[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.os2ezine.com/ or zipped for off-line reading.  Some graphically oriented articles have been removed from this document.]


OS/2 e-Zine!		June 28, 1998		volume 3, number 9
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1998		Falcon Networking  	ISSN 1203-5696

         "Over Three Quarters of a Million Satisfied Visitors!"


OPINIONS:

  Chris' Rant
  As through a glass...


DEPARTMENTS:

  Answers from e-Zine!
  OS/21st
  the REXX Files


REVIEWS:

  LOTUS SMARTSUITE FOR OS/2

  Overview - Chris Wenham
  123 - Dr. Dirk Terrell
  Approach - Christopher B. Wright
  Freelance - Christopher B. Wright
  Organizer - Chris Wenham
  Word Pro - Chris Wenham
  SmartSuite Tips - Chris Wenham


  First Looks and Nifty Gadgets

	    SFUtils		Keyboard Plus v1.1


READER SURVEYS:

Results from our June 13th Survey
  Find out what your fellow readers told us last month! 

OpenGL Hardware Support
  Answer these simple questions and find out how you compare to
  other OS/2 users.  Results will be printed next month!


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Copyright 1998   -   Falcon Networking
ISSN 1203-5696

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

Chris' Rant	- by Chris Wenham

Blinded By Protocol

The workday begins, you power up your computer, you dial into your Internet provider and your mail, browser and FTP client cannot resolve any addresses. Calling your ISP you find out that they switched to a new nameserver protocol that uses a feature added to Windows a year earlier. To save money the ISP shut down their old and now obsolete nameserver, but if you like they can mail you a floppy with the patch "for your Windows PC." The consortium that developed the new nameserver system, headed by Microsoft, did not choose to make the protocol an open standard nor make a fix for OS/2. With that kind of maddening panic and exasperation that comes only when you look into the future and see yourself facing months of convincing a cash strapped ISP that their half dozen OS/2 customers need the old nameserver, you instead hang up the phone and face months of finding a new provider who isn't also shifting to the new scheme. 

You notice one day that you're starting to get more and more mail from customers and associates that comes in an attachment which you cannot read. The attachment is a file that uses a format similar to Word's, now embodied as part of Outlook Express that Microsoft began bundling with Windows. You send mail to these people asking them to please switch back to regular ASCII, or to HTML if formatting is important, but they say the default setting cannot be changed and it's a chore to go to the dialog box nested three menu levels deep, just to change the formatting for each e-mail sent. 

Your favorite web site switches to a dialect of Dynamic HTML supported only by Internet Explorer. Like with the introduction of frames, most sites don't offer alternative content, but merely an apology and a link to download the browser you cannot run. 

ZIP becomes steadily displaced by a new compression scheme from a company that only makes a Windows version and is unwilling to make its superefficient proprietary algorithms public. 

Where do these nightmares come from? A cruel imagination? Most actually come from real life news stories, or rather what happens when you read between their lines. Proprietary standards and protocols are intoxicating to the companies that develop them, as the profit potential of being the only vendor for a hot standard can be huge. The most visible precedent for the proprietary route is, of course, the Windows API -- a standard that has earned its maker a place as one of the most staggeringly rich and powerful companies in the world. Is it any surprise then that here, in the PC industry, worshippers of Microsoft's success are all too ready to copy its business techniques letter for letter? 

The PC industry is also famous for not tolerating multiple standards very well. Most web browsers still only support a pathetic sampling of image formats (.GIF, .JPG, and a tiny drop of .PNG support here and there); Office suites still inter operate poorly with programs from other vendors (try using 1-2-3 with Clearlook, Mesa 2 with StarWriter and so on); Modem wars; Audio and video streaming; video cards; sound cards; USB vs. Firewire; so on and so on. The fact is, it's cheaper to use only one standard for encoding or transmitting information. The program, computer or service which supports the larger number of standards also has the higher price, and the consumer PC marketplace is not known for fat profit margins. 

So your ISP will more likely want to minimize the number of redundant services it offers and software makers will want to keep their money making secrets close to heart as well as doing everything in their power to increase the number of people using them. 

What it spells is a death of slow, creeping blindness to any platform which cannot keep up with the progress of these standards and protocols and schemes. Looking at fiascoes like QuickTime, Netscape Communicator and DVD it seems that OS/2 is definitely not the one first to bat with support for important new standards, which is what I'd call a tragedy waiting to happen. 

The only notable exception to this reputation is Java, for which OS/2 support is exemplary. This may be its saving grace, but that's the topic for another column. 

But to make sure we don't get blinded by protocol and loose our means of using our computers productively with the outside world, I suggest that the OS/2 community needs to do two things: 

First, use good old fashioned political means to make sure the proprietary standards loose out to open ones. This means letter writing, grassroots efforts, word of mouth, and the most powerful of all: voting with your wallet. 

And second, provide encouragement (financial or otherwise) to the large pool of technical talent we have, so that someone out there is ready and willing to create the support for those open standards once won. Take a look at the OS/2 port of the (http://larkin.NuclearWinter.com/rros2.html) Roadrunner cable modem login client, (http://www.practice.xo.com/) Practice Corp's QuickMotion and (http://www.innoval.com/) J Street Mailer as examples of both free and commercial software that already tackle the problems of open and semi-open standards (Roadrunner's Kerberos authentication, QuickTime video, LDAP etc.) 

If you think the threat of proprietary standards and protocols blocking OS/2 users out of the world is or is not real, or think you know of other ways to deal with the problem, your thoughts are welcomed and encouraged in our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/rant/June28-1998.html) Hypernews Forum.

                         - * -

(chris@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to keep his bicycle and a trailer.

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

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Developers of The Graham Utilities -- the largest, most comprehensive suite of disk, file and general utilities specifically written for OS/2.

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

As Through A Glass	- by Pete Grubbs

"For now we see through a glass, darkly . . . now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known." 
                I Corinthians, 13:12.

We humans are funny creatures.  We look out upon the universe in all its vast, infinite complexity and instinctively recoil.  We simply cannot encompass the completeness of existence all at once.  No.  We have to separate it out into little patches that our finite minds can comprehend.  Then we laboriously stitch those pieces together until we recreate something that's sort of like the real thing.  In some cases, we make such a compelling argument -- compelling to us at least -- that we really believe we do understand what's going on out there.  We follow those arguments, those stitched up shreds of comprehension as though we really knew what they meant and how they related to us.

And we very often discover that we are pretty much clueless about it all.

A few years ago, IBM decided that it would cede the Small Office/Home Office market in PCs to Microsoft and Windows.  Its ad campaign for the brand new upgrade to OS/2 2.1, Warp 3, fell to earth like a ruptured duck, flopping and squawking, and, rather than hire some real marketing talent to take the fight back into Microsoft's face, IBM contented itself with the sure knowledge that it could market OS/2 in those areas of the computer world that really counted, the ENTERPRISE MARKETS.  The word SOHO became a no-no in the Big Blue halls.  As Ralph Nader recently discovered, it's nearly impossible to get OS/2 preloaded on anything you buy from IBM unless you're an ENTERPRISE customer.  (Gee, is that the reason they pulled the name Warp out of the hat in the first place?  Warp.  Enterprise.  Scotty, get me out of here!)

And it makes a certain amount of sense, when you think about it.  Going head to head with Bill Gates is something that most ISVs avoid like the plague.  Even when you win (has anybody actually won?), the effort leaves you bruised and battered and wondering if it was really worth the effort.  And since IBM could make money in other areas by letting MS alone on the desktop, it just didn't make a lot of sense to put up a big struggle to maintain a presence there.  After all, we can always count on the ENTERPRISE market.

Guess who's looking pretty clueless right about now.

Windows NT is taking over a lot of those markets.  Not because it's better.  Not because it's faster.  Not because it's more scalable, or reliable.  It isn't any of these.  Everyone knows that NT 4.0 isn't a mature product.  That same knowledgeable crowd are crossing their collective fingers, hoping like hell that 5.0 will get here and that it will live up to all of the hype surrounding it (Right.  As if!)  But the truth of the matter is that NT is taking serious market share from UNIX and Novell because it's friendlier; it's more familiar.

Why is it more familiar?  Gee could it have anything to do with its relationship to other Microsoft products?  Could it be because MS owns most of the desktops out there in SOHO land?  Could it be because the number cruncher who runs Win 95 all day doesn't want to face up to any learning curves when he gets home to play Microsoft Golf?  Could it be because somewhere the rank and file of Corporate America come home and discover that there's a kid waiting for them to walk through the door and install Doom for him and that same rank and filer wants to get the job done as quickly as possible which is noticeably easier if one is very familiar with the operating system?  If one runs the same OS at home that is running in the office?  Maybe it's because some IT manager somewhere discovered that it was a lot easier to train people in her department to use an office computer system that looked a whole lot like the same machines those people used at home.  Maybe it's because some other company realized that the ENTERPRISE markets and SOHO markets and home markets are really all ONE market, and went after that one market with a will, even if it didn't have much to offer.

What IBM (and the rest of the computer industry, for that matter) has got to realize is that the computer business is like everything else in the universe.  It's complex.  It isn't driven from the top down, or from the bottom up.  It's coming at you from all angles.  It doesn't consist of a pile of completely separate pieces.  It's an integrated, seamless whole.  If you focus exclusively on any one facet of the industry to the exclusion of all others, like, say, ignoring the home and SOHO markets to cultivate just the ENTERPRISE market, you'll get your knickers seriously twisted by the first company who comes along and sees that those three markets are forever and inextricably linked.  If you pretend that the people who own computers in their homes aren't the same people who go to the office and work on them all day, well, some upstart little company may come along and grab both markets right out from under your nose while you stand there pulling on it, wondering where your market went.

Maybe I'm being an optimist, but I don't think it's too late for Big Blue to sort this out.  I don't think it's too late for OS/2 to emerge as a serious competitor to all that is Windows.  But I know, without a doubt, that IBM, OS/2 and the rest of us are doomed if we don't learn to see more than just the little chunk of reality right in front of our noses.

                         - * -

(peg5@psu.edu) Pete Grubbs is a self-described OS/2 wonk, a doctoral candidate in English literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a part-time faculty member at Penn State and is currently developing a copy editing/creation service, The Document Doctor, which tailors documents for small businesses.

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

Answers from e-Zine!

Welcome back to "Answers from e-Zine!", your source for answers to all your OS/2 questions!  In each issue 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@os2ezine.com) send it in!

