[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!		December 16, 1998	volume 3, number 20
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Copyright 1998		Falcon Networking	ISSN 1203-5696

	"Over Three Quarters of a Million Satisfied Visitors!"


OPINIONS:

  Chris Wenham 
  Chris Wright 

REVIEWS:

Object Desktop 2.0 vs. Everything Else

  Object Desktop 2.0 vs. Everything Else - Chris Wenham
  Launching and Switching - Sam Henwrich
  Archiving and Packaging - Chris Wenham
  Virtual Desktops - Sam Henwrich
  System Stats and Monitoring - Sam Henwrich
  File Management - Chris Wenham
  Object Desktop 2.0: Conclusions - Chris Wenham

  Master Of The Empire - Lief Clennon

ADMINISTRIVIA:

* How to Subscribe to OS/2 e-Zine! for FREE.
* How YOU can Sponsor OS/2 e-Zine!
* The Sponsors that Make this Issue Possible


Copyright 1998   -   Falcon Networking
ISSN 1203-5696

Chris Wenham

Thou Shalt Not Pull The Wool Over Mine Eyes

Summary: Technology changes ethics, and soon it's going to have an enormous impact on ethics in journalism and the media. Chris explains how.

In my December 1st editorial it became rather clear that I wasn't being exactly truthful about the last 10 years of PC history. That I hoped would be more than obvious once the piece was read the whole way through. To my satisfaction, the feedback I received over the column showed that only about two people didn't realize this, and actually thought I was being serious. Possibly what let everyone figure it out, if the clues I dropped were too subtle, was the fact that there was a reader feedback forum attached to the bottom of the article. Anything that anyone wanted to say could and was posted there, with subsequent visitors figuring out in two heartbeats that a convincingly written stream of BS was, in fact, just that - and very deliberately BS too.

The fact is that while most publications are perfectly honest and ethical in their reporting, there do exist hundreds of thousands of cases of favoritism, bribery, and the heavy-handed abuse of media to swing public opinion for a political goal. It happens in small hometown newspapers, radio shows, television shows, right up to the national level. Sometimes it becomes painfully public, such as the case when General Motors wanted to be informed ahead of time of potentially controversial articles being published in the magazines they advertised in, or when Intel wanted web sites to pack themselves with "multimedia enhanced" content to push the adoption of their MMX enabled chips, or when Microsoft's "astroturf" (fake grassroots) campaign had the lid blown off it.

Because cases like this make national news does not mean that it's easy to sniff out biased reporting; in fact, many went to show just how it happens all the time. As we learned from indignant advertising executives quotes during the Microsoft controversey, phony grassroots campaigns are an everyday part of the PR arsenal. It's not unusual for a company to pay for and get away with Letter-to-the-Editor writing campaigns, spontaneous testimony from "concerned experts" and other fluff pieces that reek of payola. What has let these companies get away with this is the fact that the media institutions still control the ink on the paper. Many times, the companies involved own the ink and own the paper.

Intel is an investor in C|Net; Microsoft is an investor in MSNBC; Softbank is the owner of Ziff Davis; Falcon Networking is the owner of OS/2 e-Zine! It's often too much to expect that every publication can be absolutely independent because it still costs a lot of money to publish to a wide audience. So for the past couple of centuries objective reporting has hinged entirely on the integrity of the owners, the editors and the journalists. In my December 1st article I illustrated, just a little, how this is changing because of the Internet.

Forums such as the interactive one you'll find linked to at the bottom of every one of our opinion pieces is only one manifestation of a trend. We still control those forums and I can delete messages a couple minutes or hours after they are posted. But I can't control other forums such as the newsgroups where, in fact, our integrity was called into question as part of a larger debate over the effect of paid advertising in publications. Already then I could sense that we couldn't get away with that kind of scam even if we wanted to, where in an earlier era we could. It's because many of our readers showed up and expressed a voice there and in other forums - places we couldn't control, and places easily and effortlessly accessible by everyone. We, and now every other publication in the world, is subject to the same force that Linux benefits from: under the glare of a thousand eyeballs, every flaw is obvious.

With Linux it's possible for anybody to correct a flaw because the source code is right there. Publications, even online ones, don't usually allow the unfettered modification of their content by just anyone, but it's becoming harder and harder to prohibit the free annotation of anything that is written. Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the web, visualized from the very beginning a publication space where annotation of any page was a common and accepted fact. And as it turns out, we're not very far away from that end. While thousands of publications like us are adding feedback forums to every opinion piece already (Ziff Davis being the ones we shamelessly stole the idea from) experiments are also being conducted in third party additions of forums and feedback mechanisms that are beyond the control of the original publisher.

A few years ago, you might have noticed a few sites adding links to an IBM run service called Aqui ("a key"), a basic annotation service that let you add what you considered to be relevant links to any page on the web. Webmasters interested in oiling the gears could put a link on their pages to the Aqui database, but the lack of such a link wouldn't stop anyone from annotating your page anyway by directly pasting the URL into Aqui's homepage. It just made it a bit harder for anyone to see what related links had been suggested by other visitors whenever they came to a page.

All it really takes is a database that searches by URL and extracts visitor annotations keyed to those URLs. It won't matter if the page is on a forgotten university account of a student who graduated years ago, or a private club, or a major international publication, the URL is still unique and the third party database is running on a different server - one that's accepting hundreds of thousands of new inputs from anyone. The only barrier is how easy it is to see those annotations - you have to know that the annotation service exists. But even then, that obstruction is not far from being broken apart too.

Imagine if in the standard toolbar of every web browser is a button labeled "Read Comments" that is linked to such a third party annotation database. It's an easily codeable affair once such a database exists - just feed the current URL into a query and display what comes back. It could even be automatic, with a window pane just below each page re-loading every time a new page is loaded to show what annotations the database is aware of. All outside the control of the original publisher, all with a little button labeled "Add your comments" that allows any sharp-eyed watchdog to blow the whistle. Might it be a while for the media infested browser companies to add such a button or pane that may or may not be in their best interests? Too late for them, (http://www.mozilla.org/) the source code to the browser is now open. The power of visitor annotation to web sites will be realized by the power of visitor annotation to the browser's functionality itself.

And yet is it limited to cyberspace alone? Probably not. While the URL of a page is its own unique identifier that allows a database to look up annotations on it, every printed magazine that you buy at a newsstand or supermarket today has a bar code on it - a unique identifier that's just as good. Bar code readers are cheap to make, with only an infra-red LED needed for contact scanning and lasers as a speedier non-contact method. Bar code scanners now come in some VCR remote controls! But stick one on the corner of a Palm Pilot like device and suddenly you have the mechanisms in place to call up the free reader commentary of any issue of any printed publication in the world - all with the flick of a wrist. If that kind of technology becomes pervasive you can kiss good-bye to the good old "Letters to the editor" department.

What may come rapidly on the heels of ad-hoc feedback forums such as these are the next logical step: ad-hoc annotation of the body text. To get an idea of this in crude manual form, read the Halloween documents. These internal Microsoft memos were leaked to the press and when posted to the public, had rebuttals and commentary inserted into the body text itself - set in a different text color so it was easy to tell which was the original article and which was the annotation. The technology to do this on the fly has been around ever since the first word processor with team-revision support hit the market. This could be built into the browser, and probably wouldn't be too hard with the advancement of Javascript and the new layout engine of Mozilla.

As the science fiction writer Larry Niven put it: Technology changes ethics. With suntan lotion preventing sunburn, the taboos on revealing beachwear clothing for women and men slowly lifted until you have the string bikinis of today. Technology made it ethical to cut a dead person up into his component organs, because they could now be transplanted to save the living. And technology changed the finance world when fast electronic transactions and check clearing removed the income that banks used to collect on "floats" - or the interest earned on customers' accounts while checks waited to clear - at the same time it changed the ethics of bad check writing too.

Technology is now changing the ethics of publishing. Publishers won't be able to get away with glaring omissions anymore because those will be filled by their own readers within hours - much to the publisher's embarrassment. Same goes for exaggeration, misdirection and whatever else.

Go ahead, annotate me. You can do it in our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/rant/dec16-1998.html) interactive forum. Watch out though, because we still control the horizontal.

                         - * -

(http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/rant/dec16-1998/1.html) A good thing too - but beware political reactionaries - Basil Fernie
(http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/rant/dec16-1998/2.html) Microsoft is Already TWO STEPS AHEAD! - Tom Nadeau
-> (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/rant/dec16-1998/2/1.html) take names - Dennis J Tuchler
(http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/rant/dec16-1998/3.html) Ethics changes technology - Dwight M Keller

 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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Chris Wright		-Chris Wright

A Christmas Software Wish-List

Summary: Chris Wright makes a Christmas wish for the perfect mega-web-site
builder program for OS/2.

Christmas is coming, the time where all us folks in the U.S. of A. are sucked into an abyss of greed, avarice, gluttony, and overdrawn credit cards. At this time of year it seems wholly appropriate to obsess on wanting something I cannot, as of yet, have:

An all-in-one, monster web authoring program for OS/2.

