[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!		February 16, 1999		volume 4, number 3
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Copyright 1998	Falcon Networking		ISSN 1203-5696

Reviews:

*StarOffice 5.0:*

Out of Beta and into our nitpicking little hands at last. We scrutinize the cross-platform office suite from Star Division and all its goodies in this extensive review.
* Introduction - Chris Wenham 
* User Interface - Christopher B. Wright 
* Internet Integration - Sam Henwrich 
* Star Office vs. SmartSuite - Chris Wenham 
* Conclusions - Chris Wenham 

* Norton Antivirus 3.03 for OS/2 - Pete Grubbs 

Articles:

* Rumors, Winks, and Brad Wardell - Chris Wenham 
- We decided to have an interview with Stardock Systems President Brad Wardell about these persistent rumors that his company will be publishing a new OS/2 client. Find out what he said and join the debate yourself 

* Logical Arguments for a New Client - Bob St. John 
- As a former IBM employee and now IBM Business Partner, Bob St. John has a clear understanding of why a new OS/2 client would make sense for IBM. 

* Building Dynamic Web Sites, Part V - Chris Wenham 
- Learn how to write macros for PPWizard and use them to implement nifty and time-saving widgets for your web pages. 

Opinions:

* Chris Wenham 
* Chris Wright 

Departments:

* OS/21st 

ADMINISTRIVIA:

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* The Sponsors that Make this Issue Possible


Copyright 1999   -   Falcon Networking
ISSN 1203-5696


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Chris's Rant  - Chris Wenham

Summary: How a couple of simple inventions and smart gathering of data could really kick Microsoft in the pants.

_Knocking The Fat-Cats Upside the Head_

Simple inventions have a habit of triggering huge shifts in power and money. What may look like an ordinary TV remote control, for example, is actually a deadly machine gun to the eyes of the once triopolistic broadcasting networks (ABC, NBC, CBS). Before the remote control, the bulk of entertainment automatically dropped in quality to only what was good enough to stop you getting out of your chair to cross the room. Or then there's the bar-code and scanner. Since companies like Gillette knew when a TV commercial was going to air and send people out shopping, they could force the supermarkets into displaying their razor blades exactly how they liked it, and when they liked it, and how much to re-order. But give the supermarkets the power to gather incredible volumes of data on their shoppers, detailing not only when shoppers bought something, but also what -else- they bought, and that information can be used to hold Gillette to ransom instead.

Looking at these examples can help you understand the economic and power shifts that have occurred in the computer industry. The installation program removed the need for expensive consultants to set up a company's computer software, for example (up until bad programming brought it back). But it can also teach us how to Kill Microsoft.

Lets start analyzing the situation. Microsoft gets on 99% of all computers by pre-loading practices, much like how the broadcast networks get into every TV set through their affiliate stations that dot the country. The remote control - an easy way of changing channels with the twitch of a thumb muscle - killed the chances of the stations getting away with mediocre entertainment. When cable and satellite came and joined the remote control, the smaller stations could now reach a whole continent without the need of affiliates.

Parallels? Boot manager software lets us switch between operating systems very easily, just like the remote control let you change channels. The internet gives small software companies the power to distribute their product to the whole world cheaply, just like cable and satellite did for independent TV stations.

Boot Manager was probably the smartest feature that IBM could have put into OS/2. It was boot manager that gave millions the confidence to try OS/2, knowing it wouldn't be an all-or-nothing deal. If this software didn't exist, or PC hardware didn't allow multiple bootable partitions to exist, then OS/2 wouldn't have existed outside an ATM machine at all. Is it really a surprise that practically every operating system for the PC comes with some kind of utility like Boot Manager? All, that is, except for Windows?

Making it easy to switch between operating systems, easier than what Boot Managers do, is priority number one for anyone who wishes to knock Microsoft upside the head. Invent the equivalent of the remote control for computer operating systems, one that can let you jump from one OS to the other without requiring a shut-down. What we have right now is a bit like a remote control that has to stop the VCR from recording the show you want on channel 2 before you switch to channel 3.

Next, learn from FreeBSD when it comes to installing operating systems. IBM, take note. Make OS/2 freely downloadable and give it a "one floppy" installation program. The idea is this: You download a program that creates a special, bootable floppy disk. That floppy has enough OS/2 to boot, plus a minimal internet dialer and TCP/IP stack. After you've booted from the floppy, you connect to the internet and install the operating system via FTP. It works for FreeBSD so well that it's what got me to try it, and it can work for OS/2. You solve the problem of not being stocked on the retail outlet's shelves and -help- with the lack of pre-loading by making this installation as easy and painless as possible.

The next step -- learning data acquisition tricks from the supermarkets -- is made harder by the fact that Microsoft is already doing pretty good at it. Marketing tricks such as the creation of "Office Suites" (smart bundling) came about because someone was watching what software was being bought by who and when. Not only is Microsoft powerful enough to wrest sales data from the retail stores, they also take thousands of technical support questions per day from people who tell them 1) what they have installed, 2) when they bought it, and 3) what they use it for -- all as a matter of course in a normal tech support call. For Microsoft, it's was easy to see that those who bought a word processor also bought a spreadsheet and database.