                         - * -

TIP --  An alternative to the Spike program (mentioned in last issue's "(http://www.os2ezine.com/v3n08/project.htm) the OS/2 Project") that not many people know about that is an option for Warp 4 users, is to right-click on the Desktop (or any standard folder) and choose "paste". This puts the contents of the clipboard into a file in that folder.

You are first prompted for the file name and data type. I can't recall right now, but you may be able to select an object type that you have created and associated so that the resulting file will have a unique icon and even its own viewer.

 - (scorpion@thuntek.net) Ryan Gray

                         - * -

Q --  Is there support for OS/2 and DVD-ROM drives?  If not, is IBM planning it, or does anyone know?

A --  According to voice Conference on March 30, 1998, there is not FULL DVD support... yet.

Sam Deitweiller (of IBM) said, in part:

  "Currently there is no plan for full DVD support.  There is work
  going on to support DVD media for data."

 - (tpater@one.net.au) Tony

                         - * -

Q --  I am trying to find if I can use SYQUEST's SparQ drive with OS/2 (I am planning to buy one). Reading information between lines on SYQUEST's web page, they do not say YES but they say NO to some options -- I cannot conclude anything. I wonder if anyone has some experience with SparQ.

A --  To those interested in possible OS/2 support for large removable disks like Syquest's new SparQ and the slightly older SyJet line, I can now report UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS:

My drive is the IDE version of Syquest's SparQ 1.0.  Together with one other IDE device (a CD-ROM drive) it resides in an otherwise all-SCSI configuration.

While there is no claim of OS/2 compatibility from Syquest and only incomplete support for these kinds of removable drives in Warp 4  (including FixPak 6), I have found a very recent update which seems to rectify the situation.

Look for a file called:  IDEDASD.EXE - 137,650 bytes, on (http://service.software.ibm.com/os2ddpak/html/647679D565C73E0F862565980068EFB0.html) IBM's OS/2 device driver site.  It contains updates to FixPak 6 as follows:

  IBM1S506.ADD
  IBMATAPI.FLT
  IBMIDECD.FLT
  OS2DASD.DMD
  OS2DASD.TXT

These files solve some problems with Warp and very large IDE hard drives, and assorted other things including support for large removable Syquest disks.

When I first installed the four new device drivers, my system refused to boot.  It just hung on the opening blue Warp logo screen.  Through trial and error (mostly error), I discovered that the new IBM1S506.ADD did not like my Intel DK440LX motherboard.  Using the FixPak 6 version of the driver solved that problem.

With 3 of the 4 above device drivers installed as per instructions in the OS2DASD.TXT file provided, I now have full use of my SparQ drive under Warp 4.0.

 - (ivan@idirect.com) Ivan Vestergaard

                         - * -

That's it for this issue.  If you have a tip or question that you don't see covered here, don't forget to (feedback@os2ezine.com) send it in!

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

OS/21st	- by Sam Henwrich

In this column I'll be discussing new ways in which OS/2 can be used in both the consumer and corporate world, with technology that exists both today and which may be developed in the future. My purpose is not to say what should be done, but what could be done, to feed a steady stream of ideas out there that may be picked up by others with the means to see them through, or merely to underline the fact that OS/2 does have a future.

If you wish to contribute your own ideas, discuss ideas already presented here, or read what others have to say, then jump into our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/os21st/June28-1998.html) Hypernews forum. I'll be checking it regularly to see what you have to say.

                         - * -

The vision of Network Computing as seen by Oracle and IBM leaves very little room for the individual. Network Computers are designed to be cheap boxes, deployed in the thousands across a factory floor and office block, drawing applications and files from a server costing tens of thousands of dollars. Its purpose is to bring back the Mainframe and Terminal era and the efficiency, cheapness, scalability and robustness associated with it. If an NC breaks, it's cheaply replaced. No precious files or user preferences or phone books are lost as everything is stored on the server. Plus, as a worker roams across the plant, any NC he touches becomes his own personal workstation, with his own desktop and applications and preferences intact. 

This scenario is highly desirable for companies besieged with Windows crashes, staggering upgrade and "Cost of Ownership" expenses, high failure rates and crippling data loss. But is it really desirable for the home user who cannot afford the cost of even just the server itself? 

The name of the product IBM has placed its Network Computer technology into is called Workspace On Demand, or "WSOD" for short. It's based on Warp Server and performs several admirable feats such as booting a computer across the network and providing a "roaming desktop" that follows you from computer to computer. It's designed to make use of the hundreds of obsolete PCs that are scattered around almost every company in the world -- old PCs with small hard drives, weak processors and shallow amounts of RAM. If the server makes up for these deficiencies somehow, then all those junk PCs become usable and valuable again, saving the company a write-off.

But question yourself: what characteristics of WSOD would be nice to have in your home? Would you like to roam from bedroom to living room and have your desktop and applications follow you to the computer you keep there? Would you like these and your personal files to be kept separate from other members of the family? 

If you look at some of the devices in your home today you'll see that some are already using the ideas of Network Computing in some form or another. Your telephones, for example, need to store no particular preferences. Chances are your phone company offers a speed-dial service, where your favorite numbers are stored at their exchange. Plug any phone into an outlet, press two buttons and you have Grandma, or your sister, or your lawyer. The phone itself didn't need to remember those numbers in some kind of built in memory (even though there are ones that do), neither did it need to be any special kind of phone at all. 

There's also evidence to show that home owners and small business owners are no strangers to the "Client/Server" model that requires a high up-front expense but low continuing expenses. For example, some homes have a Central Vac where a vacuum cleaner is installed in the basement and an outlet for the hose is available on every floor. And we all have a central boiler feeding hot water to every faucet, instead of boiling cold water in a kettle every time we want to wash the dishes or take a bath. Far removed from PCs, but the idea is to show that home users might be willing to pay for the same types of scheme, applied to computers.

So paying about $1,000 to $1,500 for a server that's installed in the basement or closet to feed a home network of cheap NCs costing under $500 each (coming down to $200 or less as Moore's law and competition do their trick) now starts to sound realistic. At this price range it's affordable to put an NC in every room of your home or every office of your small business while retaining all the benefits we bought our expensive PCs for. If WSOD is installed on the server (which ideally would be a closed box with only one or two buttons and no keyboard or screen) then you've got the stability that makes it practical (no screen to go blue, no keyboard to press CTRL-ALT-DEL on) and the technology to make it desirable.

For those reading this article right now you probably already have a computer with enough power to be the server and maybe some junkers lying around that can be utilized as NCs, thus saving you a bundle already. Your slow machines can be e-mail checkers and web browsers that you keep in the kitchen, while your son (or you) has a Pentium to play games on in his bedroom. 

It is with regret that I say IBM probably won't do much to grease the tracks for this particular use of their technology. The motives behind their reasons for pulling out of the "small guys" market haven't changed since they quietly altered OS/2's focus two years ago. But it is not out of the reach for third parties to do it since the bulk of the technology has already been developed by IBM and would work superbly in the scenario I've described. What remains to be handled now is the packaging of WSOD. Could someone make a package of the server, software, cabling, network cards and instructions ready to sell to home users and small business owners?

I'll wager that there are already some hobbyists experimenting with ideas like this one and achieving some degrees of success. There was quite some excitement over the porting of the VNC client (Virtual Network Computer) to OS/2 a few weeks ago, which allowed one to control an application running on a Windows or Unix machine remotely from a box running Warp (or any other platform). The beauty of VNC is that the client machine is stateless, meaning that if the computer you're using for a remote control dies on you suddenly, the application you were controlling is still running on the server unaffected. You can move to a different computer, login, and literally resume from the same file and cursor position you left off at. 

So I hope this answers a 'Yes' to the question: Is Network Computing for the little guy too? Clearly there are many benefits that home and small-business users can enjoy just as well as the Megacorporations can.

Comments? Ideas of your own? Join in the discussion with our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/os21st/June28-1998.html) Hypernews forum.

                         - * -

Sam Henwrich is an upstate NY OS/2 user. He can be reached at (henwrich@yahoo.com) henwrich@yahoo.com.

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

the Rexx Files	- by Dr. Dirk Terrell

This month I had a client who needed to implement a "shopping cart" type of application which enables customers to order items from his web site. Handling the order for one item is pretty straightforward using the CGI techniques discussed in the (http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n14/rexx.htm) December, 1996 column. (Unless you are pretty familiar with CGI programming, I would suggest that you look at that article before continuing with this one.) 

If you want to process an order that contains multiple items, things can get a little tricky. If the catalog is not too large, then you can put all of it on one page and let the customer check off multiple items and process them all in one submission to your CGI script. If the catalog is too large though, that method won't work because the page will take too long to download and be unwieldy to use. If you must break the catalog up into separate pages then you run into the problem of HTTP being a stateless protocol. Stateless simply means that there is no inherent connection between one access of a web server and another. If you call a CGI program twice, there is no way of connecting the results of the two accesses. With HTTP, a client makes a request of the server which the server satisfies in some way, and then the connection is broken. Obviously this presents a problem if you want people to be able to browse through a multiple page catalog and check off multiple items to be ordered. How can the server know what was previously ordered? 

One solution to this problem is the use of cookies, a name chosen for no obvious reason that I can tell. Cookies are small bits of information stored by the client's browser and associated with your server. You have probably heard about cookies and their potential for misuse. I won't go into the ethics of using cookies here except to say that like most things, cookies themselves are not good or bad but how they are used can be. In the case of our need to track multiple connections, cookies provide a convenient solution.
 
If you use Netscape Navigator, open the file cookies.txt in your Netscape directory with a text editor like OS/2's Enhanced Editor (EPM). It will have entries that look like this:

www.netscape.com	FALSE	/	FALSE	942189160	NGUserID	cc98a714-18593-893105250-3

For what we're doing, the format of the cookies.txt file is not important. But what you can see is that a cookie is associated with a particular web server and only that web server can retrieve the contents of the cookie. A cookie has a name (NGUserID above) and a value (cc98a714-18593-893105250-3). In our case of needing to identify a person across multiple submissions to our CGI program, we used a cookie called SESSION_ID and made it a 12 digit random number. 