OS/2 has all (at least, has most) of the pieces here, but they're scattered in different products, making it somewhat awkward for those of us short on time and patience to learn. What we need is the Program To End All Programs (TM). I have a vision of such a program, a vision that shines as brightly as a certain star that is commonly associated with this time of the year.

I am a very, very busy man. Not only do I write for OS/2 e-Zine!, I draw an on-again, off-again comic strip called "Help Desk" for the same publication, play "music" in a part-time band, do occasional volunteer work for various projects like Warpstock, and -- oh, yes, I almost forgot -- I have a Day Job. This Day Job, which is crucial to honing my finely tuned skills of observation, communication, and design (not to mention paying the bills, feeding the dog, the cats, my wife and myself) consists of doing some technical writing and some web design for a very large law firm in Richmond, Virginia.

Using Windows 95.

Using Microsoft FrontPage 98.

That's what they standardized on, that's what I use. Actually, to be perfectly honest, FrontPage 98 has a lot of potential as a web development tool. It has several features that I am very happy with, and actually miss using when I'm using another program.

The biggest problem with FrontPage 98 is that it's extremely unstable, especially if you've been using it for more than half an hour. Regardless of feature set, no matter how intuitive a program is to use, if it crashes all the time, it's not worth your money -- not if you design web pages for a living.

Microsoft FrontPage 98 has a very impressive feature set, and is an extremely intuitive program to use, but it locks up and freezes my machine too much. As much as I like using it (when it works), I reboot too much for it to be practical for large-scale web projects.

Besides that, it generates needlessly bloated HTML code.

Besides that, it doesn't work as well with Non-Microsoft browsers that don't use ActiveX (i.e., Netscape).

Besides that, it's not available for OS/2, which is pretty much all that need be said for The Big Picture.

But some developer out there, or some ISV, should take notes on this program, take all its best features, come up with some features it doesn't have, and create a "killer app" for OS/2 -- a web design environment that will wipe the floor with everything else out there on the market. Just to get the ball rolling, I'll tell you how I think it should work.

First, OS/2 WebDeveloper Pro (my not-so-original name for this application) is more than just a GUI web page application, it's also a database. It's also a Java and JavaScript development environment. It's also... well, I'll start from the beginning.

When you fire up OS/2 WebDeveloper Pro, it gives you the opportunity to set up a new web site or continue developing a site that already exists. We're going to create a web site from scratch here, so clicking the "new site" button brings you to a dialog box that asks you to set up a mirror site on your hard drive. You choose a directory or folder that acts as the "root" level of your web site, then name your project. After you give your project a name, it creates a dummy index.html file which opens as a blank page, and you can begin your site setup.

Under OS/2 WebDeveloper Pro, you don't save individual web pages per se. What you save is an entire web site. Each OS/2 WebDeveloper web site would essentially be a database that keeps track of all your html file names, all your links, and all your graphics. For example, you'd specify a default graphics directory for your site and when you decide to link a graphic to a page it defaults to that directory. OS/2 WebDeveloper Pro would also keep track of all internal links in the site, so if you should move an html file from one level of your directory tree to another, it will automatically update the links elsewhere on the site to make sure they are still alive. And finally, it should also update remote sites using simple FTP.

Actually creating web pages in OS/2 WebDeveloper Pro would be done in either WYSIWYG or open-code formats. In other words, OS/2 WebDeveloper Pro would allow the user to design in a full WYSIWYG environment, similar to HomePage Publisher's, or dealing strictly with the HTML source code, similar to WebWriter/2.

When developing in a WYSIWYG environment (which in my dream world is licensed from the author of HomePage Publisher, since I've never used a WYSIWYG program that generates cleaner HTML code on any platform), various HTML structures (tables, cells, graphics, etc.) all have object-specific right-click commands associated with them. For example, when right clicking in a table cell, you have the option to "Edit Table, Edit Row, or Edit Cell," or "Delete Table, Delete Row, or Delete Cell." Choosing any of the edit functions causes a dialog box to appear where you can specify various attributes of the HTML object.

If you right-clicked on a graphic element, you could have the option to "define graphic, make link, or make imagemap." Defining the graphic would allow you to modify the size of the graphic, either leaving it at its default, or stretching it by increasing or decreasing its pixel height and width -- or, defining its size as a percentage of the area it's sitting in (for example, 70% of the entire width of the web site, or 70% of the width of the cell it's sitting in.) Choosing "make link" would allow you to use it as a hyperlink and add in the necessary info for that. Finally, choosing the "make imagemap" would bring up a little screen where you'd choose either client-side or server-side as the basic imagemap type, select various portions of the graphic and define those areas as hyperlinks. Once finished, you'd click "OK", the screen would close, and the imagemap information would be embedded in the appropriate areas of the web page.

If you right-clicked on any blank portion of the page itself, you'd be able to call up a dialog box that would allow you to enter the title, meta tag information, backgrounds and whatever else.

Another important feature in this application would be that you can completely customize your keyboard to map to various commands within the application itself. For example, you should be able to define the alt+L combination as the command that inserts a hyperlink into the document, or alt+P as the command that brings up the general page information dialog box.

Finally, not only should the WYSIWYG area create web pages, but it can also (to a limited extent) generate simple JavaScript commands. For example, lets assume I wanted to add in JavaScript the illusion that when a mouse was resting over a graphic, the graphic changed color. This is nothing more than switching one graphic with another, but it requires JavaScript function. Here's how it might work:

I'd insert the cursor in the area I wanted the effect to take place, and activate the "insert JavaScript" feature. A window would appear with a list of the pre-generated scripts that I can choose from,  such as "image switch". I also give this routine a group name in case I want to include other items in the same JavaScript routine. After filling out a few fields, the script is generated and inserted for me. If I want to do the same thing to another image (for example, if it is part of a series of links) the "Add to group" option does the job with the same easy-to-use interface.

Of course, there are some people who prefer to code their HTML by hand, and OS/2 WebDeveloper Pro shouldn't leave them out in the cold. If the web developers prefers dealing with source code (because source code allows you to create cleaner, more compact code) he or she can expect features such as syntax highlighting, error notification, automatic indentation and configurable keyboard shortcuts.

Other Useful Goodies

And now here's some things I'd like to see in a web development programs but haven't actually seen anywhere yet:

* Support for Cascading Style Sheets
* A plugin architecture, so third parties can increase the applications power and usability
* Rexx scripting support to automate things without needing to write and compile a plugin
* A way to merge database fields with templates to create multiple pages with similar layout but different data. For example, a Lotus Approach database with 25 employee phone numbers and addresses could be merged into a web page employee information layout, creating 25 web pages, one for each employee.
* Automatic conversion of URL and e-mail data. All strings that start with "http://" or "ftp://" are converted into hyperlinks. All strings with an "@" in them are converted into mailto: commands. These functions should be optional, by the way.
* Templates. OS/2 WebDeveloper Pro should be able to store pages as templates -- in case you want to use them in other pages.
* Configurable toolbars and tool palettes. Basically, the more I can customize my tools, the more efficiently I'll get my work done.


So that's just about it: my vision of the ultimate web design program. Now all you have to do is build it...

                         - * -


Eager programmers wanted! (Especially if they work pro-bono.) But if you're just another dreamer with your idea of the perfect site creation program, make your Christmas wishes too in our (http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/wright/dec16-1998.html) interactive forum.

(http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/wright/dec16-1998/2.html) Coding templates! - Mark Bickford
(http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/wright/dec16-1998/3.html) Whats wrong with Enhanced Editor? - zeppelin@gte.net
(http://www.os2ezine.com/forums/get/forums/wright/dec16-1998/4.html) too much overhead but ... - Bernd Hohmann
 
(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.

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The Hard Stuff		-Craig Miller

Hard Drives

You can have the fastest video card out there, 256 megs of SDRAM, 1 meg of Burst cache, 21 inch monitor, 450 Pentium 2 processor, the works; but it matters little if you skimped on the Hard Drive. The Hard Drive is the Achilles heel of any computer because it's the slowest peripheral you have. In this article we'll go over Hard Drives, differences in EIDE and SCSI, terms, File systems, and, of course, things that should be known specific to OS/2 users.

The Basics

On a hard drive, data is stored in the magnetic coating of the platters. The so called head, held by an actuator arm, is used to write and read data (like a record player). This disk rotates with a constant turn time, measured in revolutions per minute (rpm). Data is organized on a disk in cylinders, tracks and sectors. Cylinders are concentric tracks on the surface of the disk. A track is divided into sectors. And a hard drive has a head on each side of a disk. Nowadays, the actuator arm is moved by a servo-motor (not a step-motor which needs more time while swinging in after moving over the desired track). All hard drives have reserved sectors, which are used automatically by the drive logic if there is a defect in the media. Typical hard drives have a rotation speed from 4,500 to 7,200 rpm, with 10,000 rpm drives just now getting to the market. The faster the rotation, the higher the transfer rate, but also the louder and hotter the drive. You may find you need to cool a 7200 rpm disk with an extra fan to prevent shortening the drive's lifespan. Modern drives read all sectors of a track in one turn (Interleave 1:1). The rotation speed is constant.

