like the Background Magic program mentioned in last month's issue. Select what bitmaps you want to be switched around from the program's file dialog, and then simply select the time you want the program to wait before switching. ShowTime/2 adds another feature though, because it allows you to set bitmaps to appear either as your Desktop background or as a 'slide show' (the images cycle as the background of a folder in front of you, allowing your Desktop to remain unchanged). It also displays the time of the last change in the titlebar of the main program.

The current beta of ShowTime/2 only allows images to appear scaled, not normal size or tiled, but the author says this is a feature he'd like to add to the next version. ShowTime/2 is available for purchase and e-mail delivery through Pillarsoft for US $7 or through BMT Micro for US $10. (BMT is more expensive, but also has more payment methods and is faster in terms of turnaround.) For more information, see the ShowTime/2 home page.

Is it time for something to improve your Desktop? Having just reached its second public beta (a small bug fix over the first beta, which was preceded by 4 internal versions), Dialog Enhancer does just that. Dialog Enhancer is a utility for Warp 4 which replaces many of the graphical resources of OS/2 with 'spiffed up' versions. Dialog boxes, 'File Open/Save' boxes, basic system programs such as ChkDsk and the Icon Editor -- all have had the graphical resources associated with them tweaked to visually make more sense and to be more appealing. Many dialogs in Warp 4 which use the old Warp 3 system fonts by default will use the newer and more appealing WarpSans instead once Dialog Enhancer has been applied.

Dialog Enhancer has been tested on all versions of Warp 4 (FixPaks too), but will not work on any other versions of OS/2 (if demand for other versions exists, though, the author is willing to consider it). Once installed via ObjectREXX, you'll hopefully find that your OS/2 system looks better and makes more sense. It adds text to dialogs here and there to make those dialogs easier to understand, adds icons to some, makes some take up less space, et cetera.

The author of Dialog Enhancer, Richard Castle, is planning on releasing the product as shareware, probably for a price tag of US$15, once the beta cycle is completed. Until then, anyone is welcome to download it and try it out on their system. The more people who like the program and register it, the more development that will go into it, so download it and see what you think. (Keep in mind it's beta software, and acts underneath the hood of OS/2 -- follow the directions, and you should be OK.) You can download the latest version of Dialog Enhancer (as of this writing, v1.041b) from the program's web page.

For the web designers out there, the makers of the WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") HTML publisher HomePage Publisher have just released their second beta of version 2.0 of the program. HomePage Publisher allows you to create web pages without knowledge of arcane HTML tags -- simply type in your text and then use HPP's various toolbar functions to change it to your liking, using bold and italics, centering and different font and header sizes at the click of a button. HomePage Publisher even supports drag-and-drop of images into your document; pick a cool graphic and simply drag it out of its OS/2 folder and drop it into your page. This drag-and-drop extends to other files, so if you want a link in your document to a certain file, just declare the link and drop that file on top of the link. HPP also allows easy editing of the raw HTML source code, in case you want to add a feature to your page that the program doesn't currently support, like a Java applet or CGI script.

HPP has a slew of other useful features too, including spell checking, editing of on-line pages, find/replace, a color wheel to let you find the exact shade of a color you want, and more. Since version 2.0, the program also includes support for the Netscape frames format -- allowing you to easily create framed documents.

HomePage Publisher is available in an evaluation version that allows 100 saves, plus a few other limitations -- registering the product eliminates all restrictions. No word is yet available on the price of version 2.0 when it reaches release, but HomePage Publisher 1.0 sells for US$95 so version 2.0 could cost slightly more, since it includes frames support (and possibly will have other features added before release). Note that the author is offering all registered owners of version 1.0 a free upgrade to version 2.0, so if you've already registered the product, you're safe.

If you'd like to try out HPP, you can download evaluation versions of version 1.0h (ZIP, 3.8M) or version 2.0 beta 2 (ZIP, 3.9M). Version 1.0 may currently be purchased from a variety of distributors worldwide, including BMT Micro. For a list of sites to order from, or just more information about HPP's features, see HomePage Publisher's web page.

Ryan Dill is a student of Computer Science at Acadia University in Wolfville, NS and OS/2 e-Zine! 's technical editor. He is reported to be relieved that, with the advent of Warp 4, talking to your computer is no longer considered a sign of mental instability.