So, how is the cookie created in the first place? It's really pretty simple, you simply return a line in the header of your response to the client of the form

Set-Cookie name=value; path=/somepath; expires=date and time; domain=domain_name

where name is the name of your cookie (case-sensitive) and value is the value associated with the cookie. The path is the path on the web server to be associated with the cookie. This could be a file (e.g. /catalog/page1.html or just / if it is to be associated with all paths on the server). And expires is a date and time (GMT) for the cookie to expire and be removed by the browser. If you do not specify an expiration date, the cookie expires when the client closes their web browser. Finally, domain is the domain to be associated with the cookie. This must contain at least two dots to prevent the possibility of someone's using ".com" for example, and getting all of your cookies from any site with ".com" in the address. A valid value might be ".os2ezine.com" or "www.os2ezine.com". You can leave off the domain and it will default to the address of the server setting the cookie. Here is a concrete example:

Set-Cookie: SESSION_ID=54635397865; path=/; expires=Wednesday, 09-Nov-99 23:12:40 GMT path=/ domain=.os2ezine.com

The code to send back the header of the response to the web browser might look like:

Say 'Set-Cookie: SESSION_ID='||Session_ID||'; path=/; expires=Wednesday, 09-Nov-99 23:12:40 GMT path=/ domain=.os2ezine.com'
Say "Content-type: text/html"
Say
Say
Say "CGI Results:<P>"

Once you have created a cookie on the client end, that cookie will be passed to your server anytime a request is made and the path in the cookie matches the requested document. The cookie will be passed in the environment variable HTTP_COOKIE. You will recall that in the first article we wrote our Rexx code so that it would run under OS/2 and Unix, which have different ways of retrieving the contents of environment variables. Under OS/2 Rexx, you use the value() function and under Unix you use the getenv() function. So, modifying our previous code a little bit, we can get the contents of any cookies that the client browser sends to us:

Select
   When OperatingSystem="OS/2" then do
      method = value("REQUEST_METHOD",,env)
      cookie = value("HTTP_COOKIE",,env)
      len = value("CONTENT_LENGTH",,env)
      if (method == "GET") Then Do
         query_string = value("QUERY_STRING",,env)
      end
   End
   Otherwise /* We're on a Unix machine */
      method=getenv("REQUEST_METHOD")
      cookie=getenv("HTTP_COOKIE")
      len = getenv("CONTENT_LENGTH")
      if (method=="GET")  then do
         query_string=getenv("QUERY_STRING")
      end
      If (method == "POST") & (len \= "") Then Do
        /* use POST method to pass parameters */
        post_string = charin(,,len) 
        query_string = post_string
      End
End /* Select */

After executing the above code, the variable cookie will contain the contents of any cookies that are appropriate to the current query by the browser. You can then parse the contents to get the values stored in the cookie. In my program, I needed to know if the client had been assigned a session ID and if not, to assign one. Here is the code I used: 

If Pos("SESSION_ID",Cookie)<>0 then Do
   /* SESSION_ID exists in the cookie, so parse for its value */
   Parse Var Cookie . "SESSION_ID=" Session_ID .
   If Session_ID="SESSION_ID" then /* just in case we assigned a session ID before creating it */
         Session_ID=Left(Random(1,100000),6,"0")||Left(Random(1,100000),6,"0")
   End
Else Do
   /* There was no SESSION_ID in the cookie so create one */
   Session_ID=Right(Random(1,99999),5,"0")||Right(Random(1,99999),5,"0")
End

What this code does is check to see if there is a SESSION_ID in the cookie. If so, it parses the contents of the cookie to get the value stored in SESSION_ID. Then it checks to make sure that it doesn't have the value SESSION_ID which would result if we set the cookie before defining a value for our Rexx variable. If the cookie doesn't contain a value for SESSION_ID, then we create one. The value for the session ID is generated using the Random() function. Right() is used to tack zeroes onto the random number to make it have a length of five digits. Performing those calls twice and concatenating the results gives us a session ID that has twelve digits. You could, of course, generate the numbers in many other ways. 

And that's all you have to do to use cookies in your CGI programs. The example code below creates a random session ID and shows you the value of any cookies passed to your server. The code will serve as a good template for creating your own CGI programs that need to use cookies. You can find Netscape's documentation for cookies at (http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html) http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html.

                         - * -

(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.

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

/* Move the next line to the top of the file if you are running on a Unix machine
#!/usr/local/bin/rexx
*/
Parse Arg Argv
Parse Source OperatingSystem CallType
env = "OS2ENVIRONMENT"
vtab = ""
lead = "<LI>"

Argc = Words(Argv)
Select
   When OperatingSystem="OS/2" then do
      method = value("REQUEST_METHOD",,env)
      cookie = value("HTTP_COOKIE",,env)
      len = value("CONTENT_LENGTH",,env)
      if (method == "GET") Then Do
         query_string = value("QUERY_STRING",,env)
      end
   End
   Otherwise /* We're on a Unix machine */
      method=getenv("REQUEST_METHOD")
      cookie=getenv("HTTP_COOKIE")
      len = getenv("CONTENT_LENGTH")
      if (method=="GET")  then do
         query_string=getenv("QUERY_STRING")
      end
      If (method == "POST") & (len \= "") Then Do
        /* use POST method to pass parameters */
        post_string = charin(,,len) 
        query_string = post_string
      End
End /* Select */
Session_ID="SESSION_ID="||Right(Random(1,99999),5,"0")||Right(Random(1,99999),5,"0")
newcookie='Set-Cookie: '||Session_ID||'; path=/; expires=Wednesday, 09-Nov-99 23:12:40 GMT path=/'
Call Header
Say "Old cookie was" cookie "<P>"
Say "New cookie will be" Session_ID "<P>"
Exit

Header:
Say "Content-type: text/html"
Say newcookie 
Say ""
Say "CGI Results:<P>"
Return

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

Lotus SmartSuite For Warp 4 - Overview	- by Chris Wenham 

At the beginning of the year we ran a (http://www.os2ezine.com/v3n02/) comparison review of two office suites still in testing phase: Lotus SmartSuite for Warp 4 versus StarDivision's StarOffice 4.0. The review showed that each had began to focus on two distinct strengths: Lotus continued on its usual course of adding more and more power to a suite of very mature and well developed applications, while StarDivision made the move of choosing smoother integration and advanced user interface over sheer mass of features. 

This is interesting, as up until now most office productivity apps were quickly reaching commodity status where there's little to differentiate one from another. Nobody, not even Microsoft, has been able to do anything particularly exciting with the common word processor or spreadsheet these days. The feeling goes that the book is about ready to be closed, everything that could be invented has been invented, the job is done and it's time to go home. On-the-fly spell checking? Done. Internet connectivity? Done. Autofilling of cell ranges? Done. But while the attention is slowly moving away from the individual components, it's been focusing instead on the suite as a whole. How well does each component interact with its siblings? How can each program leverage the power of another in the same suite? 

Integration and Data Sharing

With integration and data sharing an office suite is worth more than just the sum of its parts. A spreadsheet that can trade information with a database is worth more than just a database and a spreadsheet bundled together. If your database kept track of inventory and sales, and your spreadsheet calculated your budget, wouldn't it be far more useful if your database could feed its sales report figures directly into your spreadsheet right next to your expenses and payroll, than if you had to key those values in manually? 

This is one of the most important criteria that we tested SmartSuite on. While we reviewed each component based on its own merits, we also sought to see where they could exchange data with other parts of the suite. We weren't disappointed. 

DDE

Since OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) is not supported under OS/2, nor does SmartSuite support OpenDoc, the primary method of sharing data in the suite's components is to use DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) with a link usually initiated through the clipboard. With DDE we were able to perform several feats of data linking between SmartSuite components. For example, after highlighting a range of cells in 1-2-3 and copying them to the clipboard, we pasted a link into a Word Pro document (using the "Paste Special" menu option). Whenever we went back to 1-2-3 to change the data in the cells, the data pasted into Word Pro changed with it. This link is one-way, so if you edit the data while in Word Pro, the changes don't appear in 1-2-3 and any changes in 1-2-3 will override the ones you made in Word Pro.

Reading Each Others' Files

Much more data sharing is possible between the SmartSuite components by the fact that most can read the file formats saved by their siblings. Word Pro can read an Approach database file or Organizer file and mail merge a document with the addresses it finds there, Approach can read a 1-2-3 spreadsheet file and use it to start a new database with, and Freelance Graphics can read a 1-2-3 spreadsheet file too for building tables and graphs.

Finally, for Word Pro, ODBC (Object DataBase Connectivity) drivers are supplied as an optional item to install. These allow Word Pro to open databases from programs such as DB2, Oracle and Sybase.

LotusScript And Other Common Elements

The rest of the suite's integration features come in the form of common elements, such as the SmartIcon toolbars that adorn the user interface, the LotusScript language that lets you write macros and small programs to automate your daily work, and the similarity Lotus has tried to keep with menu structures and keyboard shortcuts. 

LotusScript itself is a powerful language that Lotus has extended on the OS/2 platform, with access to Rexx functions (such as the many third party Rexx libraries) and SOM for cross-application scripting. But apart from this Rexx function interface and the ability to call a Rexx script from a LotusScript program, there isn't a way that you can use Rexx instead of LotusScript. LotusScript is the "glue" that binds the two of them together. 

Installation

So a huge office suite like SmartSuite must have a pretty complex install sequence, right? Yes, actually it does, although there is an easy install available you might find yourself compelled to choose the custom install method instead. Why? Well even with the easy install, SmartSuite's defaults are all set to exclude quite a lot of features and extras in order to keep it's hard drive footprint down. A lot of file import and export filters are excluded from a default install and must be switched on by the user if he/she needs them. A default install will take about 163 megs of hard drive space, which rises and falls as you enable or disable features in the custom install.

Before you do install you may want to check what FixPack level your computer is at. SmartSuite's reliance on Open32 (described below) needs the enhancements introduced by IBM in FixPack 5 SE (special edition) and later. SmartSuite comes with a copy of FixPack 5 SE on the CD though, so you won't need to spend hours downloading it if you haven't already.

Documentation and Support

The stack of printed manuals that come with SmartSuite is thick, but really only serve as introductions. The real documentation is in the help files, which are well written and indexed. All of the applications have a visual, animated tour too, which uses Freelance's media player (you don't have to install the Freelance component to use them though). Next are the online manuals stored in Adobe Acrobat format. SmartSuite comes with the Acrobat reader (the full package, including Netscape plugin) for this purpose.    

Free phone support is available for 90 days (this 90 day period starts when you like, beginning with your first call, and ends 90 days later even if you don't make any more calls) and switches to pay-per-incident thereafter. We found this support to be nothing short of excellent. Calls were answered promptly, we were able to leave problem files on IBM's Testcase FTP site for their representative to examine, and they even called us back to make sure the problem was resolved to our satisfaction.

Workplace Shell Integration

Double-click on a document and it opens its associated application as you'd expect. But if you double click on a document and the associated program is already running then a DDE link is established and that current session loads the document you clicked on (this doesn't work with Approach or Freelance, though). Plus, if you open the properties notebook of any document, you'll find a new tab with information about the file such as its author, description and other statistics. Even better, Word Pro documents have a preview picture displayed in the Properties Notebook too.