It would seem that to compromise Microsoft's monopoly you should go into the third-party technical support business instead of trying to compete with them on the desktop. When Microsoft's best technical advice is to "delete and re-install," you'd think it wouldn't be so hard. Gather all the information about what people are doing with their computers and you've got MS by the throat, since if you sold that information to someone else like Corel or Be, they could make a better office suite or operating system with no trouble. It's just like how the supermarkets could sell their shopper statistics to Bic instead of Gillette.

That kind of technical support takes a lot of resources to supply, however, and it seems as if the one company already doing it -- IBM -- isn't using the data they're collecting.

Or are they?

IBM wants to be a solutions company, one that solves problems rather than ship boxes that create new ones at the same time. They've been suffocating OS/2's destiny, but they've also been taking the destiny of Windows out of Microsoft's hands. IBM ships Apache now, not IIS. It could be that IBM lost the desktop war against Windows, only to dangle Microsoft itself on the end of a string.

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Chris Wright  - Christopher B. Wright

Summary: What was that presentation at Warpstock that made all the programmers mad, and why should we embrace the idea instead? Chris Wright talks about this new way of creating software and how it'll make open-source look like a growing pain.

_A Vision of Software Future_

For those of you wondering, I will be continuing my look at Free Software and Open Source Licenses in about a month. I'm about to move into the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, and that's taking up a lot of my time. (Any North Carolinians out there, feel free to drop me a line!)

In this issue we have an interview with Brad Wardell where he talks about the possibility of Stardock becoming the main point of sale for a new OS/2 client. Personally, I think it would be a Good Thing for OS/2. I *also* think it would be a good idea if OS/2 became Free Software in the same way Linux is today. Though it might seem so, I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive.

But if IBM released only what they owned today, we wouldn't have a complete operating system at all. For much of OS/2 is made up of parts that have been licensed from other companies.

Presentation Manager, for example, is licensed from Microsoft and so is the peer networking. Now in truth, OS/2 is a command-line operating system that doesn't need the PM, but can you really imagine most of us running OS/2 without the Workplace Shell? It's theoretically possible to take parts of an operating system and fill in the cracks with your own code, but this is a monumental task that I don't think can be handled by the current OS/2 development community. And that's why it's nice to know a company like Stardock is still enthusiastic enough about OS/2 to want to try and market it themselves. And despite what some people on Usenet may feel about them, Stardock has displayed a commitment to the OS/2 community that goes above and beyond the call of duty. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed, hoping that they can pull this off.

Yet for the record I also consider this a *stopgap fix*, for I feel that the technical advantages of an open source operating system are something that smaller OS communities absolutely *must have* in order to justify the time and expense it takes to keep using it.

How, then, shall we do this? How does one take a proprietary operating system, an operating system that's not just proprietary to one company but has components that are proprietary to MANY companies, and make it freely available to the world at large?

Last year during Warpstock '98 I heard an answer to that question in a session called "A Call To Arms." It's a radical idea. It may not be possible. But is was so breathtakingly bold and innovative that it made many of the people in that session very, very angry.

I was interested in the session because the speaker, Lynn Maxson, was very vigorously pushing it beforehand. Most people who heard about it thought it was going to be a "rant session," and I confess I did too. There were a few rant sessions at Warpstock (one of them was mine, I'm not ashamed to admit it), where people would basically say "OS/2 has problems, and it's all [insert scapegoat's name here] fault."

Mr. Maxson is an older man with long, long steel gray hair pulled back in a rather austere ponytail. He's a very vigorous and strong-spoken, strong willed man. The first time I saw him, I thought to myself "he looks like the kind of guy who would occasionally reminisce about the Chicago riots fondly." In other words, he was intimidating and he seemed a bit crazy. When he was telling people about his session, he told everyone "prepare to be offended." I had no idea what that meant, but that kind of sell always attracts me, so I showed up at his talk (a bit late, alas) expecting him to rail against IBM, rail against Microsoft, and rail against the computer press for screwing up the OS/2 market.

Mr. Maxson's session looked like it would be the mother of all rants. It wasn't. It was the plans for a revolution against the entire software industry; it was, indeed, a "call to arms."

His idea is deceptively simple: instead of "coding" a program using a language like C, C++ or Java, write a detailed software specification. Run that software specification through a logic engine. Let the logic engine write the code.

The idea already exists to a certain extent. At Warpstock '98 there were two products that almost did this: one was a traditional programming application called Visual Prolog, and one was a Java design tool. In both, instead of writing code, you told the program builder what you wanted the program to do, and it generated code for you. These applications had their limitations. With Visual Prolog, for example, you could only create single applications. But they were marvelous examples of how advanced technology has come, and how much more accessible programming is to the world at large today.

Think about it: computers don't "understand" programming languages. Programming languages weren't built for computers, they were created for people. Computers only "understand" the concepts "on" and "off," represented in binary, and there aren't too many people who actually program in binary (in fact, I think all ninteen of them live on a mountain somewhere and they actually rule the entire world in secret).

Programming languages were created to allow people to write commands that were a lot closer to the way we actually communicate. These commands are then translated into the language a computer understands when they are fed through a compiler.

Programming languages, however, are like any other kind of language: you have to learn to speak them correctly or the other party won't understand a damn thing you're trying to tell them.

