First Looks and Nifty Gadgets

irst Looks and Nifty Gadgets brings you reviews of the new and novel. Each month we take a look at what's just hitting the streets and some tiny, but tried and true products that are still helping people be as productive as possible.

This month we look at: Voyager | J Street Mailer Beta | Submission for OS/2 1.0

Voyager VRML Plug-in for Netscape

Snow Storm Software, after the release of their Escape GL 2.0 (see the review in this month's issue), have taken the VRML 2.0 support from the screen saver and packaged it into a plug-in for Netscape too. This viewer can read and display the popular ".WRL" files found out on the web, embedded in a web page or linked to separately.

Contingent on the success of Voyager, Snow Storm also announced plans to work on a "Voyager Pro" version that supports full browsing and navigation of VRML sites. The current Voyager is limited to viewing only, but the "Pro" version would support full browsing capabilities, along with VRML tricks such as proximity sensors and animation.

Voyager

by Snow Storm Software
MSRP: US$29

J Street Mailer

InnoVal Systems Solutions Inc., makers of the popular Post Road Mailer series of e-mail clients for OS/2, have started the beta testing phase of their new J Street Mailer (GIF, 29K) e-mail client for Java. While the beta program is only open to those who pay the $40 membership fee, we had a chance to have a look at the latest release of the beta.

Set up with a layout similar to the Agent newsreader for Windows, folders (inboxes, outboxes, sent mail, custom folders etc.) are in the top left frame, the contents of folders is listed in the top right, and selected e-mails are displayed in the third frame at the bottom. J Street Mailer is written in 100% pure Java and supports POP/SMTP mailboxes, binary attachments, multiple e-mail accounts and multiple personas per e-mail account.

J Street Mailer also features a spell-checker, an HTML based help system with a convenient internal viewer, the ability to store your own notes with each e-mail message, and an interesting Templates system for composing messages - one template provides a fill-out form for sending problem reports in to InnoVal.

Performance will be dependent on the level and quality of your Java Virtual Machine, but overall the Beta was shipping up fairly well for what it does.

J Street Mailer Beta

by InnoVal Systems Solutions Inc.
MSRP: US$40 for beta program membership. $20 for Post Road Mailer 3.0 customers

Submission for OS/2

Developers of web sites are probably quite familiar with the tedious and often eye-aching job of submitting the URL of a new web site to all of the dozens of search engines on the web. Well ache no more, because this little utility will make it possible to enter the site's information once, and double-click your way into the search engines.

With a simple dialog-box (GIF, 7K) you enter your site's URL, the contact e-mail address, a few keywords and a category (descriptions are not yet supported). Then start double-clicking on search engines -- that's all there is to it. Submission will connect to the respective search engine and insert your site's information into their databases via their "Add Site" function (a CGI script that accepts information encoded in a URL).

Unfortunately Submission only has two search engines in its list at the moment; HotBot and Lycos. But anyone with a little bit of Rexx knowledge and an understanding of a search engine's URL format can add their own quite easily (just use the existing list as a template to start from and make a couple of small changes). The author is requesting that anyone who writes support for a new search engine would forward their instructions to him, so he can add it to the program.

Submission for OS/2 v1.1

by PowerDale IT Ltd.
download from Hobbes (.ZIP, 80K)
Registration: Freeware

That's it for this month. Tune in next time for more reviews of neat gadgets and first looks at new OS/2 tools.

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ISSN 1203-5696