Printing is integrated nicely as well. Choose "Print" from the file's right-click menu, or drag-n-drop it to a printer object, and the document will be printed properly without having to start up the host application first.

Performance and Stability

SmartSuite's performance and stability isn't all we expected it to be, but it's considerably better than the beta version we used during its testing phase. We noticed that some of the Suite's components do tend to crash once in a while, but not frequently enough to make it unusable or uncomfortable. Performance was the key disappointment, and may be due partly to the fact that Lotus ported the Windows version over to OS/2 using Open32 -- a set of 'aliases' that map common Windows functions over to native OS/2 ones. While Open32 itself doesn't add significant overhead, we suspect programming methods learned under Windows don't always translate efficiently to OS/2. 

In our testing we ran SmartSuite on a number of hardware platforms, the lowest of which was a 486/80 with 20 megs of RAM. On this machine it was quite unusable and even failed to print under 1-2-3. A Pentium 120 with 16 megs and a faster hard drive yielded bearable performance when running one application at a time, and a 24-meg laptop with Pentium was comfortable running two of the Suite's applications simultaneously. Our minimum recommended system would then be a Pentium 120 with 24 megs of RAM and a 1.6 gigabyte hard drive or higher. The sweet spot begins to occur at 32 megs and higher. 

Conclusions

In testing we found that Lotus SmartSuite for Warp 4 is excellent in almost every facet of its design, but its chrome finish is marred and scratched in a few visible and not-so-visible places. This is disappointing because we felt most of the flaws were trivial and easily fixed. So when we talked to Lotus we were pleasantly surprised to hear that they do have plans for another version of SmartSuite for OS/2 to be released sometime in the future.

We think SmartSuite is the best office suite out there for professionals using OS/2 and needing strong compatibility with file formats they might exchange with their colleagues. But we think its expense and heavy requirements make it inappropriate for casual users or those only interested in one particular component (none of the SmartSuite programs are sold separately, even though Organizer for Windows is)

On the whole, our hats off and much gratitude go to Lotus for their superb effort. We wish it had arrived earlier, but we're mighty glad that it arrived at all. 

                         - * -

Lotus SmartSuite For Warp 4
     by (http://www.lotus.com/) Lotus Development Corporation
     MSRP: US$472 (upgrade and academic pricing available)

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

Lotus 1-2-3	- by Dr. Dirk Terrell 

It's been quite a while since I bought Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.0 for OS/2. I must say I wasn't very impressed with it. My spreadsheet needs are pretty modest and I have been quite content with the IBM Works spreadsheet that comes in the BonusPak. However, the latest edition of 1-2-3 is quite nice and has lots of useful features. 

Getting Started, 1-2-3 uses "SmartMasters" to help you with commonly encountered needs. The SmartMasters supply formulas and scripts to make certain tasks almost effortless. The ones that come with 1-2-3 are 

 o  Amortize a Loan 
 o  Calculate Loan Payments 
 o  Create a Personal Budget 
 o  Create a Territory Sales Plan 
 o  Create an Expense Report 
 o  Create an Invoice 
 o  Fill Out a Time Sheet 
 o  Generate a Purchase Order 
 o  and you can create you own SmartMasters (using a SmartMaster!)
    for those tasks you find yourself doing repeatedly.

You can, of course, create a new spreadsheet without using a SmartMaster. Doing so brings up the main window. There is nothing surprising about the interface. It has the well-known gridded interface with tabs for jumping quickly from one spreadsheet to another. Toolbars provide quick access to commonly used features and bubble help pops up when you place the cursor over a button. Properties for selected cells such as font, color, number format, alignment, etc. can be easily changed using the status bar at the bottom of the window. You can also bring up the InfoBox, a tabbed notebook which lets you change the properties of a selected range or object. The toolbar itself is configurable using the SmartIcons Setup window. 

Features 

1-2-3 comes with a slew of built-in functions that make it almost trivial to perform complex calculations. I was mildly surprised to see even the various Bessel functions, of interest mainly to physicists, included in the program. A button on the toolbar provides quick access to the functions so that you need not worry about remembering how a particular function is spelled or what its parameters are. All you have to do is click on the function you want, select the range of data that you want the function applied to, and 1-2-3 does the rest. 

Even with all of the built-in functions, sometimes you have something that requires writing your own. 1-2-3 uses the BASIC-like LotusScript for writing scripts and customizing the program. Programming scripts is facilitated by the interactive development environment. The documentation, in the form of Adobe Acrobat files, is extensive. There is also a LotusScript-Rexx interface if you prefer not to learn another scripting language. It isn't as convenient as having Rexx be the native scripting language, but it does at least allow you to use external Rexx scripts and libraries. If you need to do a lot of scripting though, you'll probably end up learning LotusScript. 

Interesting and powerful is the ability to link the cells of two spreadsheets together, so that when the value of one cell is changed, it simultaneously changes in the other. I imagine this would be valuable to those putting together a budget, where the final calculated salary of an employee from one sheet can be inserted into the company budget that's managed on another. Give the employee a raise and the change is reflected in the budget without having to copy-and-paste manually.

Spreadsheets, being just columns and rows of numbers, usually are not very exciting to look at, but 1-2-3 has some features that can really spruce up the appearance of your spreadsheet when it comes time to make a presentation. There are a number of nice styles that you can select from and apply to ranges of a spreadsheet. Experimenting with these styles, I ran across two issues though. One is that some of the styles take an inordinately long time to apply. I had a three column by two hundred row range selected and applied the 'Chisel2' style. It took about a minute for the style to be applied, which revealed a second problem: the update was running in the program's main thread. This meant that I was watching the clock cursor the whole time instead of being able to switch back to EPM and immediately begin complaining about how slow the update was. This is something that I see all too often and is unacceptable in a product for a multithreaded operating system. 

Charts are a powerful way of seeing relationships in columns of numbers. 1-2-3 provides twelve different chart types such as scatter plots, bar graphs, pie charts, and line graphs. You can also create charts with a 3D appearance which can be very helpful with bar graphs. As always, the InfoBox can be pulled up to adjust the settings of things like fonts and colors. One thing that I found annoying was the inability to change the size of the marker in a scatter plot and the possible marker types did not include a dot. In scatter plots with hundreds of points or more, the large size of the markers tends to make the plot look messy. It would be much better if you could change the size of the markers. Even better would be the ability to create your own marker types. Scientists like myself will probably find themselves using more specialized tools for creating plots since things like error bars are completely foreign to most spreadsheet programs, which are usually targeted for business applications. So if your graphing needs are business oriented or if you just need a quick and dirty look at some data, 1-2-3 works pretty well.

True to this business focus, 1-2-3 has the ability to plot data on maps. You can create maps, for example, that might indicate sales in each of the 50 U.S. states. Other included maps are Canada by Province, Western Europe, and the world as a whole. 

Internet integration is the latest fad in office suites and 1-2-3 has the ability to save files to a remote machine and open them from a remote machine using FTP. You can also load files from a web site. I encountered no problems loading or saving files, but the dialog window seemed a little slow in responding to input. 

Compatibility 

Sooner or later you'll need to exchange files with someone who doesn't use SmartSuite. Using tactics that the U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit over, Microsoft has managed to make MS Office the standard for office suites. So you're sure to get someone handing you an Excel file at some point. The documentation claims to support Excel .xls files up through Excel version 7.0 and I had no problem opening a file saved in Excel version 7.0 (Office 95), but I got an error on a file saved with Excel from Office 97. So Gates and Gang still have you on the file-format-of-the-month merry-go-round. 

Since I have a number of spreadsheets saved in the IBM Works format, I was curious to see how easily they could be imported into 1-2-3. Not surprisingly, there is no support for importing them directly but IBM Works will save spreadsheets in the older 1-2-3 version 2 format. These files can then be read by 1-2-3. 

Conclusion 

Lotus 1-2-3 is a pretty good spreadsheet application for the most part. It has a few annoying problems, but it is solid and does have some very useful features, especially for business users. If you're looking for a well-integrated office suite, 1-2-3 does a good job of filling the spreadsheet part of SmartSuite.

                         - * -

(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.

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

Lotus Approach	- by Christopher B. Wright 

New technology always redefines the requirements for older technology. Once upon a time, word processors were simple programs designed to make writing letters and memos easier. With the advent of more powerful hardware for the PC, the demands required of a word processor grew. As corporations began to use word processors as "standard" tool for company documentation, they wanted word processors to be able to handle more. Today, word processors are almost as powerful as many desktop publishing software packages, and in a few years they may be indistinguishable from each other. 

The world wide web is also creating new demands for applications. Suddenly this medium is encouraging word processors to not only support HTML, but SGML (the overarching language that HTML is derived from) as well. 

Database applications are also being redefined by the web. Because the web is such an accessible way to share information and because databases can keep track of information so well, it seems only natural that the two should be connected in some way. Today, databases are the 'back ends" that pump information into pre-formatted templates on many major web sites. Databases are used to allow online customers to process their online purchases. Databases, it seems, will be an integral part of the web of the near future. 

As an example, take Project:ToolBase, a feature of the (http://www.dtcweb.com/) Desktop Communications web site that I have been sweating over for some time. P:TB is, simply enough, a listing of all OS/2 compatible publishing software (with hardware listings still under development). People can browse the site and see what OS/2-compatible publishing software is out there, whether they're looking for something specific (like OS/2 MIDI sequencing software) or just looking. This seems like the obvious situation for a database: I enter all the information into my database, keeping it up to date, and the Database generates a web page displaying the information I want displayed. This would allow the information to be updated quickly and consistently (something not as easy when you need to change all the information one web page at a time, especially when the database starts to grow). 

In this new age of database management, you need more than a robust, easy-to-set-up-and-configure database program that can keep track of large volumes of information quickly and reliably while at the same time allowing a novice to get up and running in a relatively short period of time. You also need a program that can create database reports (summary pages of selected database information) that are HTML pages (for small companies), as well as databases that can link to your web server and actually manage web pages themselves (for larger companies). 

In the classic world of database applications, Lotus Approach is a top-notch and world class application. It has just about every tool you'd ever think you'd need in a database and is a very easy-to-use application -- as easy-to-use as any database will ever get without sacrificing important features. 