And yet today we have programs that can approach the translation of sentences from, say Spanish to English and vice versa. A very crude version of this is the Babelfish translation engine at the search engine (http://www.altavista.com/)AltaVista and there are programs much more sophisticated that can do even better.

So why can't we apply this technology to application development? And ultimately, why can't we use that to create OS/2 on our own?

That was Mr. Maxson's hypothesis. We are almost on the verge, he claimed, of an era where we will have the computer power to feed a well-written software specification into a logic engine, where the logic engine will look for every single possible code combination that will meet those specifications, and ultimately spit out a working program in machine language. Perhaps not this year, but a few years from now, when Pentium V's are being marketed like Celerons are today, we'll be able to do this in a period of time that approaches acceptable.

It's the old idea that if you took an infinite number of monkeys and sat them down in front of an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite length of time, eventually one of them would, simply by hitting random keys, produce the entire works of William Shakespeare. Computers, being more single-minded and less susceptible to starvation than our Simian cousins, could do the same thing a lot more efficiently. And they'd have a few advantages that the monkeys would not:

*They wouldn't be expected to create something ex nihilo. A well-written software specification  would give the logic engine a set of guidelines that it wouldn't have to stray from. In other words, you would be able to exclude a whole lot of useless combinations right at the beginning.

*Computer Programs can only do so many things anyway. A program is itself constrained in what it can do, and therefore, a whole lot of other combinations aren't even possible.

*Therefore, theoretically, it should be possible for a logic engine to say "given these requirements, I can come up with this product."

Theoretically.

The problem, of course, is that I'm not a programmer so I don't really know how hard this is, or how many combinations a logic engine would have to go through to come up with a working product. I asked some people after the presentation who were programmers what they thought of it, and public opinion seemed split right down the middle between people who thought it might work, and people who were convinced that it would never work.

I also noticed that during the presentation a lot of people really did look angry. Some people actually got up and left. Why? Because Mr. Maxson was essentially talking about the end of a programmer's career (as we conceive it today, anyway.)

In fact, I have a personal reason for wanting Mr. Maxson's idea to succeed. I'm a technical writer. If Mr. Maxson is correct, and programs can be created directly through specifications, someday my skills will be in pressing demand. Someday I'll be able to charge a few hundred dollars an hour for a client who really wants a software specification for a product they'd like to use. The mind boggles, the mouth waters...

All greed aside, there would be a lot of advantages to this method of application development, the most obvious one for OS/2 users being: we could write a specification that describes OS/2 and create an OS/2 clone. We could write specifications for device drivers and have device drivers for previously unsupported technology. That's not a walk in the park, that's not something that can be done easily, but it is something that more people than just programmers can participate in. It opens the pool of potential developers much, much wider than even the Open Source movement does. Anyone who can research information, make sense of technical specifications and pay close attention to detail would be able to participate in the development of an application, even if they didn't really know how to write one themselves.

OS/2 could be replaced - piece by piece - with something developed this way. Specifications are, by their very nature, "open source." If someone can read it, someone can implement it. It's Free Software for the masses, it's something you can develop without being a hacker. And it's something that can be used to replace proprietary systems without having to reverse engineer anything.

If it works.

This, of course, is the big question: will Mr. Maxson's idea work? It seems possible in my opinion, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not really qualified to say. The only reason I can think of why this wouldn't work is that we don't have the hardware for it. But even I don't see this as a true obstacle, because computers will continue to increase in power year after year. Five years from now, the most powerful computer you can buy today will look like a toy. Five years from now, we'll have the computing power to do this.

I'm a big believer in Lynn Maxson's presentation. I don't know what to do about it, I don't know how to make it happen, but I want to see it come to pass and watch it revolutionize the way software is written.

And five years from now, it just might be possible to take this idea and create an operating system out of it; an operating sytsem that isn't really owned by anyone per se, because hey, it's just a specification. Open Specs, baby. The Cathedral and Bazaar models will be supplanted by the Open Mic Night model of software development.

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OS/21st  - Sam Henwrich

Summary: A medely of ideas for gadegets, widgets and nifty features that could rock OS/2, if only some developer would be nice enough to implement them...

_A Brain-Dump Of Ideas_

While looking through the screenshots submitted by users to the e-Zine!'s (http://www.os2ezine.com/contests/screenshot98/) screenshot contest, I started thinking about all the things that OS/2 could really use, and which could conceivably be added by Workplace Shell enhancers and other programs such as Object Desktop, XFolder and SmartWindows/Window Styler. This is my wish-list of widgets, gadgets and small improvements. The things I think could make OS/2 rock even more. If the developers of the above utilities are reading this, consider them, please? :-)

See-Through Command Line Windows:

This idea is liberally stolen from the Enlightenment window manager for Unix. A command prompt that's transparent, so you can see the desktop background and icons though the frame. You type, and the letters float above your background. What's nifty is that if you get rid of the titlebar (possible with SmartWindows/Window Styler) and thin the borders to mere lines (possible with the Scheme Palette), it can be almost completely inconspicuous until you want it.

Titlebar Media Player:

There are programs that put clocks in the titlebars of windows, there are programs that put extra buttons in the titlebars of windows, how about one that puts a media player in the titlebar of windows? A couple of buttons for play, forward, back and stop. A display of what MP3 or MIDI or CD track you're playing, and something in the System Menu of each window for configuring it. If this widget was designed to be a front end, you could configure it to transparently operate any command-line player you had.