All modern hard drives also have their own cache varying in size and organization. The cache is normally used for writing and reading. On SCSI HD's you may have to enable write caching, because often it is disabled by default. This varies from drive to drive. You may be surprised that it is not the cache size that is important, but the organization of the cache itself (such as a read/write cache or a look-ahead cache). With most EIDE drives, the PC's system memory is also used for storing the HD's firmware (e.g. software or "BIOS"). When the drive powers up, it reads the firmware from special sectors. By doing this, manufacturers save money by eliminating the need for ROM chips, but also give you the ability to easily update your drives "BIOS" if it is necessary.

Transfer rate is higher when data is read or written to the outer parts of a disk. The simple reason is that there is more space there for sectors to be read in one turn. The number of sectors varies in steps. Usually on a disk there are 10 to 20 zones (called 'notches') with a constant sector number. That's the reason why you see the steps in the transfer rates. Some hard drives use the combination of 'vertical' and 'horizontal' mapping. The 'horizontal' mapping is used in the zones, the 'vertical' mapping between the zones. However, transfer rate and seek time look the same to 'vertical' mapping.

The Interface (EIDE / SCSI)

Currently there are 2 different interfaces: EIDE and SCSI. You will often find an EIDE controller already integrated with the motherboard and that EIDE drives are much cheaper than SCSI drives. For SCSI you'll usually need an extra controller, because there aren't a lot of motherboards with them integrated. Together with the higher price of a SCSI disk, a SCSI system is more expensive than EIDE.

With EIDE you have a primary and a secondary channel that will connect to two devices each for a total of four per machine. Those could include a mix of devices such as a hard drive, CD-ROM or disk changers. Lately there have also been tape backups with EIDE connectors, but you need special backup software to use them.

OS/2 benefits the most from SCSI, since it'll make simultaneous accesses more frequently - a task that SCSI handles better than EIDE. If you have a server or are working with large files like audio, video or other disk-intensive applications, you will benefit more with SCSI. There are three reasons for this:


* All modern operating systems now supports SCSI very well. Windows 3.x didn't!
* Bus mastering works much better with SCSI
* The fastest hard drives with the best performance are SCSI.  	


If you need large capacities and the highest transfer rates available on the market you need SCSI. This is not because EIDE is incapable of this, it's because of the market. High-end disks with high capacities and high performance are intended to be used in servers and aren't built with EIDE interfaces. At the moment, EIDE disks are built with up to a 25 Gigabyte capacity (there is a problem with a 4 GB barrier in some BIOSes, and for drives bigger than 8 GB you need a new BIOS that supports the INT 13 functions AH=41h bis 49h. This is why there were refreshes in the Install Diskettes for OS/2), and transfer rates of about 9 MBytes per second. IBM just came out with new drivers for drives over 8.4 gigabytes. I personally have a 9.1 gig drive and are not having any problems. If you need more, you'll have to use SCSI. Also, SCSI drives have larger cache RAM than EIDE drives do. New news is that IBM is coming out with a new Hard Drive (EIDE), that will be 25 Gigs. If that doesn't get you, then wait for Seagate's 50 Gig drive!

The need for speed

You need to know how a slow or fast hard drive affects your overall system performance in a standard environment. If your operating system isn't constantly swapping (e.g. you have enough memory) the speed of a hard drive is only a small part of a well balanced system. Let's say you have a drive that has 30% better performance than another older one; the benefit for standard applications would be from 2% up to 18%. Sometimes, you want or need the fastest components available. Other times, more capacity and reliability is needed.

There are several programs available that test the performance of a hard drive. Some are so-so, others are good. In any case, if you have one, you get numbers that tell you something. But do you have a point of comparison? Different benchmarks mean different numbers. Different environments mean different numbers. Modern benchmarks are independent from existing data on the drive (but only read performance testing can be done). But a benchmark could be affected by several things:


* To which channel is the drive connected
* Is the drive alone or together with other devices connected to the controller
* Under which operating system is the drive tested and used
* Which drivers are loaded or not loaded
* Testing at Monday or Friday, etc.
* If it's a full moon or not


A good program to try is SysBench 0.9.4b. If you run it, send me the results and I will compile them and have the results in my next article. Please run all of the tests if you do.

File systems

If you purchase a new hard drive you'll find that it is physically pre-formatted. This means that the cylinder, track and sector information is already written onto the disk. You now have to partition the disk to prepare it for the logical formatting of the file system and writing the partition information and boot sector to the disk. You don't have to use the whole disk with one partition. You can divide it into several, and depending on the operating system there are several file systems to choose from. The most used file systems are FAT (DOS, Windows, OS/2), NTFS (Windows NT) and HPFS (OS/2). I will only be talking about FAT and HPFS, as these are the ones that come built into OS/2.

FAT: File Allocation Table

DOS, including DOS 7.0 of Windows95/98, and OS/2 can use the FAT file system to store data to floppies and hard drives. The FAT organizes multiple sectors into clusters and uses 12 or 16-Bit cluster address numbers. The 16-Bit FAT is able to address up to 65526 clusters (some are used for special purposes). A cluster can be as big as 32K, which translates into a maximum partition size of 2 Gigabytes. The side effect is that every file takes up at least 32K worth of disk space, even if it is only one K in size. That is the reason why power users forced to use FAT divide a hard disk into slightly less then 512 Megabytes per partition -- then only 8 K per cluster are used and you don't waste too much of your limited space on. If you want to know the size of the clusters on your FAT formatted partitions, you can check by using chkdsk.exe at the OS/2-prompt. If you have a hard drive that is larger then 2 gigs or you use OS/2 exclusively then don't use FAT! It was designed two decades ago for floppy disks, modified later for 10 megabyte hard drives, and looses on average 15% of your disk space to "slack" or leftover cluster space. Instead, you need to use...

HPFS: High Performance File System

A standard OS/2 Warp 4 installation supports two file systems for use on your hard disks: FAT and HPFS. The HPFS file system supports file and directory structures different from the FAT file system and is much better than FAT as a result, although FAT is still retained for backwards compatibility and diskettes. HPFS gets better performance from the intelligent positioning of data on the drive (starting from the physical center of the disk and spreading outwards, so the drive head has less distance to move), plus it allows real long file-names, is less likely to lose data, more      resistant to file fragmentation, and thanks to storing data by the sector instead of in clusters it uses disk-space more efficiently than FAT.

Another advantage of HPFS over FAT is that it's a "forking" filesystem, storing extra data about files and directories in an area called the Extended Attributes (EAs). For example, the name and icon of an object that appears in an OS/2 folder or on the OS/2 Desktop is stored in its EAs. In HPFS, EAs are part of the HPFS file control lock which is read when the file is opened. In FAT, EAs are stored in a separate file in separate clusters and require additional I/O to access them, and are therefore slower.

HPFS has two limitations: Native DOS applications can't see HPFS formatted disks (although DOS programs running in OS/2 Warp can and there exists a driver to read HPFS disks from plain DOS), and the HPFS driver takes approximately 264KB of memory.

For more info on HPFS you can jump to (http://www.software.ibm.com/os/warp/performance/growth.htm) IBM's page.

One note is that Warp 5, or Warp Server for e-business, will have the Journaling File System (JFS). While I have a Beta of Warp 5, I'm having problems intalling it. What I will say about JFS is the same things that IBM themselves talk about. Some of major subjects JFS tackles are:


* A significant reduction in file restore time  	
* Increased file and partition size limitations  	
* "Sticky" and dynamic drive letter assignments for enhanced support of removable media
* Enhanced performance scalability on Symmetrical Multiprocessor (SMP) systems  	


You can read more on this at (http://www.software.ibm.com/os/warp/products/aurora/aurorafs.html) IBM's site.

Hard Drives: Who's out there?

The big makers of hard drives are IBM, Seagate, Western Digital and Quatum, with some input from Fugitsu and Maxstor. With so many decisions on what hard drive to buy, look first at how much you want and how much you want to spend. If your running OS/2 and another OS you might want at least 6 gigs of drive space. Why? Remember the Hard drive is one of the most painful things to upgrade because all your important data is stored there. The last thing you want is to run out of drive space 6 months down the road. With the extra space you don't have to worry about being "space deficient". My first hard drive was a whopping 250 megs. My brother laughed at me because he thought I would never fill it up. In four months I filled it up and used Stacker 4.0 to double it, two months latter I filled that space also. Speed is important, like before, the slowest part of any computer is the hard drive. Remember: The faster the drive the faster the computer as a whole. Next time we will be going over RAM which goes hand-in-hand with Hard drives.
 
Craig D. Miller can be reached at (craig@os2ezine.com) craig@os2ezine.com

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

Object Desktop 2.0 vs. Everything Else		-Chris Wenham

Summary: An introduction to our feature review: Object Desktop 2.0 versus Everything Else. We take a close look at the newest release of the popular enhancement utility and see what it's up against elsewhere.

Much can be said about the success of Object Desktop. To use Stardock's words, it's like a "Third party upgrade to OS/2". To others, it's the grout that fills OS/2's cracks. Since its debut, Object Desktop has gone through three major revisions; 1.5, 1.5 "Professional", and now - 2.0. What it has been steadily adding are a stream of improvements to OS/2's user interface, integrating them with the operating system itself to the point where it is seamless. There are few instances where you can draw a line on the screen and say "This is Object Desktop, and this is OS/2."