In the new, web-enabled world of database applications, however, Lotus Approach fares much, much more poorly. While Approach is touted by Lotus as a "web enabled" application, these functions are so basic and unusable that one wonders why Lotus even bothered putting them in. In fact, the "web enabled features" seem more like a thinly disguised ploy to get users to buy IBM's DB/2 product and Lotus Notes rather than an attempt at making truly useful database-to-web integration features. If you're looking for a superior database application for traditional workplace database tasks, Lotus Approach is something you should definitely consider. But if you're looking for a database that will help you manage your information and display it on the web, Lotus Approach by itself is a waste of your money -- you'll also need DB/2 and (probably) Lotus Notes before you can do anything seriously. 

The Good

As a traditional database, it's difficult to think of one that combines the ease-of-use and power of Lotus Approach. Other than a few annoying User Interface and semantic quirks, Approach is a joy to use. 

There are a lot of good things to say about Approach. I cannot say how impressed I am with it's power and flexibility when defining fields, creating the layouts of your data entry screens and database reports, and of course actually entering the information itself. Approach is powerful and easy enough to use that a novice can get started reasonably quickly ("reasonably quickly" in database talk means after messing around with it for about a week.)
 
Approach allows you to set up notebook-style tabs that work in much the same way that tabs in Lotus 1-2-3 does -- dividing your database into anything you want: multiple formats for reports, data entry screens and so forth. Unfortunately, anything you do to one tabbed section -- like sorts and searches -- is done to all tabs. 

And Approach is a relational database: it can pull data from more than one database file and use it in the one you're working on, going so far as to update the other files if any of that information changes. Approach can import and export a lot of different file formats: Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel, Oracle, dBase III and IV, Fox Pro and more.

You can also define, save and reuse searches and sorts. For example, I have a saved search in my Project:ToolBase database that immediately searches for all Desktop Publishing software and displays them in alphabetical order by software title. I also have searches for Graphics Design, Multimedia Authoring and Web Creation software that do the same thing.

The Bad 

While Approach allows you to set up tabs within your database (to allow you to create multiple reports, or different views for data entry when you're keying in data) it doesn't allow you to assign different searches to those tabs. For example, when I'm using the P:TB database I think it would be nice if one tab automatically searches for and displays only software, and another tab would automatically search for and display only hardware. Alas, this is not to be: a search affects everything in the database, including reports. This lack genuinely surprised me, since it seemed like Lotus had thought of just about everything else. 

Another difficulty I had was linking two or more databases together to set up a relational database. While linking the databases seems simple enough, it doesn't seem to work right. If that last criticism seems a bit vague, that's because the documentation doesn't explain it thoroughly enough. (See "The Ugly," below.) 

And finally, I couldn't possibly write a review without a complaint about the user interface. First of all, as a hint to any programmer out there, the user should be able to a) resize the application window so it opens to whatever size they prefer, and b) move the window so it opens over whatever part of the desktop they want it to. Approach does neither of these, it always opens to the same size and same position on my screen, regardless of how I've opened it and resized it before. This is frustrating! People with larger monitors and people who work at higher resolutions don't want a single application taking up more than 40% of their screen space unless absolutely necessary. 

And I'm a bit frustrated at Approach's insistence that the design area of a database use the same layout that a report would -- in other words, it defaults to a US-standard 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper. There is no "screen" setting, which would make a lot more sense if you're building an interface for data entry. Why would the screen display of a database be concerned with page height, width, and margin settings? It shouldn't, but I haven't found a way around it yet. 

The Ugly 

But the most unforgivable sin of Lotus Approach is the documentation itself. Alas, Lotus is following the corporate trend of including only the bare minimum in product documentation, and while it is the largest of all the manuals in Lotus SmartSuite, it is not thorough. It walks you through all the basics for building a simple set of databases, but it doesn't allow for any deviation in ideas and doesn't cover alternative setups. As simple as it is, Approach has powerful tools that need thorough documenting, and the manual is not up to the task. It's ironic, because it's the largest of all the manuals included in SmartSuite, but in order for it to be useful it needs roughly two hundred more pages. 

Documentation is a pet peeve of mine (I am, after all, a technical writer) and a lot of people respond to this peeve with the counter argument that no one really reads the manual anyway. This is true for a lot of people in a lot of situations, but when you're using a powerful program or a high-end feature, a clearly written, well-documented manual is a must. The Lotus Approach manual is fine for someone just starting out who wants to do very simple things on a database, but you can only go so far on it, and it won't teach you to really use the program to its fullest extent. 

The Modern 

In the more modern (some would even say "trendy") world of on-line, web based databases, Approach is not quite as useful as I would have liked it to be. Unfortunately, IBM clearly intends for this application to work in conjunction with DB/2 in some way -- a clever way of getting two powerful programs sold by the same mother company to work cooperatively instead of competitively, but it's a cheat for end users and small businesses because DB/2 isn't always an affordable or practical solution. 

Lotus Approach does have Internet and web integration, to some extent, but this level of integration and its practicality is not all it should. I'll explain the degree of integration below. 

Level 1: FTP database to FTP site, open database remotely. 

Approach can save the database file to an Internet site, and other Approach users can open it from that FTP site. This can be a slow process, since Approach files aren't necessarily svelte and quick to download. 

My take on this feature is it's a lot more useful on a network or intranet, where bandwidth is less of a concern, than on an Internet or extranet site. 

Level 2: Create static HTML pages based on reports. 

This feature is just terrible. Lotus Approach can convert a report into a series of static HTML pages. It can, for example, take a bunch of product descriptions and turn them into individual web pages and link them together so you can browse through them. However, it doesn't retain any formatting to speak of. It will emulate the position of fields by creating tables, but it won't retain any graphics in the document, won't keep the background color, the text color, font type, font size, anything. All you get is a bare-bones, basic layout, which is not acceptable to many web sites trying to promote a uniform, corporate image. I used this feature for Project:ToolBase, and it took me hours afterwards to modify each page so it would resemble my web site. 

Why can't Approach use more of Word Pro's web features? I don't know. The manual devotes no more than two pages to the whole thing, so it's not much help either. 

Level 3: Work in conjunction with a web server. 

The most mysterious of the three methods, I have no idea how it works because I don't have a web server that supports it. I can't really report on its usefulness. 

Conclusions 

As you can see, I don't think much of Approach as a database for Web publishing. Now, I have to admit it's quite possible this criticism isn't wholly fair. While it doesn't appear that Approach has any robust Internet integration features to speak of, especially when it comes to creating static web pages, there might be a few tools I missed because it wasn't covered in the documentation. With only two pages devoted to covering the Internet tools there could be a whole lot of tools I'm missing out on. If that's the case, however, in my defense I will say that if Lotus can't be bothered to document it, I can't be bothered to credit them with having it. 

I'm really, really torn on this product. On the one hand, I'm absolutely impressed with the database program itself, and feel that it's a top-notch, powerful and useful product in that respect. On the other hand, when it comes to the web I find it useless for what I need it to do, and I don't have the financial wherewithal to set it up the way they apparently intend it to be used. I find myself loving it for its power as a database, and despising it for its inability to transfer information over the web in any particularly useful manner. 

My recommendation: if you're looking for an "old school" database, and have no plans to use this database on a web site (be it intra, extra or Internet based site), Lotus Approach is an excellent tool to use, thanks to its ease of use and logical design. If you're looking for a standalone database that can translate its data into static web pages, avoid Approach like the plague. If you're looking for a database that will interact with a web server, you'll have to evaluate Approach yourself because I don't have the ability to test those features.

                         - * -

(wrightc@dtcweb.com) Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Richmond, VA area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95.  He is also a member of Team OS/2.

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

Lotus Freelance Graphics	- by Christopher B. Wright 

When you're putting together a computer presentation, whether for a business presentation, a formal project meeting, or a convention talk, the most traditional way of going about it is to use a presentation package like Microsoft Powerpoint, Corel Presentations, or Lotus Freelance. These packages allow you to create "slide shows" that can be displayed on a computer, or, with extra equipment, projected from your computer onto a screen. 

Presentation packages come in may different forms: some are devoted solely to creating presentation slides that are then either printed out or displayed from the computer, while others pack in most drawing features found in today's vector drawing products, allowing the program to double as a standard drawing application. Somewhere in the middle of this range is Freelance Graphics for OS/2 Warp 4, an application that combines extensive multimedia support and moderate graphics creation into a useful and surprisingly easy-to-use presentation application. 

Freelance Graphics actually leans closer to the "presentation" side of the spectrum rather than the "presentation plus graphics" side. While it has graphics tools, it doesn't have the range and breadth of, say, Corel Presentations. You cannot draw in layers, there are no bezier tools. Most importantly, Freelance doesn't appear to be designed to export your graphics files directly into Word Pro (the only way to do it without exporting your graphic into another file format is by using the cut & paste tools). The graphics tools included in Freelance seem designed to supplement the presentation aspects of the program, rather than as a general-purpose tool. Having said that, Freelance does have a basic set of flowcharting tools that are both intuitive to use and flexible in their use, making them handy in many kinds of business presentations and documents. 

The presentation-specific tools are a lot more fleshed out, both in power and in ease of use. The three views in freelance (one slide at a time, all slides as thumbnails, and an outline view for your text) all allow you to focus on specific parts of your presentation to save time. For example, the outline view allows you to assign a title and basic text to each of your slides without having to go through the process of adding new slides (every time you set up a new title, a new slide is created). The thumbnail view allows you to arrange your slides to your satisfaction by simply dragging them around the screen. And the single slide view allows you to modify the general layout and graphics of each slide one at a time, without worrying about changing any other slides in the process. 

Lotus has done a great job at making all of the objects in the single slide view area context-sensitive, allowing you to modify just about every aspect of your presentation without having to use the menu. Each object on a slide (text, graphics, anything) can be given an action -- so you could, for example, have your text and graphics "fade in" one at a time during your presentations, or you could link a graphic with another slide so that when you clicked on it with your mouse, you jump to that slide as if you were clicking on a hyperlink on a web page. In fact, it is possible to create entire multimedia presentations with Freelance, so long as you are careful and don't try to get too complex in your design. 

One of the best features of Freelance is that you don't need it to view its presentations. Freelance comes with a kind of "presentation compiler" that allows people who don't have the program to view your presentation. The OS/2 version will allow both OS/2 users and Windows 95/NT users to view their creations. This is probably one of the best features of the program, since it allows the author to have a lot more control over how the information is distributed. For example, the author could take the presentation on a laptop that doesn't have Freelance installed on it, and still run it at meetings and demos. The author could even distribute his or her presentation over the Internet. You could conceivably create e-zines and other such publications on Freelance and upload it to FTP or Web sites for people to download and view at their leisure. 