"Snapping" Windows:

If you've used Photoshop for Windows you'll know that its various palettes - things like layers, brush and color palettes - will all "snap" into place next to other palettes or to the edges of the screen. For all intents and purposes they're free-floating, just like other windows, but when they get within about 5 pixels of the edge of any window, they 'snap' to it, making it easy to create a neat and clean looking stack of palettes without having to nudge windows pixel by pixel.

What I'd like to see is a utility that does this for -all- windows, so I can "snap" an address book window to the bottom of a mail composition window, or a chat window next to a CD player.

One Good Size Affects Another:

How about a utility that glues the edges of windows together, so that when you use the mouse to re-size one, it causes the other window to re-size in a complementary manner too? For example, I size one folder to be narrower, and the folder immediately next to it re-sizes at the same time to be wider. It'd be like simulating the divider bar of PMMail or Object Desktop's navigator.

For that matter, you could glue windows together so that moving one automatically moves the other with it - keeping the same relative position.

The Universal Dock:

Object Desktop's Control Center will let you "dock" folders and icons that you can launch or browse with a click, it can also let you add any of its built-in status panels and widgets, but how about one that lets you dock anything? So, for example, I could drop a command-line prompt in there that's only 1 or 2 lines high (which you can do with the MODE command). Or drop an incoming-mail reminder program. The title-bars would be removed, so they don't take up space, and when you move or re-size the dock the programs inside of it move and re-size relative to it as well.

Smooth Scrolling Virtual Desktops:

If you have Star Office 5.0, launch it, load up a text or HTML document that's longer than one screen, then activate the "Smooth Scroll" feature (Tools->Options->Text/HTML Document->Layout). Use the scroll bar or page up and page down keys to scroll up and down a few times. Instead of the usual "snapping" scrolling, it smoothly -rolls- the document up and down.

After playing with this, I jumped across virtual desktops to check my mail, and a brainwave hit me.

How about modifying the virtual desktop manager so it smoothly scrolls from screen to screen the same way StarOffice scrolls a text document? This might use an obscene amount of CPU power, but hey, Gordon Moore, eh?

For that matter, why are we still using buttons to snap from desktop to desktop? How about treating the desk as one long (or wide) page, and scrolling it by less than one screen-full at a time? The desktop itself and all of its icons would stay stationary and all the windows would slide over the top of it like a separate layer.

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Star Office 5.0 - Introduction  - Chris Wenham

Summary: Is it an operating system? Is it a desktop replacement? Is it a word processor that got hopelessly carried away? No, it's Star Office 5.0, the free (for personal use) office suite from Star Division. It's the Application that earns the capital 'A'. But just why would you want it?

The price of Star Office 5.0 dropped to a couple of hours on the internet last autumn if you wanted it only for personal use. Hundreds of thousands of OS/2, Linux, Mac and Windows users have paid up in modem hours already to use what they might have thought was a Microsoft Office killer. Well the price is right: free... as long as you have the time to download its 70 megabyte installation file (which is not available broken up into smaller chunks). But closer examination reveals that Star Office can look like a dog to more than just your phone line.

We've broken up the review of Star Office differently than we have in the past. Instead of reviewing its individual components (word processor, spreadsheet etc.) we've taken a more horizontal approach; focusing on aspects we only loosely talked about before, such as its Internet capabilities, user interface and integration, how it compares to Lotus Smartsuite for Warp 4, followed by our conclusions as to its value and worth for the tasks it was designed for.

What Is In Star Office 5?:

Everything up to and including the kitchen sink can be found in Star Office 5, which we imagine could earn a legend not unlike that of large cities: You can visit it for the day, but you'll never discover all of it if you stayed for a year. Star Division has tried very hard to think and take care of almost everything you could want for office duties, and to that they've probably succeeded better than anyone else has. But that should send up a few warning flags with the savvy and battle hardened users out there: trying to do everything means that it'll often do -too much-, and do it badly.

Being a document oriented application, it's main components such as Star Writer and Star Calc are de-emphasized in favor of what they actually edit. So to give you an idea of its scope, here's what it handles:

*Text documents
*Web pages
*Spreadsheets
*Presentations
*Drawings
*Databases
*Schedules
*Charts and graphs
*Images

I could probably list another page worth, but these are the main types that Star Office is best at handling. In the main three categories -- text documents, spreadsheets and drawings or presentations, Star Office is remarkably competent. It honestly and easily delivers first class power and features that'll have you productive in no time. Databases are a somewhat questionable, for while Star Office can connect to tables on remote ODBC servers, it's own engine isn't terribly impressive. We found it impossible to create a query that links two or more tables, for example.

Installation and Documentation:

Installation is great, documentation is awful -- at least the online help is. While help files are all you get in the free personal version, Star Office does offer a deluxe, purchasable version that comes on CD and includes printed manuals. In addition to what the boxed version comes with, Star Division also self-publishes a number of additional guides that can be bought separately.

We found that the online help for the suite is grossly incomplete. There are detailed instructions for dealing with the Star Office Desktop (more on that later), but detailed manuals for the individual components were not to be found. Star Office does have a "tooltip" system that can display extended help for each button you hover your mouse over, or you can use a help agent window that annoyingly hovers over your work.