But since Object Desktop is a collection of smaller utilities and modules, each of which can be individually installed and uninstalled, its competition is a motley crew of shareware and freeware programs. While no other product for OS/2 competes with it directly - as a tightly knit collection of enhancements sold together - not all of its components will appeal to all people, leaving lots of room for those scattered shareware and freeware programs to appeal. In this feature review we focus on and separately address each major function of Object Desktop, but also give you an idea of what you can expect to find elsewhere.

The Components

Object Desktop's main components, the ones that have been around since version 1.0 and which you'll usually interact with the most, are the Control Center, Tab Launchpad, Keyboard Launchpad, Object Navigator, Archive Objects, Enhanced folders and text objects. Version 1.5's main addition was the Object Packages. Several more joined the team with Object Desktop Professional - a brief fork in the Object Desktop family tree that added features that were mostly of interest to the office and corporate setting. Now Stardock has mended that fork in version 2.0, which ends the distinction between a "regular" and "professional" version and makes everything one big happy package.

Control Center

This is like a nerve center for your desktop. It's the most visual of Object Desktop's modules and embodies the most functionality. In it are a Virtual Desktop manager (which creates 2 or more visual workspaces to run programs in), a flyout-menu browser similar to the one in Warp 4's WarpCenter toolbar, a set of system information displays that keep abreast of data such as available memory and hard drive space, a clock, and a task list.

Tabbed Launchpad

Made as a replacement for the Launchpad that came with Warp since version 3, this one adds tabs that let you flip through groups of buttons which can launch programs. It also features a task switcher (a special tab that lists each window as a button) and the ability to be sized in square or rectangular configurations that stack butons in a grid.

Keyboard Launchpad

This may be the most under appreciated utility in the suite, perhaps because in the age of the GUI the keyboard is de-emphasized in favor of buttons on the screen. But the Keyboard Launchpad is one of the best reasons to buy Object Desktop, for it is faster and more economical than any other program launching and task switching utility you'll own.

Object Navigator

This is best described as either a big improvement on the Drives object, or a clone of the file manager that's built into Windows 95. With a split-pane view, the Object Navigator lets you see the folder tree and the contents of a selected folder at the same time and without unnecessary juggling of multiple windows. In Object Desktop 2.0 it also includes a built-in instant viewer that harnesses the Object Viewers that also come with the suite - supporting well over a hundred popular document and image formats.

Archive Objects

This is also a feature worth buying Object Desktop for, as they are the best method of dealing with Zip files that we've come across for OS/2. The idea is simple: If archive file formats such as .ZIP, .ZOO, .ARC, ,LZH, .RAR and so-on are basically collections of files in a named group - just like folders on your desktop are - then why not treat them as if they were just folders on your desktop? With Archive Objects you can, and Object Desktop has this feature down pat. Double click on the icon for a .ZIP file, for example, and it'll open just like a folder, display icons for the internal files just like a folder, and let you manipulate them just like another folder. Big plus for usability with only a few shortcomings.

Enhanced Folders

Replacing all of the standard folders on your desktop, Object Desktop's Enhanced Folders will add a status bar and a number of cosmetic enhancements. In version 2.0, even more visible improvements have been added in the form of a toolbar that emulates a little what can be seen in Windows 98. This toolbar will be most familiar to users of Object Desktop 1.5 and earlier as the one from the Object Navigator.

Enhanced Text File

When OS/2 can't figure out the type of a file it defaults to opening it with the OS/2 System Editor. Object Desktop replaces this default and also forces its addition to the "Open" menu of any file - even if the file type is known (but not overriding the default in these cases, however). The Object Desktop text editor isn't much different from the OS/2 System Editor except for a few useful changes.

Object Packages

These are a relief to those annoyed with the fact that you can't "zip up" an OS/2 program object, or any other abstract object on the desktop such as shadows and WPS integrated utilities that register special classes. This not only makes them notoriously difficult to back up, but also even harder to transfer them to a new desktop on another machine or re-installation. Object Packages solve this. They can record everything from the icon, position, class and all other relevant details, data and configuration of desktop objects that don't normally show up in a command line "DIR" listing, plus they can record as little or as much as you like. One icon, one folder, or the whole desktop. If that wasn't enough, they can automatically generate a Rexx script that restores the objects on systems that don't have Object Desktop installed.

Object Security

Originally added in Object Desktop Professional and now part of OD 2.0, Object Security is maybe better known as Workplace Security - a product that was and still is available separately. Stardock licensed the code and made it part of Object Desktop, with inevitable compatibility so complete that objects locked with Workplace Security will be unlockable with the same passwords under Object Desktop. While it may appeal mostly to corporations and apprehensive family members on a shared computer, Object Security's strength only goes as far as the desktop itself. Anyone with access to the command line of your computer can still read files and open folders without the passwords.

Object Advisor

Many power users will brush Object Advisors off, and for a large number of the rest of us, probably won't be affected by or find them useful at all. But they are a boon to training and one more good reason to put OS/2 to use in kiosk systems and desktops where users must be able to learn how to use something new in a short time. What the Object Advisor does is similar to the Warp Guide, or the yellow "helpers" that pop up on a fresh Warp 4 installation and tell you what various controls mean. Object Advisors watch where you click, and if a help text has been written for the object in question (in HTML, naturally) then a little unobtrusive window will pop up and show you what it knows about it, disappearing when you click on something else. Like the WarpGuide, they're annoying to those who know what they're doing, but perhaps invaluable to those who don't.

Object Advisors, while coming with help texts for most of the standard Warp desktop objects, are really meant to have the bulk of their content written by you, and have them be seen by others.

Cosmetic Enhancements

We couldn't possibly skip mentioning what Object Desktop does for vanity. A respectable number of entries for our Screenshot Contest so far have included at least some hint of Object Desktop's influence in the titlebars, window frame controls (the usual minimize, maximize, close buttons etc.), or scrollbar controls. With 2.0, the beatification has been extended with multiple themes to choose from (you can make your system resemble Windows 95, if you're desperate to, or the Mac )

Now it's on to the in-depth reviews. We've split them up into the five major categories that Object Desktop addresses in the Workplace Shell environment. These are:


* Launching and Switching
* Archiving and Packaging
* Virtual Desktops
* System Stats and Monitoring
* File Management


At the end we'll have a summary and our final conclusions.
 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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

Launching and Switching		-Sam Henwrich

Summary: One of the most common ways that utilities enhance the workplace shell is to add a new kind of program launching or task switching mechanism. Object Desktop has some good ones, but how do they stack up to the others that are available?

Object Desktop has no less than three modules that perform the basic job of launching programs and switching between them. These are: the Control Center, the Tabbed Launchpad, and the Keyboard Launchpad.

To cover a little background on the basics, the Workplace Shell's default behavior when an object is "opened" (by double clicking, or picking 'open' from its context menu, or by any of the means which Object Desktop and other WPS integrated utilities support) is to launch the application or window if it isn't already open or running, and to switch to it if it is already running.

Control Center

In OD's Control Center the main way of launching programs is to use the flyout menus that work in a style very similar to the WarpCenter that comes with Warp 4. You can create one just like with the Warp Center too, by drag-n-dropping a folder into the panel. While you can navigate through cascading menus that list the contents of folders, you can also right-click on any list item to get a full context menu, or drag-n-drop something out of the menu too - making it pretty handy for, say, keeping close access to your Templates folder.

For task switching, Object Desktop 2.0 has added a special Task list menu to the Control Center.

But there's one problem with the cascading menu system, a bug that we've observed in Object Desktop since 1.5 and which we call the "Name..." problem. It's the case where instead of displaying a folder's contents, Object Desktop will simply present a single menu option called "Name...". Click on this and you get a useless dialog box that asks for something - but what it wants neither the dialog box nor the documentation will say. This problem seems to occur, if it occurs, always at the second level of any cascading tree. You can usually work around it by taking the long route, so if it refuses to display the contents of your hard drive when you go through the "Drives" menu, it should work if you try going first through "OS/2 System" and then to "Drives" instead. Silly, but Stardock did not seem to be aware of this problem until we told them about it.

Some other benefits of the Control Center that naturally affect all of its other functions, not just the launching and switching, are the way it can not only anchor itself to any edge of your screen but also optionally force other windows to stay out of its space. Calling the feature "Reduce desktop size to position" it makes it seem as if the desktop is now shorter or narrower by the width of the Control Center - which now occupies its own involotile edge of the screen. Nothing can overlap it, nothing can underlap it. We found that it was more convenient than a float-on-top feature that can start a "priority war" with other programs that have the same feature.

Tab Launchpad

Another visual way to launch and switch applications is with Object Desktop's Tab Launchpad, which was designed to replace the Launchpad that came with Warp 3, later de-emphasized in favor of the WarpCenter in 4.0. As well as displaying a palette of buttons to launch applications with, it also has a row of tabs that divide the palette up into groups of programs. You can have one tab for utilities and another for multimedia applications, for example. But one special tab that's optionally present is a palette of currently running tasks. With this, you can switch to a new window just by clicking on its icon.