I like Freelance Graphics a lot, but I wish Lotus had spent as much time developing and extending the graphics capabilities as they had with the presentation/multimedia capabilities. The graphics tools are adequate for what they are intended to do, but I miss having bezier curve tools and layers. I also don't know why graphics created in Freelance can't be saved in Freelance's old .DRW format (which is the only native Freelance format Word Pro recognizes, by the way). I found it terribly frustrating the first time I tried to import a Freelance graphic into Word Pro, and I find the cut & paste method more of a kludge than anything else. 

I also wish Lotus had spent a bit more time on the documentation. I give Lotus low marks all around for the quality of their documentation -- while it's reasonably well written it doesn't cover any more than the very basic you need to get started. While this will let you use the program, it most definitely will not show you how to use the "cool stuff" (transition effects and the rest); in fact, the documentation really doesn't even tell you the "cool stuff" exists! Lotus should have taken the time to hire a few more technical writers and completely documented their entire suite. What's more, they should have contacted me and paid me to do it (but that's another story). 

The result of this lack of documentation is that it will take some clicking and playing around before you uncover all the neat effects you can use in your presentations. Fortunately, the interface is fairly straightforward and intuitive so you'll eventually be able to find what you're looking for. 

The bottom line is that Freelance Graphics is an excellent presentation tool with mostly unexceptional graphics tools. And the standalone player that allows you to distribute the presentation without the program makes Freelance a must-have for anyone who wants to distribute their presentations to a wide range of audiences.

                         - * -

(wrightc@dtcweb.com) Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Richmond, VA area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95.  He is also a member of Team OS/2.

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

Lotus Organizer	- by Chris Wenham

Organizer, SmartSuite's Personal Information Manager (PIM), is by far the most "fun" programs in a suite of dull office productivity apps. Right away it has the most visually appealing interface that draws you in and makes you want to fiddle around with it. It's also the one you may want to have running all the time, if you have the RAM for it, since it has the power to keep track of your whole personal and business life, schedule alarms and programs to be run at a certain time, plus manage your contacts and long-term projects too. We've already reviewed Organizer (http://www.os2ezine.com/v2n12/organize.htm) last December in our PIM roundup, so in this article I'll be paying more attention to the features I missed last time and giving you an idea of its performance and stability to date.

The Sections

Made to visually resemble a paper organizer, the leather bound kind you carry around in your briefcase and buy refills every year for, Organizer is divided up into seven main sections: Calendar, ToDo, Addresses, Phone Calls, Planner, Notepad and Anniversary, all accessed by clicking on colored tabs that run along the side of the 'binder'. The one you'll spend most of your time in will be Calendar, which has the ability to show through information from the others to give you a complete, at-a-glance view of your day. 

Most of the sections can be displayed in up to 4 different arrangements, each will either sort the information differently or display it across varying time spans. For example, the Calendar section can be arranged from a monthly view (with a grid like you'll find in a hang-on-the-wall style calendar), to a biweekly, weekly, and two-day view. The two-day view is the most detailed and my particular favorite, since it not only displays your appointments but also visually represents their duration. 

The address book is one of the best I've seen. Not only can it store separate home and business addresses for each name, but it can also sort according to many different criteria. Last name, company name, zip code, city, e-mail, fax, assistant's name, anything. Plus, you can customize the fields, changing the label for the second telephone number to "Modem" instead - and then sort by that! This address book is linked to the "Calls" section as well, meaning that when you pull up the dialog to make a new phone call, you can select from a drop down list of entries in your address book as a means of searching for the number.

By using the Planner section you can generalize and experiment with long term projects that may span days or weeks instead of just a few hours. Using colored 'marker pens' you swipe the grid, which can represent a year or 3 month (quarterly) view, then label whatever the project or event is. Afterwards you can adjust the marked area to shorten or lengthen it, move or delete it. It might not be a full fledged project manager but it's perfect for figuring out when a good time for a vacation is or seeing where a trade show might conflict with a deadline. 

The Notepad you might think is a redundant item, since it's nothing much different than the OS/2 System Editor or any of a hundred other text editors you might have. But its value is in its location - right there in your Organizer. Saving dozens of scrap files in a directory might work, but it's not fun. Organizer gives you a means of throwing random ideas and thoughts, hotel confirmation numbers, shopping lists or whatever in a place where you can find it again. It can divide pages up into "chapters" that are indexed at the front of the section, for even greater ease. 

Lastly, the Anniversary section at the back of the binder is good for recurring events such as birthdays, weekly or monthly meetings and so forth. Here you can schedule an event to happen on a specific day of the year, or on "the second Tuesday of every month" and have it continue that way forever or until a certain date or number of months/years into the future. 

Taking and Making Calls

If you're busy on the phone you'll like Organizer's facilities for managing calls. Drag 'n Drop an address book entry onto the phone icon and Organizer will prepare to make a call, having the phone numbers found in the address book entry ready for you to select and click the 'Dial' button. Organizer can dial an internal or external modem if you have one and wait for you to pick up the receiver when answered. A notepad and stopwatch is provided for you to jot down reminders and time the duration of the call, all of which is saved together and visually represented as a "phone slip" so you can look back on your records and see not only when a particular call took place, but to who, how long it lasted, and what notes you took. 

Similar features are provided when someone calls you. If a call comes in you can click on the "Incoming call" button and a call entry is generated along with a dialog for taking notes and timing the call. Unfortunately, even though Organizer can dial the phone for you through a properly configured modem, Organizer cannot listen for rings and automatically initiate the "incoming call" dialog for you. This is a small feature I think would have been nice for busy offices. 

Links

Not to be confused with DDE links is Organizer's information linking ability. With it you can associate address book entries with ToDo items, Calendar events with Planner entries, and link almost anything to an external file or program. So say you need to call a hotel to make a reservation and you've made a note of it in your ToDo list. You can link that ToDo item with the hotel's address in the address book so that when you next review your ToDo list you can simply click on the link and be transported instantly to the exact page with the hotel's address and phone number. That ToDo or address book entry might also be associated with a Calls entry for phoning the hotel and so on. 

Especially useful is its ability to link to external files, meaning that a report can be linked to the calendar event for the meeting you have to show it at. When you see that meeting approaching you can click on its link and load the report into Word Pro (or feed it by DDE if Word Pro is already running) ready to review and print. 

Ease Of Use

Organizer is very easy to use, mainly because it mimics a "real" pocket planner right down to page curls (which turn the page when you click on them) to sound effects of swishing paper and "clumphing" sections. Scheduling appointments and entering addresses is just a case of flipping to the right section, pointing to the place where you need it to go (like a square marked on a calendar view), and double clicking. This point and click method of scheduling extends all the way down to half hour increments if you need it to. Organizer is also thick with gadgets and nifty variations on standard controls: where another PIM might represent spans of time by a couple of entry boxes and spin buttons, Organizer has a custom drop down time line. 

But does this visual metaphor waste space and reduce productivity? With Organizer you can't reduce the size of the window beyond a certain point, hindering efforts to have it on the screen all the time, and the decorative visual elements reduce the amount of space available for your information. If that wasn't bad enough, the view can start to look disorganized when you have a lot of data entered.

Categories and Cost Codes

Every element you can create in Organizer, from calendar event to address book entry, can be assigned to a category of your choice. These can be one of the predefined categories that Organizer came with, or a custom one that you create. The categories are designed to help you keep track of and manage items across sections and are usually represented visually by a tiny icon that you pick. But beyond the visual "key", you can also use Organizer's filtering tool to see all items in your organizer that belong to a particular category.
Cost codes are another immensely useful feature for grouping time related items. With Cost Codes a freelancer or consultant can put down how much he or she charges per hour for a given client or task, and then assign those cost codes to all the appointments scheduled with Organizer. Organizer will calculate how much you're owed, and these figures can then be exported to a spreadsheet program like 1-2-3 for preparing an invoice.

Printing

Organizer is very well endowed for printing purposes, coming with a large range of templates for various Avery, DayTimer and DayRunner blanks that you can buy at your local stationary store. In fact, in the printed documentation that comes with SmartSuite you'll find that two of the booklets are dedicated to Organizer - one introduction like the others, and a print layout guide. 

Polish

I've noticed, especially with Windows programs, that time managers and PIMs are some of the most adorned and polished programs you can buy. I can only guess that the basic concept of a PIM is so simple that the programmers are often left with lots of time on their hands. So it's to be expected when you notice Organizer is chock full of "little things" that add polish and shine to the program (and maybe waste RAM). 

As mentioned before, there are a lot of custom controls that replace what an ordinary spin button or drop-down list would accomplish easily. All fields where a date needs to be inserted have a tiny drop-down calendar that you can flip through and point to the desired day. The scrolling action of the calendar in Day-view is smooth slide-click, not unlike the scrolling action of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Tiny controls are embedded everywhere, like at the top of each calendar page, for "unfolding" a page into a wider view. It has several dozen different alarm tunes (which play through the PC speaker instead of the sound card) and about as many category icons. Turning a page is animated, the moue cursor is animated, and deleting an item is accompanied by an animated flash of flame and smoke. 

Conclusions

But boy is this ever a neat program! You could spend more time organizing your life than actually living it with this application (should you be prone to extremes) since it's literally tons of fun for any gadget freak to play around with. But of course, you're a professional, and gadgets are not what's supposed to be important. Functionality and productivity are. In which case you'll still have bags of fun with Organizer anyway, because it's rather good at that too. 

But light on it's feet? Nimble? Fast? Goodness no! I do not recommend running Organizer continually on a system with anything less than 32 megs of RAM. All that polish and decoration weigh in big time, slowing down even fast PCs. If you have less than the recommended hardware (Pentium 120, 32 megs, fast hard drive) then you'll only want to run Organizer when you have to, not all the time. This means you can kiss good-bye to its alarms and timed program launching features (Organizer does not have a "stub" program that monitors alarms in the background when the main program isn't loaded). 

Organizer is by far the most polished and complete Personal Information and Time Manager we've tested for OS/2.

                         - * -

(chris@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to keep his bicycle and a trailer.

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

Lotus Word Pro	- by Chris Wenham 

If you own Warp 4, which is what you'd need to run SmartSuite anyway, you can have a look at the suite's word processor right now if you wish, since an early Beta version of it is available on the Application Sampler CD that came with the operating system. What ships with SmartSuite for Warp 4 is not much different except for a handful of extra features and a much more stable code base.

User Interface

Word Pro's user interface hasn't evolved much, SmartIcons still represent the most visual part of the interface besides the document itself. There aren't any docking style palettes or clip art palettes like you'll find in StarOffice, but everything you need is reasonably within reach of the mouse or keyboard shortcut. 