OS/2 Integration:

Help is -not- available in .INF format and this is only the beginning of a depressing trend towards Star Office's OS/2 apathy. There's almost no Workplace Shell integration whatsoever, no support for Rexx, it doesn't even use OS/2's look and feel! Star Office will override practically all of your window controls. It has it's own system for that, which can be set to mimic the Windows, Macintosh, or Unix appearances, plus a laughable recreation of the OS/2 look and feel. If you've installed Object Desktop or Smart Windows or any other utility that changes the appearance of, or enhances the functionality of OS/2's window controls, they won't have any effect within Star Office's own desktop and sub-windows. As you'll see in the screenshots, only the Star Office main window title-bar will betray any evidence of running on a customized OS/2 machine.

Foreign Document Support:

Star Office can read and write to a considerable variety of document formats, including those of Microsoft Office. Star Writer can read and write to Word 97 documents (but with trouble handling those that used Word's "Fast Save" feature), Star Calc can handle Excel 97 files and Star Impress can read PowerPoint 97 presentations (although not save to them).

Conspicuously absent from its array of import filters is support for DeScribe and Lotus Smartsuite for Warp 4 formats. We found that Star Office could not read Lotus Word Pro or Organizer files, and actually dealt with the problem by -launching- Word Pro or Organizer itself - since both were installed on our test systems. This was the one exception to our "no WPS integration" rule, of course: it could launch files according to their WPS associations.

Performance:

Our recommendation is not to try Star Office on anything with less than 32 megs of RAM. While it's -very- efficient for what does, making copious use af shared code, it's still crammed with a lot of features anyway. It's also impossible to load -only- the word processor, or -only- the spreadsheet. You have to load that and the Star Office desktop too.

Performance also lagged severely when using either its e-mail or Newsreader features. Both had a tendency to lock up the suite and make it spin its wheels frantically.

Next: The Star Office User Interface...

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Star Office 5.0 - User Interface  - Christopher B. Wright

Summary: StarOffice is arguably the most feature-complete office suite available for OS/2 users today. From a User Interface design perspective it's also one of the quirkiest of any platform. A mix of brilliant inspiration and terrifying dementia, people willing to tolerate its annoyances will find its strengths amazingly useful -- but some people will find it too annoying to concentrate on anything else.

With Star Office 5.0, Star Division has managed to create the most integrated and seamless office suite released to the software market so far. Whether this is a blessing or a curse is a matter of perspective -- some like spreadsheets that transparently dump their data into text documents, some like a word processor that works and acts like a word processor and a spreadsheet that works and acts like a spreadsheet. There are tradeoffs to both ways of working, most noticeably in the area of speed, but also in the area of the user interface.

The Desktop:

Star Office comes with its own desktop, a major factor of the design and not merely a feature. To call it a 'feature' would imply that you could switch it off, but you really can't. Star Office, perhaps from being a multi-platform deal, has sought to preserve consistency by pretending your own operating system's desktop and interface don't exist at all. It has its own icons, it has its own folders, it has its own directory tree. It's as if you suddenly installed a new operating system on top of your existing one. What's worse, it resembles Windows 95.

Also because of the fact that it imposes its own desktop, Star Office has practically zero integration with the Workplace shell. Nor does it pay attention to Rexx or the window list. Open a document in Star Office and it'll appear in its own private task bar - a Windows 95 task-bar rip-off that has everything from the "Start" button to a clock and palette of widgets. There's no way to detach a document window and have it float outside the Star Office desktop.

But duplicating the Windows 98 "Start" button makes very little sense: first, people in Windows 95 who see another Start Button will not necessarily understand why they're seeing two. While they aren't identical, they do look very similar, and that could cause more initial confusion than help. Second, people who use other operating systems are more comfortable with a different kind of interface and may find the presence of the whole Windows 95 paradigm to be counterintuitive and annoying.

Visual Stimuli:

Star Office is a visually slick application. It has all kinds of neat widgets and buttons and tabs all over the place. It is very customizable and with a minimal amount of effort can look as busy and cluttered or as austere and clean as you desire. Hold down the control key while moving a palette and you can made it 'dock' with the sides of the screen - resizing the document window automatically so it doesn't obscure your work.

Application Integration:

Each of the applications that live within the office suite are fairly feature complete on their own, but Star Office has been designed to allow information to be carried seamlessly from one application to another -- even to store that information in an area where any Star Office application can grab it at any time. Star Office has its own internal implementation of Object Linking and Embedding, for example, which means you can embed a graph into a spreadsheet and have it update its columns whenever you edit the tabular data.

But the user-interface tools that allow you to use this level of integration so seamlessly exist not within the document itself, but rather on the periphery of your document window. The two most notable of these items are the Explorer and the Beamer.

The Explorer:

The Explorer, usually found on the left-hand side of your application window, allows you organize your work and your work's peripherals (clipart, images, sounds, etc) in such a way that you can easily access them without leaving your document. You can assign it to link to anywhere you like: I have mine linking to the hard drive I use to store all my documents. You can also create folders that link to other areas: for example, I could create a new folder in the Explorer called "apps" and link it to my "d:\os2apps" directory on the hard drive. (Believe it or not, you can use the Star Office desktop like a program-launching shell.)