In the shareware and freeware fields of the various OS/2 internet archives there are an uncountable number of programs that perform basic "button palette" services for launching and switching programs.

Keyboard Launchpad

An unsung hero, a box of hidden treasure, Keyboard Launchpad is humble yet amazingly useful. What it does sounds ordinary enough, but you'd be surprised at just how much it can add to your productivity if you'd only try it. Keyboard Launchpad simply opens any object (a program, or folder, or some other object) whenever you press a keyboard shortcut that you've assigned to it. You can be anywhere when you press the shortcut (except in a fullscreen session) and Keyboard Launchpad will notice it - making it not just an excellent way of launching programs, but also of switching to them.

Imagine you're in your web browser and you need to switch to your mail client - you press Control-Shift-M and instantly you switch to mail. Why? Because you assigned the mail client's icon to Control-Shift-M in the Keyboard Launchpad. Now say you need to switch to your spreadsheet - you preess Alt-Shift-S and instantly you're there. If you make yourself use that method of switching between applications for just five minutes, I guarantee you'll get hooked on it. It makes an even bigger impression when you use it in conjunction with Control Center's virtual desktops, as described elsewhere in this issue.

Keyboard Launchpad is valuable not just because it lets you use the keyboard to start and switch to applications, but because it also takes up zero screen estate. Control center is nice, but it takes up space. Tab Launchpad is nice, but it tends to take up even more space despite its tabs. Keyboard Launchpad... well, you only see it when you need to configure it. Then you forget about it.

We found two comparable shareware programs that are similar to the Keyboard Launchpad. One is Keyboard Plus, able to do almost everything Object Desktop can do, but without much task-switching prowess. We were able to make it start programs, but it had trouble switching to anything other than a folder object. Keyboard Plus is more powerful elsewhere, as it can be used to insert the date and time, plus the output of any command-line program at the current cursor position of any editor.

The second comparable program we found is MKey, which lets you add programs to its list by drag-n-drop, just like Keyboard Lanuchpad does and Keyboard Plus doesn't. But MKey also had the same difficulty that Keyboard Plus did when it came to switching tasks. Otherwise it could launch programs by keyboard shortcut just fine.

Task Manager

Task Manager is the most obvious task switching module in Object Desktop. Despite being a plug-in replacement for the Window List built into OS/2, responding to a press of Control-Escape or a chord click with the mouse on the desktop, it also manages to squeeze a basic command-line program launcher in a small entry box near the bottom.

Task Manager makes the standard Window List look more visually appealing, with buttons to perform the common actions of tiling, cascading and closing, plus a window list that includes the icons. Object Desktop's Task Manager can be configured to arrange tasks in a flowed style rather than straight-vertical, it can also use either small or large icons to represent tasks.

Task Manager's useful functional addition is a filter. If you have background running programs such as a web daemon or a SQL server or some such that you don't want or need showing up in the window list then you can have Object Desktop filter them out. All other task-listing components of Object Desktop, such as the Tasks button in the Control Center or the Tasks tab in the Tabbed Launchpad will obey the filters you set here - shortening your list to a more visually manageable state.

Competitors

One program that has the most feature overlap with Object Desktop's Control Center, Tab Launchpad and Keyboard Launchpad is Program Commander/2. While not quite resembling either, it does cover many of the same functions. Instead of the Control Center's flyout menus that draw automatically from your Desktop's folders it has a popup menu system that you must configure manually. For task switching, it has a simple task bar with a built-in clock that resembles that of Windows 95. It also has a virtual desktop like the one found in the Control Center, but we'll discuss that a little bit later on with the other virtual desktops.

Program Commander/2 includes hotkey support similar to what you'll find in the Keyboard Launchpad, but we were unable to test in time for this review.

                         - * -

Keyboard Plus 1.1
by John Fairhurst
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/util/wps/kbdplus.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (440K)
Registration: Freeware


MKey 1.10
by Roger Sennert
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/util/wps/mkey110.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (333K)
Registration: Freeware


Program Commander/2 2.0
by (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/7885) Roman Stangl
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/util/wps/pc2v200.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (1M)
Registration: Freeware

 
(henwrich@yahoo.com) Sam Henwrich is a long-time OS/2 user in Endicott, NY

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

Archiving and Packaging		-Chris Wenham

Summary: The common Zip file is both a convenience and a pain. Convenient for its compression and easy way of packaging files, but a pain to manage. There's also the issue of doing for Workplace Shell objects what Zip does for regular files. Object Desktop has an answer to both problems.

As far as handling the common archive formats such as ZIP, RAR, .ARC and .LZH, Object Desktop has the job down pat. It also rules supreme for the job of backing up collections of desktop objects for restoration later to the same, or a different machine. For backing up your desktop, it's not bad, but doesn't save as much configuration information as Warp's Archive feature or other dedicated backup programs do.

In version 2.0, Stardock has left out one set of components that used to be in the earlier Object Desktop Professional, namely the Object Backup. Stardock tells us these were dropped because of licensing issues (the code wasn't their own). Object Scheduler was also dropped since it was part of the backup code covered under the dropped license. You should be able to "carry over" these modules by installing Object Desktop 2.0 over OD Professional 1.5, but we have not tested this configuration.

Archive Objects

Object Desktop's Archive Objects are, to put it simply, the best method of dealing with .ZIP files and all other archive formats that we've ever come across. The argument can be made that it doesn't have a lot of the finer functionality that programs such as WarpZip have, but we think its sheer elegance balances all of those issues out. It's philosophy is simply to help the Workplace Shell understand how to read and write to the various archive formats, all other functions such as drag 'n drop, copying and moving and renaming files are then handled by the WPS and whatever other enhancements you also have installed.

That isn't quite all of it, however. Right click on an archive file and you have a couple of extra options in its menu; "Extract- to-folder", and "Auto-extract". Expand-to-folder produces a dialog identical to what you've probably already seen for the "Move" and "Copy" menu options, giving you the flexibility of choosing a folder that's already open, or an unopened one on your hard drive somewhere. Auto-extract is the easiest to use, as it automatically creates a new folder with the name of the Archive (sans extension) and extracts everything into it.

The Archive Objects are also hooked into the way OS/2 treats drag 'n drop of archive files. If you use drag 'n drop to copy an archive file to another folder, Object Desktop will offer to unpack the contents of the archive into it instead of doing a straight copy. This may or may not be convenience, as there is no way to switch off the "Yes/No" dialog and have it default to a particular action. There's also no way to switch off the "Do you wish to open the folder I just extracted to?" dialog that comes after every such extraction.

The only catch with Object Desktop's almost flawless treatment of archives as folders comes when you try to run an executable program from within one. While this is certainly possible for completely standalone programs, it isn't if the program needs a .DLL or some other file that's also within the archive. Object Desktop cannot tell when a program needs to read something from within the archive, and therefore cannot unpack such supplementary files on the fly. You have to completely unpack the archive and run the program from the new directory.

Front ends to ZIP file manipulation isn't anything new, however. There have been a number of managers for OS/2 that do the job graphically, although never treating the archives as if they were folders. WarpZip from PillarSoft is a recent one that's shaping up to be a very good option. It's visually appealing, with easy access buttons to common functions, built-in viewers for several file types and the ability to look into nested Zip files. It does not seem to have the ability to manage other archive types, however.

Second to WarpZip is Zip Control, a program with similar functionality but a more awkward user interface.

Object Packages

If you've ever dropped to a command prompt and navigated by hand to, say the "System Setup" folder of your /DESKTOP directory and summoned a "DIR" listing then you'll know there isn't much to see, despite what the graphical folder and icons may say. That's because the System Setup and other folders are chock full of abstract objects, or objects that exist only from the Workplace Shell's point of view and not that of the filesystem's. The object's existence and its settings are all kept in the OS2.INI and OS2SYS.INI files - which also annoyingly have an intimate relationship with the extended attributes and directory structures of your hard drive. It's not as if you can expect to recover your whole desktop by backing up just these two files. It's also impractical to try and merge the contents of an old set of .INI files, or someone else's.

So Object Packages do for abstract desktop objects what InfoZIP does for directories full of files; it archives them into a single, real file that you can copy onto a floppy disk or transfer over the internet. Archive your entire desktop to have an instant backup, or only whatever objects you drag 'n drop into the package. Some uses include giving a friend a pre-configured Program Object that runs a DOS game or application with all the correct memory and process settings, or having all of your company desktops standardize on one layout and icon arrangement (for it stores and can restore icon positions on the desktop and in folders too).

Keeping in mind that not everyone you may want to give a package to has Object Desktop installed, the Object Packages you make can generate a clone of themselves implemented as either a Rexx program (that, when run, restores the stored objects) or as an .RC file. In addition, for those who wish to restore an archived desktop without re-installing Object Desktop to get its folder and classes re-registered (Object Desktop is one big collection of abstract objects itself), there is a standalone program called OBJINST.EXE in the OBJDESK install directory that can read a package file and restore its contents -- re-registering all necessary classes, backgrounds, icon positions and more.