Down the bottom of the window you'll find a bar of sliding draws that house most of the text formatting options. Fonts, font sizes, color palettes, styles, document statistics and more are all available and tucked away here. Click once on the font and a draw opens up to list all others installed on the system, same goes for text styles, colors and so forth. Misspell a word and a little cyan dictionary lights up, click on it and a draw slides out with possible replacements. 

The default single row of SmartIcons can look rather spartan when you start up Word Pro for the first time. It's not what you'd expect if you spent your word processing life in a program such as Microsoft Word - which uses a good third of the screen real-estate for buttons alone. But click on the blue handle of each toolbar and you can move it to a different part of the screen or dock it to any edge. Click on the tiny gray button above the handle and you can call up or hide other sets of SmartIcons. With a little arrangement you can make Word Pro fully Testosterone Compliant. 

But Word Pro also gives you broad power over viewing the document itself. Of course, various zoom levels are supported, but so are a couple of nifty navigator and page arrangement views. In the "Special Views" dialog you can switch on a number of split window views including the 'PageWalker', 'Doc Skimmer', 'Panorama' and 'Zoomer'. All are designed to manage large projects consisting of multiple pages and are especially useful if you need to get an overall idea of the document you're working on. 

Editing Prowess

When all the widgets and gadgets that could possibly be assigned to a button on a toolbar had been invented, the obvious next step was to improve the typing and editing process itself with 'invisible' features that show themselves only when you make a typo or come to selecting and moving blocks of text. Since maybe 10 years ago, it's been standard in almost every editor to select multiple words by holding down the shift and control keys while navigating with the cursor keys, or select characters by holding down only the shift key. Word Pro's default is actually to select words by holding down only the shift key, and force it to select character-by-character when you hold down the control key too. This can be a pain in the butt to people who's "fingers know where to go" until you find out how to disable the SmartSelect feature in the Word Pro Preferences dialog. 

This Love/Hate relationship can extend to a few other 'invisible' features, like the SmartCorrect which will fix typos on the fly. It's sure handy to have "Teh" changed to "The" seconds after you type it, but a bit annoying (especially to us technology writers) when typing acronyms in caps but seeing Word Pro change it to lower case instead. "NCs" (for "Network Computers") gets changed to "Ncs" and you must emphatically change it again before Word Pro gets the message. But common mixed-caps acronyms like "PCs" are already in its database to make the job a little easier. 

SmartFill is another feature to be found, borrowed most likely from the Spreadsheet world where it's in common use all the time. Say you create a table 7 rows high and write "Monday" in the first cell. Grab the edge of that cell with the mouse and drag down to select the other 6 cells below it and Word Pro will fill them in with "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday" and so on. You can customize Word Pro's database with almost anything you please, such as the names of your family, the divisions of your company, your favorite rock bands or whatever. The SmartCorrect feature can be "kludged" to do something similar outside of tables too, programming it to replace "myaddress" with "231 North Epson Street, Sometown, NY,13582." But unfortunately it's not as sophisticated as Microsoft Word's similar feature, which can substitute not just words or phrases but images too. 

The Desktop Publisher

Word Pro, like most modern word processors, is blurring the line that separates it from a conventional desktop publishing package. Since its earliest incarnations as AmiPro, Word Pro has had desktop publishing features like frames, drawing tools, and split columns. This new version adds the ability to flow text from one frame to another in the "continued on page 3" style of layout. It still doesn't have the ability to create alternate layouts such as tri-fold brochures, but it does have a "booklet" feature accessed from the print options. 

For those creating lengthy reports or books, Word Pro has the ability to create Tables of Contents, Indexes, Tables of Authorities and Cross References, all built automatically by flags that you insert into the body text as you edit it. 

Team Editing

One of the strengths Lotus is particularly proud of is SmartSuite's "Team" features, designed to make peer review and teamwork on a project easier. With Word Pro, a document can be examined by various members of a team, with some having permission to make editorial changes, marking and inserting comments into the body text with colored highlights, scribbles and whatever. Team members can then look at the different versions of the document as suggested by others and the original author (or approved editors) can approve or reject changes as he or she sees fit.

HTML and the Web

If all the writers covering Lotus SmartSuite are doing their jobs properly they should be writing their reviews in this program, if not just to submerge themselves in the SmartSuite environment and write an objective review. But this also raised a few questions: since we're an Internet publication, how good are its HTML and Web publishing capabilities? 

Lotus has moved quickly to add considerable Internet functions to their programs, but haven't done very well in the implementation of all of them. In Word Pro and most of the other programs in the suite you can load and save files over the Internet, plus you can also export documents in HTML format ready to be published on the Web. It's nothing like the Internet integration seen in StarOffice, where the browser metaphor and URL location field are prevalent, but you can do things such as insert links into a document, embed images stored on remote servers and perform Internet searches on selected text (something that defaults to opening a Netscape session and searching Yahoo!).

The HTML code that Word Pro generates is good as long as you stay between the lines of plain text, but we don't think it's the ideal tool to use if you're a professional, HTML purist, or plan to get adventurous. 

Conclusions

Often when I think I'll be reviewing a word processor or text editor I'll switch to it and use it for all my editorial work, same goes for mail clients and other programs that I use on  regular basis. Since a couple of months ago when Lotus first sent us copies of SmartSuite I've been doing all of my editing work in it, changing only to the OS/2 System Editor to clean up it's near-perfect HTML code before it gets sent to Trevor for publishing. Don't consider this an endorsement though, because like a nomad I'll probably be using something else in a few weeks or months.

To me, the word processor is the most important part of any office suite. It's the first I try out and it's the one I'll spend the most hours in. Word Pro feels comfortable, a Cadillac of word processors, but it doesn't feel like the best it could be, especially in the realm of Internet features. Word Pro could be more like StarOffice and put the document's URL somewhere much more visible, letting me load documents off the web without going through a dialog box first. It could also give me the power to customize the HTML code it generates, so it prefers <STRONG> emphasis over <B>old case. 

Sand these problems over and I, a stickler for perfection, will be happy.

                         - * -

(chris@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to keep his bicycle and a trailer.

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

SmartSuite Tips	- by Chris Wenham

While working with SmartSuite for Warp 4 and surfing the web we discovered a few tips for use with the new office suite. We've compiled them here, along with a few other resources such as links and mailing lists that you may wish to pursue when learning more about SmartSuite. 

Changing the default browser and sending URLs to the currently running Netscape

One of the most annoying problems we discovered with SmartSuite was that it was set up to use Netscape Navigator by default as the browser launched whenever you click on a web page SmartIcon or Internet link in any of the components (Organizer's Almanac page, for example). Even worse, it always launched a new session of the browser instead of sending the URL to the currently running session, if you had it open. 

There are two solutions and at least one is surprisingly simple. The first is to use the REGRX.EXE program in the X:\LOTUSW4\COMPONENT directory which will allow you to switch back and forth between Netscape and Web Explorer as well as perform a few other registry repair options. Just go to the 'Services' menu of this program and select 'Set SmartSuite Web Browser'. 

But if the browser you want to use is not Netscape or Web Explorer, or you want the URLs fed to the currently running session of Netscape, or you wish to use some specific command like arguments (-3 for Netscape, or to tell Web Explorer to use more than 4 connections etc.) then you'll need to go the slightly more complex route. FixPak 5 SE (or higher) required to use SmartSuite comes with an INI editor called RegEdit2 (set to mimic Windows 95's registry editor) that you'll find in the X:\OS2\System directory under the name REGEDIT2.EXE (where X is the drive letter you installed OS/2 to), it's this that you'll need to edit SmartSuite's registry more explicitly than REGRX can. 

So to change the default browser, follow these directions: 

  1. Open RegEdit2 (X:\OS2\System\RegEdit2.exe) 
  2. Expand the tree called "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" by clicking on the
     plus sign 
  3. Scroll down until you find the key called "http" and expand it 
  4. Keep expanding it all the way past "shell" and "open" until
  	you	reach "command". Clicking on this should display the command
  	line that each SmartSuite component uses to launch the browser in
  	the other half of the RegEdit window. 
  5. Right click on the "Data" portion of the key and pick "Modify"
     from the pop up menu 
  6. Enter the new command line for starting the browser, including
     the full path and filename of the browser and "%1" for where the
     URL	is to be passed. For example, to start Navigator in 3.0 mode
     you'd put "c:\Netscape\Netscape.exe -3 %1" 
  7. Click on 'OK', then close the Registry editor.

If you want it to send the URL to the currently running copy of Netscape instead of launching a new session then you'll need the highly useful Netscape DDE interface written by (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444vnd/os2_d.htm) Ulrich Moeller of XFolder fame, available (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444vnd/nsdde11.zip) here as a 20K download. Unzip this into a directory and put that as the default browser for SmartSuite to use, as per the same instructions given above. 

But yet it doesn't stop there, for it seems Freelance Graphics is immune to the chances made in the registry this way. To make Freelance use the web browser you want you'll need to make a small change to your CONFIG.SYS file. Opening CONFIG.SYS in the OS/2 System Editor, add the line "SET LOTUS_BROWSER=X:\Path\Browser.exe" (where "X:\Path\Browser.exe" is the full path and filename for the browser). We don't know why Lotus couldn't have Freelance follow the settings in the registry like the rest of the components in the suite (or for that matter, why the rest of the suite components couldn't follow the LOTUS_BROWSER setting either). Perhaps this will be fixed in the next version. 

Getting rid of the registration reminder

SmartSuite for Warp 4 came with a registration reminder program similar to Warp 4's own "Dancing Elephant". This reminder will pop up every week or so until you go through the registration process. But if you don't want to register, you can get rid of the reminder program by opening Warp's Startup folder, located in the OS/2 System folder, and delete the "Lotus Software Registration Reminder" object you find there. 

Overcoming Printer Problems

If your printer is spewing out garbage whenever you go to print something in a SmartSuite application, check the printer's properties notebook and make sure it's set to "Printer Specific Format" (on the Queue Options tab). Also, if you're having problems printing something in Landscape mode (such as a spreadsheet in 1-2-3) check that the printer object's settings is also set to print in Landscape mode too. Better yet, create two printer objects and set one to print in Landscape mode and the other in Portrait mode. Then when you come to print in SmartSuite, simply choose the appropriate printer object from the print dialog's drop down list. 

The Mysterious Vanishing Mouse

For some who use Organizer, you might have noticed that the mouse cursor tends to disappear and not come back after you close the application. This is a bug that was in the beta version, but never got fixed in the shipping version. Somehow Organizer increments the "hide" counter one too many and forgets to decrement it after its finished unloading itself from memory. 