A good example of a pre-defined folder in the Explorer is the Gallery. This is where clipart is stored and you can also use it store images and clipart that you create yourself. When used with the Beamer, it's great for browsing through pictures that you can just drag-n-drop into your documents.

The Beamer:

Usually found at the top of your application window, the Beamer can display the contents of whatever Explorer folder you have selected. Any files contained in the Beamer can be dragged onto a document and embedded into it. Also, any graphics you create can be dragged into a Gallery subfolder and saved as clipart.

The Explorer and the Beamer, when used together, allow you to quickly assemble and re-use pieces of documents over and over again. StarOffice has become my program of choice for my Help Desk comic strip. Any new graphics I create are dragged into the Gallery via the Beamer so I can re-use them whenever I wish.

Both the Explorer and the Beamer are hidden by default; when they are activated, they appear on the left-hand side and the top respectively. You can cause them to collapse into single thin bars when you need more work space, expanding them later with a single click. They can be configured to "push" your document window out of the way so you don't have the problem of overlapping windows obscuring your work.

Documents:

The Explorer and the Beamer are pretty consistent features of Star Office - they can appear or disappear at your whim regardless of what kind of document you are working in at the time. Each application within Star Office, however, has their own set of tools and Customization features, allowing you create a working environment best suited for you.

For example, each application comes with its own set of toolbars. These bars are tailored to the kind of work you do. StarWriter, for example, will load toolbars focusing on formatting documents if you use a text document template, but it will load toolbars focusing on web design if you use an HTML template.

Toolbars are not the only part of this application that is context sensitive. Using the mouse to right-click over almost anything will give you a context sensitive menu. Good examples are the text formatting options available in the word processor and file management commands available for each icon - rather like how it is in the Workplace Shell.

If the default assignments bother you, it's possible to change the basic keyboard mappings so you can define your own hotkeys for various program commands. It is possible, for example, to configure all your formatting commands for StarDraw so that all the key combinations are on the left side of the keyboard; allowing you to mouse around the drawing area with your right hand and change formats and drawing tools with your left.

Finally, a feature we found unique and helpful is the Navigator - a palette that lists all of the major pieces that make up an individual document. It's possible to jump to an individual drawing, heading, table or even hyperlink by just clicking on its listing - no matter how deeply buried in your document it is. This Navigator is available for most of the major components.

Overall Interface:

In terms of layout and design, StarOffice does a lot of things I like and a few things I really don't like. The more configurable a program is, the more I like to use it because I can make it all lay out everything the way I feel is most useful. StarOffice goes to great lengths to facilitate this: you can configure the Beamer and Explorer to your liking, remap key commands, and generally mold the application in your image.

But the overall design is also better suited for large screen monitors than smaller ones; the tendency to add areas to the outside of document (like the Beamer and the Explorer) makes it very convenient to drag and drop information from one application to another, but it will eat screen real estate for lunch. And despite its many good features, StarOffice is plagued with what I consider non-fatal but extremely annoying user interface issues.

And while StarOffice is very well integrated with itself, it is very poorly integrated with OS/2's Workplace Shell. It was designed to be cross-platform, after all, and supporting something as platform specific as the Workplace Shell seems to not have been high on their list of things to do. While drag-and-drop within StarOffice is quite good, drag-and-drop operations from outside the application to within a document are spotty or just plain broken.

StarOffice is very intuitive to use in most respects, which makes the counterintuitive areas all the more frustrating.

Next: Star Office's Internet Awareness...

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Star Office 5.0 - Internet Integration  - Sam Henwrich

Summary: Star Office is one of the best at talking to the internet, adopting the browser metaphor into its interface and integrating a large number of internet funtions such as e-mail, news and web browsing.

At the very top of the Star Office desktop window is a couple of buttons that look familiar. They are the forward,  back, stop and "home" buttons seen on practically every web browser yet made. There's also a box for typing URLs to be retrieved, and sure enough, whenever you load a file from your hard drive to be edited, Star Office will refer to it in that box using standard URL notation. Clearly, Star Office is meant to be used with the Internet.

And yet it's not just the interface that adopts Internet born conventions, since the suite also contains an e-mail client, newsreader and web browser. Most of its components can export their document types into HTML format ready for publishing on the web, and its address book will even perform searches on internet directories like Four11.com.

This attention to the world's largest public network of networks underline Star Office's modern approach, but watch out, because we found that a few of its Internet-geared features pay little more than lip service.

Loading and saving files across the Internet:

Loading files over the Internet is dirt easy if you know the URL (address) or can browse to it. You may never realize how powerful that is until you see a web page you'd like to edit and find yourself able to switch Star Office into edit mode with a single click of the mouse. Suddenly your "web browser" has a blinking cursor in the text and new palettes of buttons for changing font attributes and inserting objects. Nice stuff.

To save your changes to a destination on the Internet, rather than on your computer's own hard drive, you need to create an "FTP Account" on the Star Office desktop first. Once finished, you can transfer files with drag-n-drop from the Star Office desktop just like you can with the FTP objects that come with Warp 4. You can also load a file directly from an FTP site, start editing it, and know that it will save it back to the same place.