We experienced two problems with Object Packages, however. The first is that the restore process can sometimes get stuck and cause the whole desktop to freeze from which only a reboot or a process killer can save you from. This happens rarely, and in our experience only when we had a very large number of objects to restore (1000+). The second is that it may not always restore everything you think it does. Take the Keyboard Launchpad as an example: This utility in the Object Desktop suite can be a highly useful one that users choose to configure heavily. That sensitive configuration, consisting of possibly dozens of keyboard shortcuts, would be quite unpleasant to lose and re-construct. A backup solution might be to store it in an Object Package. But as we found out in our tests, while the Object Package seems to store the contents of the Keyboard Launchpad (you can see program information in the Package display), it doesn't restore that information into a working Keyboard Launchpad again.

Its competition comes mostly from products such as INIMaint, DeskMan/2 and the Gammatech Utilities, which all have facilities for backing up your desktop. DeskMan/2 from DevTech advertises the ability to archive and restore individual desktop objects, but without a copy currently on hand, we were unable to compare it to Object Desktop.

                         - * -

WarpZip 2.0
by (http://fm-net.com/pillarsoft/) PillarSoft
download from (ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/util/archiver/warpzip.zip) the Hobbes archive (800K)
Registration: $29


DeskMan/2 2.0
by (http://www.devtech.com/) DevTech
MSRP: $99.95

 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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

Virtual Desktops		-Sam Henwrich

Summary: Increase your available work space by simulating the effect of multiple computer monitors. Virtual desktop managers give you this with just one catch: You can only look at one "screen" at a time.

A virtual desktop manager is a way of pretending you have more than one computer monitor, the catch being that you can only look at one at a time. The desktop is replicated across 2 or more virtual monitors, each one capable of holding its own separate group of visible windows. They all share the same task list (programs and windows a desktop are aware of those open in other desktops), and minimize to the same "netherworld" to be restored to any other desktop. They're useful because you can cut out the cluttering effect of having multiple windows open at the same time, you can get to a "bare" desktop and access its icons quickly, and you don't have to muck about with moving windows out of the way so you can see or use the desktop under them. In fact, you can get used to running all of your programs maximized all of the time.

The best virtual desktops will either "dock" to the side of the screen and enforce their boundaries by refusing to let other windows overlap or underlap them, or rise to the top at a keyboard command or mouse movement - such as bumping the edge of the screen that it's closest to. The mechanics of how they work underneath seem to be a mix of pretending the screen resolution is X times wider or taller than it really is (where X is the number of desktops you want), and juggling windows by moving them off the edge of the screen and back on again as you switch "desktops". Get used to how they work, and you may never go back to the old task switching days. Run your browser 100% of the time in desktop #1, your mail client in desktop #2, PIM in desktop #3, and miscellaneous work in #4. If it's a busy day, you may spin up to 10 or more desktops, and shepherd windows into neat groups.

If it helps to convey the idea behind virtual desktops better, think of how many mouse clicks it would take to minimize every visible window on your screen before opening another one or more windows from an icon or the Window List. Now think of all those clicks reduced to just one and you start to get the picture. Virtual desktops are a convenience, a way to manage clutter.

Object Desktop's Control Center has an excellent virtual desktop manager built into it, and in version 2.0 it comes with some powerful new features. Unfortunately it's also broken in this version, more on that later.

Features

First of all, Object Desktop supports the creation of an array with up to 16 virtual desktops - a huge potential workspace. If you had a Power User's quota of RAM you could comfortably run your mail client, browser, PIM, word processor, spreadsheet and other "regular use" applications maximized in their own desktops. One click and they're visible. Another click and they're gone to be replaced with something else.

Like all good virtual desktop managers, Object Desktop lets you mark windows to be "sticky" - or which aren't affected by changing to other desktops. If you have a clock program or a button palette that you want to follow you from desktop to desktop, just type the name that appears in its titlebar when run, or pick from the list of already open windows. Now your volume control, CD player or whatever will stay put even though other non-marked windows get shuffled away during desktop switches.

The logical opposite of this feature, and one only recently added to version 2.0, is the layout manager. This is a feature that snaps windows to pre-allocated spaces in the desktop array. If you want your mail client to always open in virtual desktop #1, even if you're currently working in desktop #3 when you click on its icon, Object Desktop will snap it away to desktop #1 the moment it starts painting a window. To create a layout, just position your windows the way you like them across the desktop array, then choose "Record Layout" from the Control Center's pop-up menu. You'll be asked to give the layout a name (yes, you can keep and switch to multiple layouts), then the window positions will be marked in the Virtual Desktop display by a blue border. Any window or program that isn't open or running, but has a configured space in the layout, will be marked by a gray box and its title.

Since the feature uses the text of a window's title to match it with what it has recorded in its layout, it can miss windows that change their titles. Word processors that put the name of the current document, web browsers that do the same, they all could be problems and Object Desktop doesn't let you edit and fine-tune the recognition strings the way its "sticky windows" manager does. There is an "Update layout" feature that compares the current layout with what it has recorded, and makes any changes to its configuration that it thinks is necessary. So when you first record a layout, close your word processor's open documents and set your browser to its home page, then Object Desktop will get it right the first time.

Object Desktop can be configured to treat activated windows in any way you please. If a window becomes active in a desktop other than the one you're using (either because you "ALT-Tabbed" to it, or picked it from a window list) then the virtual desktop's behavior can be configured to either ignore the focus change, retrieve the activated window to your current desktop, or jump to the desktop that the activated window is in.

Problems

But the awful tragedy with this new version of Object Desktop 2.0, and the one that I - a heavy Virtual Desktop user - consider to be the biggest show-stopper of the whole suite, is that the virtual desktops are broken.

During periods of high CPU activity, be it brief or extended, Object Desktop can lose track of where the windows are on its virtual desktop array when you try to switch them, suggesting that perhaps Stardock's code has some timing sensitive algorithms in it. The problem can manifest itself in several ways:

Assuming you have a 10 desktop array, jumping from desktop 1 to desktop 5 might instead keep you on desktop 1 and pull everything down by 4 desktops full - like tugging on a table cloth. Anything from desktop 4 and below are "lost" into a state of limbo - rescuable only by using the "Retrieve Windows" command (which pulls everything into the current desktop, instead of just the affected windows), or by selecting them from the Window List and waiting for Object Desktop to realize they're lost and offer to retrieve them.

Another similar manifestation of the bug is if you, say for example, jump from desktop 5 to desktop 1. You'll arrive at desktop 1, but with the same contents of desktop 5. Object Desktop will have "pushed" everything from 4 downwards into oblivion and pulled down everything after #5 down the same number of desktops too.

This behavior is, to put it mildly, a very big pain in the butt and make the virtual desktops nearly useless. If your browser hits an awkward page, or a word processor decides to do a timed save, or OS/2 decides to flush its cache to the drive, you might find yourself with a normal and momentary burst of high system activity coinciding with the instant you innocently click on the Control Center to change desktops. But it's these moments of high CPU activity that foul up Object Desktop and makes it lose track of what it's doing - manifesting the bugs described above. If you've ever noticed your hard drive spend a half second of activity just as you try to switch from one program to another (perhaps to pull something it needs out of the swap file), then this bug can affect you. To put it into perspective, our test system has a 225mhz chip and 96 megs of SDRAM and the bug affects it frequently. From monitoring the Object Desktop 2.0 mailing list we've seen that it is affecting others too.

What's worse, Stardock does not seem to have a grip on it yet. A couple of weeks before we began finalizing this review they sent us the beta of a fix kit that replaced a few of Object Desktop's files and promised to repair that specific bug. It didn't. And dropping back to Object Desktop 1.5 we were able to confirm that this is a new bug found in 2.0 alone.

The Competition

Two good stand-alone virtual desktop managers available as freeware or shareware are Page Mage and 9Lives. Page Mage lacks a layout manager, unlike 9Lives which    has we think might have been what Object Desktop's feature was inspired from, but it has many other options that it doesn't share with the other two - such as the ability to change desktops by "bumping" the edges of the screen with your mouse.

9Lives has puzzled us for the moment, as we've been unable to get it working on our test machine in time for the review. This is a program we've used in the past with good results, however.

Program Commander/2 (or "PC/2" as it's sometimes called) is a multi-function Workplace Shell companion (and replacement, if you have a RAM constrained system or just don't like the Workplace Shell) that has a good virtual desktop as part of its outfit. While it's definitely not as good looking as Object Desktop, nor is it integrated into an overall panel like Object Desktop is with the Control Center, it does have the ability to not only expand the Workplace Shell to gigantic proportions (so you can have different icons on each desktop and a background that's wider than your screen resolution) but also adds an extra titlebar button to every window which "nudges" them over to neighboring desktops with a single click.

                         - * -

Page Mage 0.36 beta
by Carlos Ugarte
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/util/wps/pgmg036.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (60K)
Registration: Freeware


9Lives 1.21
by Ross Judson
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/util/wps/9live121.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (70K)
Registration: $18

 
(henwrich@yahoo.com) Sam Henwrich is a long-time OS/2 user in Endicott, NY

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

System Stats and Monitoring		-Sam Henwrich

Summary: Keep an eye on your available system resources for an idea on how much longer your laptop battery can last, how many applications you can risk opening before things get too slow, and whether or not you have enough room on your hard drive for that big free office suite.