To get your cursor back, start the OS/2 System Editor (e.exe). The OS/2 System Editor seems to have code in it that will make the mouse cursor reappear again. To make this easy to launch you can either make a shadow of the System Editor's icon directly on the desktop so it's easy to "feel around" for (the mouse is still active even though invisible, as you will see if you hold down the left mouse button and see OS/2 drawing boxes on the desktop). But better yet is to use a utility such as Object Desktop's Keyboard Launchpad to assign the System Editor to a key combination (I use Ctrl-Shift-S) 

Others have found they can put the OS/2 System Editor in the desktop menu (go to the 'Menu' tab of the Desktop Properties notebook) and use Shift-F10 or right-click to bring up this menu whenever the mouse disappears. Of course, it's been found that launching Organizer again will revive the mouse too, but we figured that you wouldn't have closed it in the first place unless you wanted it out of memory. 

Plus, some users have also found that upgrading their video drivers (especially Matrox owners) fixes this problem for good. 

Making Transparent Frames in Word Pro

While you can switch off the wrapping of text around a frame, the default properties are still set up so that the frame obscures the text underneath. If you want a transparent frame so the text under it shows through, right click on the frame, select 'Frame Properties' from the popup menu, click on the first tab (colors and patterns) and set the pattern type to "none". (Thanks to (kyank@ibm.net) Kevin Yank from the OS/2 SmartSuite mailing list) 

Getting More Help And Tips

If your 90 day free technical support has run out at Lotus and need some help fixing your problems with SmartSuite, you can sign up for the OS/2 SmartSuite mailing list by either visiting (http://www.findmail.com/list/smartsuite-os2/) this site or by sending a blank message to (smartsuite-os2-subscribe@MakeList.com) smartsuite-os2-subscribe@MakeList.com. The web site is particularly useful as you can browse and search through the archives of threads without needing to subscribe to the list.  

Got some of your own tips to share with our readers? Add them here in our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/tips/SmartSuiteW4.html) Hypernews tips forum.

                         - * -

(chris@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to keep his bicycle and a trailer.

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First Looks and Nifty Gadgets

First Looks and Nifty Gadgets brings you reviews of the new and novel.  In each issue 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.

      In this issue we look at: SFUtils | Keyboard Plus v1.1

SFUtils

SFUtils, or Startup Folder Utilities, from Qualint gives you something that is very useful in a networked environment: the ability to put objects in your Startup folder that point to applications on a network drive. Normally, you can't do that because objects in the Startup folder are launched before networked drives are mapped. With SFUtils, you place objects in your Startup folder that wait for the appropriate network drives to come online before launching an application or object. Until the network drives appear, you see a little window stating that it is waiting for the network drive(s) to come online.

SFUtils comes with two objects that you use: AppWait and ObjWait. AppWait waits for a network drive to come online and then it launches an application (even DOS and Win-OS/2 apps). ObjWait waits for specified network drives to come online and then opens a specified WPS object, which could be a program object, drives object, etc. AppWait is easier to use, but ObjWait is more powerful, enabling you to start DOS sessions with special DOS settings for example.

SFUtils comes with a utility, MakeObj, that makes it a little easier to use ObjWait. MakeObj creates an object that ObjWait will open when the necessary network drives have been mapped. All you have to do is fill in the blanks.

Overall, SFUtils is a very handy tool for networked systems.

SFUtils
     by (http://www.qualint.com/) Qualint
     download from the (ftp://ftp.bmtmicro.com/bmtmicro/SFUtils.zip) BMT Micro (ZIP, 190k)
     Registration: US$15 (personal); US$150 (site license)

                         - * -

Keyboard Plus v1.1

Despite the fact that the world has moved on to graphically oriented interfaces, many people realize that simple tasks can still be most easily accomplished with quick and simple keyboard combinations.  One of these people is John Fairhurst who has released v1.1 of his super-useful Keyboard Plus.

Keyboard plus offers OS/2 users to do a few great features.  It allows us to take advantage of the "Win95" keys on many new keyboards, it allows us to assign "hot-key" features to programs which don't have their own, and it provides the ability to define "global" macros -- keys which will insert text or start a program.

Keyboard Plus is a no nonsense program (there is no installation feature) but it is not short on power.  While users can not create "recursive macros" (macros that call other macros), they can do just about anything else.

Tired of typing your name in WWW forms?  Set up a macro with Keyboard Plus and just hit Ctrl-Shift-N (or any other combination you prefer) and your name can be entered without typing.  Want to launch programs without digging through folders and double clicking?  The ability is just a keystroke away with Keyboard Plus.  Some useful macros even come predefined, such as the current date (in a few different formats) and current time.

Mr. Fairhurst has also included a very well done online help system, including a small tutorial to get new users up and running.  Keyboard Plus is a small, free utility that could increase anyone's productivity.

Keyboard Plus v1.1
     by (john_fairhurst@iname.com) John Fairhurst
     download from the (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/util/wps/kbdplus.zip) the OS/2 Supersite (ZIP, 451k)
     Registration: FREEWARE

                         - * -

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

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June 13, 1998 Reader Survey Results

When IBM released Warp 4 to the world, a great deal of noise was made about its built in voice recognition software.  For the first time in history, a mass market operating system had such features bundled, and most mainstream hardware could run it "out of the box".

Now, after more than a year of real world testing, we wondered if people were really utilizing this part of OS/2's abilities.  To find out, last issue we asked you about "Talking back to your computer".

Answers to our survey were accepted from June 13th until June 25th.  We had a total of 1,030 replies to our questionnaire with 124 "spoiled" entries (replies were considered "spoiled" if they did not contain an e-mail address, if all questions were not answered or if they were duplicates).  This left 906 valid replies.  The results were as follows:

Do you use VoiceType _Dictation_?

Arguably one of the most useful features of voice recognition technology is the ability to turn anyone into a "typing champ".  With discrete pauses between words, IBM's VoiceType Dictation promises to allow non-typists to create documents at upwards of 100 words per minute -- much faster than most typists can manage.  Do OS/2 users take advantage of this feature though?  Most of them (64.8%) do not.  In fact, of those that replied positively to this question, the majority (31.7%) only use VoiceType dictation some of the time.

Do you use VoiceType _Navigation_?

Possibly the most gee-whiz feature of OS/2's voice recognition is its ability to recognize "natural speech" to perform simple tasks such as opening a window or saving a file.  With this feature too, however, our readers told us they just don't use it.  The numbers were very similar here: 66.3% not using Navigation at all and the majority of those who do use it (29.5%) using it only some of the time.

How accurate do you find VoiceType?

Surprisingly, our readers don't seem to be shying away from VoiceType because of a lack of power.  A large group of readers (40.6%) told us that they find VoiceType mostly accurate while only 20.5% told us they found it not very accurate or completely inaccurate.

Equally surprising was the fact that although nearly two thirds of readers told us they did not VoiceType functions "at all" in our first two questions, only a little over one third (37.2%) replied to this question with the "I told you, I don't use VoiceType!" option.  Apparently the difference in these two groups is made up of people who don't use VoiceType but do have an opinion on how accurate it is.

Is it important for IBM to improve OS/2's built-in VoiceType features?

Again, we were surprised when we asked about readers' interest in future support of VoiceType.  Since most people don't use the features, we did not expect to find a great deal of concern for its future.  However, you told us just the opposite.  Just over three quarters of our readers (75.3%) thing VoiceType improvements are very or somewhat important.  Only 15.1% felt it was not important.  Clearly IBM has not yet perfected this asset of OS/2 but users don't feel it should be given up on just yet.

                         - * -

That's it for this issue.  Don't forget to fill out this issue's questionnaire and check back on July 11th for complete results.




                         Complete June 13, 1998 Survey Results

Do you use VoiceType _Dictation_?

Category								Count	Percentage
Yes, all the time						8		0.9%
Yes, most of the time					24		2.6%
Yes, some of the time					287		31.7%
No, not at all						587		64.8%
I do not understand the question		0		0.0%
TOTAL								906		100.0%


Do you use VoiceType _Navigation_?

Category								Count	Percentage
Yes, all the time						11		1.2%
Yes, most of the time					27		3.0%
Yes, some of the time					267		29.5%
No, not at all						601		66.3%
I do not understand the question		0		0.0%
TOTAL								906		100.0%


How accurate do you find VoiceType?

Category								Count	Percentage
I told you, I don't use VoiceType!		337		37.2%
Perfectly accurate					14		1.5%
Mostly accurate						368		40.6%
Not very accurate						173		19.1%
Completely inaccurate					13		1.4%
I do not understand the question		1		0.1%
TOTAL								906		99.9%


Is it important for IBM to improve OS/2's built-in VoiceType features?

Category								Count	Percentage
Very important						391		43.2%
Somewhat important					291		32.1%
Somewhat unimportant					69		7.6%
Very unimportant						68		7.5%
I am not sure / I am undecided			87		9.6%
I do not understand the question		0		0.0%
TOTAL								906		100.0%

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June 28/98 Reader Survey

Have you ever wondered what your fellow OS/2 users are doing with their computers and how they're doing it?

Each issue, OS/2 e-Zine! takes the pulse of the OS/2 community on a different topic and presents you with the results.

Just fill in the form at http://www.os2ezine.com/v3n09/survey2.htm and check our next issue to find out how "normal" you really are!

                         - * -

Do you have an idea that you think would make a (feedback@os2ezine.com) good survey question?

Don't forget to check out the complete results of last issue's survey, in this issue!

              This issue's topic: OpenGL Hardware Support

Notes:
1. Only one entry per reader will be counted.
2. All questions must be answered to be counted.
3. Information must be received on or before July 9, 1998.

Complete results of this survey will be printed in our next issue (July 11, 1998).

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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.

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Indelible Blue, a mail order company, provides OS/2 software and hardware solutions to customers worldwide.

(http://www.mensys.nl/indexuk.html) Mensys
The one place to go in Europe for all OS/2 Warp software.

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On-line sales & solutions for VisualAge, DB2, OS/2 Warp, Workspace on Demand, Notes/Domino, AIX Firewall, and Net.Commerce (design/hosting).  The best deals on IBM and Lotus software and hardware (PCs, Servers, and RS/6000s) -- with OS/2 preloads!

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(http://www.warpspeed.com.au/) WarpSpeed Computers
Developers of The Graham Utilities -- the largest, most comprehensive suite of disk, file and general utilities specifically written for OS/2.

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Copyright 1998   -   Falcon Networking
ISSN 1203-5696