Web Page Authoring:

Star Office's HTML support isn't bad, but there's an awful lot we wish it wouldn't do. Creating a web page is trivially easy - it's one of Star Office's main document types. The suite is sophisticated enough to handle frames, tables (including table cell colors) and forms. For those who like to tweak the source code or need to add pixel-fine adjustments, Star Office has the unique ability to toggle back and forth between two different views of the page you're working on; WYSIWYG and HTML Source. Both are editable and changes in one take effect in the other the moment you toggle back.

One of the features that puzzled us was the inclusion of the scrolling-text marquee - a trivial feature that's only supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer. It does little more than make text slowly march across a rectangular region of the screen, but Star Office has given it preference on the main toolbars alongside more important features such as the automatic spell checking and form creation.

Even more baffling is the way it handles non-standard controls for web page forms. There are certain form controls that Star Office supports, such as combo-boxes and table-controls that are often linked to the suite's database, but which aren't supported by HTML. Star Office "fakes" support by letting you create these controls anyway, but saving them as blank GIF files in the web page's code. We think it could be very confusing for someone trying to build a web page feedback form, using controls that Star Office lets them put on their page, but discovering to their dismay that the browser will actually show big blank squares instead.

But woe be to those who actually like to edit the source, as Star Office creates -horrible- HTML. First of all, it insists on breaking long lines at about 70 columns with hard returns. These don't show up when you view the page in a browser, of course, but if you like to edit the source you may find yourself stuck with this infuriating feature that you can't switch off. Secondly, in version 5.0, Star Office has discovered Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - for the *worse*. Even where CSS is not necessary, Star Office will mark each and every paragraph with style sheet tags. This can add to the size and download time of a page, especially when styles are not needed at all.

Worse yet is when you try to convert formats such as plain text into HTML. Star Office has the insane habit of trying to mimic the properties of a plain-text document in HTML, ie: no spaces between the paragraphs. If you wanted a tool to quickly HTML-ize a text file, look somewhere else, because Star Office will drive you nuts trying to undo its [expletive] code.

E-Mail Management:

The screen for composing an e-mail message in Star Office is very smart. The suite supports sending attachments and right there in plain view is an "Attachments" tab where you can drag-n-drop anything from an individual file to a whole folder. An "Extras" tab has settings for priorities and return receipts, and the "Formats" tab has check boxes for sending the mail in plain text (default) to HTML, Rich Text, and Star Office's document format. While it may be a waste, you can have your message put into all four formats attached to the same e-mail.

It's also easy to send a document you've composed outside of the normal e-mail module; one of the features that make it clear to the user that integration with the rest of the suite is definitely its strongest advantage. If you finish writing something in the word processor component -- Star Write -- and decide you want to send it as e-mail, there's a "Document as E-Mail..." command in the File menu to do it. Star Office is smart enough to ask you if you want to send the document as an attachment or as the body text.

Filtering capabilities are also good. Star Office will let you create multiple filters that watch for key phrases and do everything from shuffle them into folders to deleting them right off your hard disk. The method for creating filters is easy, just start clicking on list boxes and typing in what you want it to search for, where, and what to do when it gets a match. It may not be entirely obvious, but what Star Office calls an "Outbox" can also be used as a generic mail storage folder - just create multiple Outboxes and store them on the Star Office desktop or in another folder. These can then be destinations for your filters - nice if you're subscribed to any mailing lists.

Everything seems intelligently laid out until you get to using Star Office as a day-to-day e-mail client. Then it gets ugly. Very ugly.

The chief problem is unresponsiveness and sluggishness. Unresponsiveness is seen when downloading new mail - it won't let you read mail already downloaded or even scroll the list until it's finished transferring the current batch. Sluggishness is seen navigating through lists of mail. In our experience, we found that the entire office suite could lock up hard and solid, freezing the rest of your computer as well, with a CPU meter pegged at 100% utilization and no way but a process-killer to shut it down. It's our opinion that Star Office is *not* suitable for those who deal      with large volumes of e-mail. You'll really regret it if you try.

Newsreading:

Star Office has a newsreader. And after you try it, you'll probably be glad you didn't delete your old one. Hidden in a section of Star Office called "Subscriptions" you can manage multiple news servers and be subscribed to as many groups as you like. The only great disappointment is the same we had with the e-mail client: It's very slow and it's very unresponsive.

What Star Office's newsreader and e-mail client can do that may be appealing, if you're a person of very low bandwidth demands, is to check your subscriptions and mail accounts every few minutes to see if there are any new messages. An icon on the task bar will flash if it finds anything new and a right-click over it will give you a menu of only those newsgroups and e-mail accounts that have new messages in them.

The Browser:

And finally, Star Office could almost suffice in place of a web browser for most surfing chores, but it's no replacement for Netscape yet. The browser component is reasonably fast enough, plus it supports many advanced HTML features, such as the above mentioned frames, Cascading Style Sheets and Java. It also supports Plug-ins, but not the Netscape kind.

We found that the Star Office browser is best for when you don't have another browser already open and need to briefly visit a web page. It's also excellent for browsing to a page that you want to
-edit- with Star Office.

Bookmarks are integrated with the rest of the Star Office filesystem and you can move them around like you do with Warp's URL objects. They only work from within the Star Office desktop, however, and not with Netscape.