All of Object Desktop's system statistics displays come as part of its most versatile module: the Control Center. You've already seen how it can be used to launch and switch tasks and manage an array of virtual desktops. Well the Control Center can also say a lot about your system's vital signs too, for it's chock full of displays and meters.

Drive Space

The most common status display is the drive space monitor, usually a bar graph that gives you a visual hint at what percentage of your drive is in use. Object Desktop's displays give not just the bar graph, but also a reading on how many megabytes (or kilobytes) remain free on each particular drive that you want it to monitor. In addition to just plain hard drive space, Object Desktop also includes a swap file monitor that keeps an eye on your SWAPPER.DAT file - a big chunk of virtual memory that OS/2 uses whenever physical RAM is not sufficient to hold everything it needs. Since the swap file can grow and shrink dynamically, it's handy to know how big it currently is not just for performance tuning (you may want to modify its default size if it's always growing too big), but also to see if you can risk opening another big program.

These read-outs, with the exception of the swap file monitor, are also functional beyond just a display purpose: click on them and Object Desktop will open an Object Navigator view for the drive being monitored.

Memory and CPU

Since there's a difference between available physical memory (how much of your installed RAM is in use) and available virtual memory (the free space on the drive with your SWAPPER.DAT file), it's handy to have an idea of how much of the real physical stuff you've got left. Just because you have 100 megabytes of free virtual memory left does not necessarily mean it's practical to launch another 100 megabytes worth of programs and files. Physical RAM is always needed whenever you're actually working on the program or file, and waiting for a hard drive to deliver megabytes of data as you switch between running programs can be a pain. Therefore, Object Desktop provides a meter that measures available Physical memory that doesn't include virtual memory.

CPU activity is also displayed in a graph very similar to the one you'll find in the WarpCenter or Pulse utilities that come with Warp. Object Desktop's display is configurable for update speed and how much history is displayed at a time. It also shows the current load in text as a percentage. Object Desktop's CPU monitor uses a loop running on an idle thread to guage cpu activity, meaning that DOS and WinOS/2 programs will make it think there is a 100% CPU load all the time.

Network activity

The big and exciting addition to the Control Center's repartee of displays in version 2.0 is the Object NetScan, a realtime display of your TCP/IP stack's use with a graph that visually shows you the bumps and flats of various upload/download activity and a wide set of textual information.

Object NetScan's graph is a four-part display compressed into one. Transmitted data is shown in cyan extending from the midline downwards, while received data is shown in yellow extending from the midline upwards. There's also two LED-style dots that light up whenever data is coming in or going out, although not quite as rapidly and accurately as a real set of external modem lights could.

The text displays will tell you everything from the current number of bytes going in or out to the averages, the peaks and the totals. You can select whatever statistics you want, and on top of that, you can optionally have Object Desktop automatically scroll them periodically to help fit everything into a small space. The only disappointment was that Object Desktop could only display these statistics in a vertically stacked list underneath the graph, which doesn't help if you like to arrange your Control Center palette in a horizontal configuration.

Object NetScan will work for dial-up networking, regardless of what dialer program you use (DIOP, ILink/2, InJoy etc.), plus it includes the ability to configure it for more than one interface. So if you use a LAN, it can monitor TCP/IP traffic through that as well.

To compare with this is NifMon and IPSpeed, two freeware utilities that can also be configured to monitor any TCP/IP interface. NifMon is the simplest and only displays text statistics, but IPSpeed displays a graph as well.

Other Competitors

A highly worthy alternative to Object Desktop for system monitoring, including hard drive space, is PMPatrol, probably the best in its class for the job it does. PMPatrol puts an ultra-thin information strip at the bottom of your screen, showing everything from CPU usage, free physical memory, virtual memory, hard drive space, network activity and more. It also has some highly advanced graphs and displays - more than enough to satisfy even the most ravenous statistics freak. It's not as pretty as Object Desktop; in fact it's very industrial looking, but it beats Object Desktop for sheer breadth of system information covered and space efficiency of its display.

A more lightweight and better looking utility is WarpBar: able to display the same basic statistics that Object Desktop can, but also offering a POP e-mail checker to let you know when you've received new mail.

                         - * -

NifMon
by John R Clark
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/apps/internet/util/nifmon.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (35K)
Registration: Freeware


IPSpeed 1.02
by <a href=") Michael Bock
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/apps/internet/util/ipspeed4.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (50K)
Registration: Freeware


PM Patrol 4.3
by WallyWare
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/util/system/pmp43.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (682K)
Registration: $29

 
(henwrich@yahoo.com) Sam Henwrich is a long-time OS/2 user in Endicott, NY

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

File Management		-Chris Wenham

Summary: It's boring, but it's basic. The job of managing files has been challenged by scores of programs that think they can do it better than OS/2's usual Workplace Shell arrangement of folders and icons. Object Desktop includes a file manager,and a folder enhancement, but is it anything to write home about?

So you're sick, sorry and tired of futzing around with drive objects and smatterings of windows everywhere just to do some basic copying and moving of files? Wish there was something that simply combined the tree view with the details view in one window? That's what Object Navigator is.

Object Navigator

Resembling the Windows 95 file manager a great deal, Object Navigator is a versatile improvement on the "Drives" object that comes with OS/2. One pane holds a tree view of any and all of your installed drives (scroll down through C:, D:, E: and so-on in the same list) while the other pane shows a detail view of whatever the currently selected directory or folder is.

Across the top of the Object Navigator is a toolbar that provides one-click access to common functions such as moving, copying and deleting files. Two of the most useful are actually the create-folder and create-another buttons. The first creates a new directory, prompting you for its name the second you click on the button, and the second creates a new object based on the class of the one currently selected. Highlight a ZIP file, for example, and this button will create another empty zip file ready for use.

For those who jump to the same directory frequently, Object Navigator now has a "bookmark" feature in 2.0 that replaces the "Favorite directory" feature found in earlier versions. The drop-down list that used to be the "Favorite directory" of past now holds the parent structure of whatever the current directory is, as well as a few common system folders like "Desktop", "System Setup", and "Printers". It does not store a history of where you've been before, however, which disappointed us. It's not much more than a condensed and redundant version of what you see in the tree pane anyway.

Possibly the most advanced feature of the Object Navigator is the integration with the Object Viewers that come as part of the Object Desktop suite. Normally the Object Viewers - a set of libraries that can read over a hundred different file formats including almost every imaginable image format, the majority of word processor and spreadsheet formats etc. - are launched only by selecting the option from a right-click over the file in question. But with the Object Navigator, clicking on a button opens a third pane at the bottom of the window with an instant display of the currently selected file. This display changes rapidly as you double-click on other files. In fact, we found the performance of the integrated Object Viewers to be very fast indeed.

The only disappointment with the Object Viewers is that, number one, the company developing them has ceased support for OS/2. Stardock merely licenses this code and does not appear to have the power to swing the third party's decision, or to even take over development on their own. Second is that these viewers do not contain support for reading the latest Microsoft Office formats. Although Stardock claims that the Object Viewers have been updated, they could not provide us with a list of which ones.

To go up against Object Navigator we found that File Manager/2 from BareBones software and FileStar/2 from SofTouch are excellent choices. Both offer similar, if not a bit more cluttered displays to Object Navigator, as well as a considerable degree of more functionality. Users may prefer the interface of FileStar/2 over Object Navigator's too, as it has two separate sets of directory trees and folder views that can be tiled neatly and intelligently within the name window. Neither have anywhere near the file viewing prowess of Object Navigator though.

Enhanced Folders

Complimenting Object Navigator are the Enhanced Folders. Their first incarnation added a status bar to display folder and file size statistics as well as some cosmetic improvements (optional extruded or sunken borders for icons and titles), but in version 2.0 they now add a toolbar that's almost identical to the one found in the Object Navigator. The same bookmark feature is there, which is useful, but so is the parent-history list - which we're a little dubious of. I'm not quite sure everyone needs two-click access to the System Setup panel from every folder on their desktop. We think a navigation history like the one found in web browsers would be much more useful.

And speaking of which, that's related to the hidden function in the Parent-history list that's a part of every Enhanced Folder's toolbar. If you set the cursor to the box's interior and start typing a web page URL or pathname to a folder or file on your hard drive, Object Desktop will whisk you away to it instantly. In the case of a URL it will start a web browser, in the case of a pathname it will jump to that folder or launch that file with its default program association.

All of these enhancements are optional and can be switched off on a per-folder basis, but we noticed an annoying problem that we complained about in our First Looks a few months ago, but which Stardock ignored: The new toolbar adds to how tall a folder window must be to display the same contents, but Object Desktop doesn't bother to adjust a folder's default height to accommodate. When you open a folder for the first time, say one that's just been created by an application's install program, the toolbar pushes the first row of icons down so their titles are clipped off by the bottom of the window. It's no problem to re-size the window manually, but we wish that if the toolbar is Y pixels high then the default folder size should be extended by Y pixels too.

To compare with this is the freeware and now open-source WPS folder enhancement called XFolder. XFolder is a formidable alternative to Object Desktop's Enhanced Folders, with better status bars but no toolbar. It does have highly flexible and powerful system of enhancing the context menus of any folder though, a feature that Object Desktop lacks. We've found that XFolder can co-exist with Object Desktop, complimenting its features in many ways without too much feature overlap. It's open source nature does suggest that it holds the potential to seriously overtake Object Desktop in this area though, so keep an eye on it.

Enhanced Text Files

Not quite a file management enhancement, but having a side effect that benefits it, is the Enhanced Text File. This is meant to be a replacement for the OS/2 System Editor (e.exe) and as such has similar minimal functionality, so similar in fact that it's barely worth discussing any of the differences except one: While the System Editor is a standalone program (an .EXE), Object Desktop's Enhanced Text File is a Workplace Shell class. Not seeing it yet? Okay, try this: Open a folder with a text file in it and open that file in the System Editor. Now while the OS/2 System Editor is still open and has that file loaded, try and temporarily move that file or directory elsewhere on your hard drive. OS/2 will refuse and tell you it couldn't move the file because it's in use by another program, namely the System Editor. With Object Desktop and the Enhanced Text File editor you can move that directory and text file and the text editor window will keep up with the move. You'll see the change in the titlebar of the text editor happen instantly too as it reflects the change in folder path or name of the file (you can rename the file while it's still editing it).

That's what makes Object Desktop's Enhanced Text File class worth installing. Its other main use is that it's always available as an "Open" option for any data file on your hard drive. While OS/2 will launch a file in the System Editor if it doesn't recognize the type, OS/2 will also remove it from the list of "Open" menu options if it does recognize the type as anything other than a text file. But Object Desktop's "Text View" (the name you see the Enhanced Text File editor go by) is persistent. It could be an image file or a database file, and you could still take a peek and edit it as raw text. What's more, Object Desktop doesn't complain if the file contains "nulls" - it just opens the file.

Shareware alternatives include such programs as SmallEd and the "Enhanced E" editors from PillarSoft, but no other editor that we know of is implemented as a Workplace Shell class or can cope with having the original file moved or renamed under its nose as easily and transparently as Object Desktop's does. Nor can they as easily be made an omnipresent option for both associated and unassociated files alike.

                         - * -

FileStar/2 2.0
by <a href=") SofTouch Systems
download from (ftp://ftp.softouch.com/pub/users/softouch/v20demo1.zip) SofTouch (1M)
Registration: $40


File Manager/2 2.67
by Barebones Software
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/util/browser/fm2_267.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (1.1M)
Registration: $40


XFolder 0.83 beta
by (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444vnd/frames/xfldr.htm) Ulrich M&ouml;ller
download from (ftp://proscenium.org/pub/xfolder/xfld083.zip) XFolder homepage (697K)
Registration: Free/Open-source


Smalled 2.0
by (http://www.bmtmicro.com/catalog/smalled/) Bianchi Software
download from (http://www.os2ss.com/archives/hobbes/os2/apps/editors/smled200.zip) The OS/2 Supersite (612K)
Registration: $18


Enhanced E 1.05
by (http://fm-net.com/pillarsoft) PillarSoft
download from (http://fm-net.com/pillarsoft/pub/enh_e105.zip) PillarSoft homepage (365K)
Registration: Free

 
(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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

Object Desktop 2.0: Conclusions		-Chris Wenham

Summary: Now that you've seen what Object Desktop does and what's new in 2.0, is it really worth upgrading to?

In almost every respect, Object Desktop 2.0 is a fantastic upgrade. It has surely granted many wishes from owners of the old versions, covering everything from the layouts in the virtual desktops to the network monitor. Cosmetically, Object Desktop has outdone itself with new themes that emulate the looks of the Mac, Openstep and other platforms known for their good looks; perhaps you've noticed some of them being used by contestants in our Screenshot Contest.

Stardock has also claimed that they've improved the stability of Object Desktop with modifications to its internal architecture, something we weren't able to verify for ourselves since it appeared about as stable as Object Desktop Professional was. It doesn't look like the memory footprint has been reduced though, so we still only advise the full suite for those with 32 megs or more. Those with less RAM should leave out modules they think they won't need during installation, such as the Task Manager, Object Security and the Object Advisors.

The question that remains is: Is it worth getting Object Desktop, or should you try getting the equivalent functionality with various shareware and freeware programs. Our opinion is that you should just go ahead and get OD. It's integrated together into one package at one price (as opposed to registering half a dozen shareware programs), the components are highly modular and don't have to be installed all at once, the modules themselves are all very well made and usually can't be matched for elegance. That isn't to say they are the most powerful in their class, however -- the dedicated program will often beat it in one way or another. We just think that at the price Object Desktop 2.0 is now selling for, the value balances out in its favor.

There's still one or two glaring issues not to be ignored though. First and foremost is the virtual desktops bug. If you're a heavy user of virtual desktops then our advice is to wait until the first fix-kit from Stardock. The remaining problem is the phantom "Name..." option in the Control Center's flyout menus. We've heard from other users that there's a problem with the installation program and Object Advisors, something we've been unable to verify for ourselves.

                         - * -

Object Desktop 2.0
by (http://www.stardock.com/) Stardock Systems, Inc.
MSRP: $99.95 (upgrade is $69.95)

(editor@os2ezine.com) Chris Wenham is the Editor-In-Chief of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Senior Editor which means he now takes all the blame.

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

Master Of The Empire		-Lief Clennon

Summary: Another in the "Civilization" style of games, this game is has less to keep track of, which has the effect of being a much faster paced ride.

A large and hallowed genre of computer games was created in the '80s by a man named Sid Meier. His game, "Civilizations", was an extension of the classic tabletop war simulation to include city management and technological growth. Since then, the "Civ-style" genre has grown in various directions, including realtime simulation with Blizzard's WarCraft, and deep-space exploration with Stardock's Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. And now entering the arena is this game: Master Of The Empire.

Fast-paced

Unlike most games in the genre, MOTE does not have progressive technology; you start the game knowing everything you're ever going to know, there's no way to research new army types and production methods. This makes for a far more fast-paced game, concentrating on tactical warfare more than on long-term expansion plans. Also, there is no way to create a new city in MOTE: your only hope for expansion is to conquer others.

You begin a game of MOTE with one to five cities, with a few thousand Zubles (the unit of currency) in the coffers of each and one unit of your choice in your capital city. Each of your four computer-controlled opponents will have the same beginning setup as you do (although of course, their cities are in other places). The area of the map around your cities is revealed to you; the rest of it is vague rumors of shorelines and forests that must be explored.

From this point on, it's up to you to control the fate of your empire. Absolute supremacy and total annihilation are your only options.

All of this and some of that: a lesson in cat skinning

There are several types of units available for you to command. Infantry is the heart of your army, able to do a great many useful things that more specialized units cannot accomplish. Tanks are the land-based powerhouses of your military, able to quickly overrun and occupy enemy cities. Various aircraft exist and are the only units which can cross mountains; the troop transport can carry paratroopers along with it, to sack cities naturally fortified by their surroundings.

The various units are each useful enough, but also each sufficiently specialized, that successful playing styles can be developed that emphasize or exclude one or more. For instance, a tank-based offensive is an obvious and fairly efficient tactic; but airborne assault has a significant advantage on rough terrain, and a tremendous army of infantry can be amassed quickly and at little expense. This creates replay value; when you get tired of one method, you can simply try another.

An expensive but useful unit is the spy, which can not only report on a city's defenses, but also has the capability to turn that city to your side with a bribe. Economics play a large part in MOTE, adding a layer of complexity that can't be ignored; units require money and resources to sustain them, and will suffer attrition if their needs are not met. Resources like oil and uranium can be traded on the global market -- but the more factions you're waging outright war with, the fewer resources are available for purchase.

The spoils of war

MOTE's simplicity is its greatest asset: because there are only a handful of things to keep track of compared to other games in the genre, it is easy to learn and easy to play. It harks back to the tabletop war games that are its ancestors, but its <a href="mote-1.gif) icons and buttons (GIF, 90k) are far easier to keep track of than the plastic models and cardboard tokens of old. And, since a game will likely last only an hour or so, it's not nearly as bad a thing to become addicted to as other Civilization-style games, which can sometimes last for days. It can also be played fast-and-loose, both because there is less to keep track of than in other Civ-style games, and also because the time investment is so much less; losing isn't quite as much of a disappointment, especially if you decide to go down in a burst of glory.

All in all, it's a highly enjoyable game. Because of its fast pace, it can be used as an idle distraction, an alternative to Solitaire; but a hardcore gamer won't be at all disappointed.

                         - * -

Master Of The Empire
by (http://www.bmtmicro.com/catalog/mote.html) Trilliun Software Products
MSRP: US$25

 
(liefc@os2ezine.com) Lief Clennon is a computer hobbyist and Team OS/2 member currently residing in Albuquerque, NM. He can usually be found badgering his friends on IRC.

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

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Copyright 1998   -   Falcon Networking
ISSN 1203-5696