Next: How Star Office compares against Lotus Smartsuite...

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StarOffice 5.0 vs. Lotus SmartSuite  - Chris Wenham

Summary: Comparisons are drawn between Star Office and SmartSuite 1.1 for Warp 4.

Put SmartSuite and Star Office side by side and your first glance will tell you they're worlds apart from each other. One is a collection of independent programs with features for helping them work together, the other is a single cohesive "environment" that emphasizes the document over the program. For a moment it's hard to decide which is the most monolithic. Is it the old one with the legacy, or the new one with its "do everything in one program" attitude?

But the devil is in the details, because both suites still stare a great deal between them. The key differences seem to be in philosophy, or how to get things done.

Data Sharing and Integration:

What makes it clear that Star Office is far superior to SmartSuite for data sharing is seen in one drag-n-drop. Open Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Word Pro, create a simple table in 1-2-3, highlight it and try to drag-n-drop it to Word Pro - you'll fail because it won't let you do that. Now open Star Office and create a spreadsheet document and a text document, create a simple table in the spreadsheet document, highlight it and try to drag-n-drop it into the text document - success, the table gets inserted into the text.

Now it isn't all that bad in SmartSuite, you can copy the table to the clipboard and paste it into Word Pro instead of using drag-n-drop, but the difference is that the first and most obvious technique we tried failed in SmartSuite and succeeded in Star Office. OS/2 uses a drag-n-drop user interface, the maneuver seems natural.

But it doesn't end there either. When linking data that appears in more than one document, we found it was easier to keep the links "live" in Star Office than it was for links in SmartSuite. When you change the figures in the spreadsheet document you want the figures in the table you dropped into the text document to change instantly as well. To do this, SmartSuite uses an awkward system of DDE links that you must manage yourself, and which may or may not get re-established properly when you re-open the document. For example, we created a chart in 1-2-3 and pasted it into a Word Pro document, but when we changed the data for the table in 1-2-3, the changes did not automatically show up in Word Pro. These problems are not evident in Star Office.

Word Processing:

A strength that Star Office exhibits over Lotus Word Pro are desktop publishing and layout features. Star Office has a "direct cursor" (also known as "Shadow Cursor" in Corel Wordperfect) that gives you the power to start typing anywhere on the page as soon as you create a new document. This "direct cursor" is simply a normal flashing cursor that follows the mouse around the screen. It jumps by tab breaks and lines instead of pixels, but it means that you don't have to tap the enter, tab or spacebar key multiple times just to position text in the middle of the screen or somewhere off to the side. Tools for drawing figures in Star Office's text documents are also significantly better than Word Pro's, with the ability to create and edit bitmap images using Star Office's simple but functional image editor.

Then take the now popular "auto-correct" feature. This is sometimes called on-the-fly spell correction (not checking, the word processor will correct "Teh" with "The" without prompting you, for example) or "text macros". The idea is that a replacement word or block of text is used to substitute a keyword the instant you finish typing it. This could be something as simple as correcting common typos on the fly ("becase" to "because") to inserting signatures, addresses and other frequently used blocks of text. I could program either Star Office or Word Pro to substitute my mailing address the moment I type "address1", for example. But while Word Pro only lets you create substitutions of words and paragraphs, Star Office's AutoText feature is considerably more flexible. With Star Office, creating an AutoText macro means having an entire page to work in. You can use text, tables, images, drawings, whatever you want. Then you could assign the keyword "MyDaughter" to automatically insert a photo of your baby daughter and a short paragraph that gives her name and date of birth.

Both suites also feature on-the-fly marking of misspelled words. In Word Pro your misspellings are highlighted in cyan, in Star Office they're underlined with a wavy red line similar to Microsoft Office. But while Word Pro will display a menu of its suggested corrections in a button at the bottom of the window, Star Office lists them with a right-click of the mouse over the misspelled word. My personal preference is the Star Office style.

But it's not all bad news for Word Pro. One feature we liked a lot in the Lotus word processor that isn't present in Star Office are the special views. Here you can pick from a variety of presentations that display your pages in a mix of thumbnail representations, outline views and draft views all in one. One, called 'DocSkimmer' is our favorite. In one frame is a draft view for editing text, another frame has an outline view for arranging sections and headlines, and a third frame displays thumbnails of all pages in your document. All frames are updated in real-time, so as you type in one you can see the letters and changes appear instantly in the other views as well. Extremely handy for managing large documents and reports.

Yet one more feature that Word Pro can boast about is its "Ask the Expert" help system. With it you pose "How do I...?" style questions and Word Pro's sophisticated help system pulls up what it thinks is the right answer. Star Office has something similar in its Help Agent, but when we tried it we found it wasn't nearly as good as Word Pro's. "How do I link frames?" in Word Pro pulled up the right answer instantly, but the same question, even re-phrased a few times to use Star Office's terminology (it calls frames "text boxes"), didn't get us anywhere near an answer at all.

Spreadsheets:

Both Star Office and Lotus 1-2-3 fight fair and well in regards to spreadsheet creation and editing. Star Office offers practically the same function set as 1-2-3 and adds to that with a function editor that makes it easy to assemble multiple functions together into a larger formula. Both have good editors for writing your own custom functions, with 1-2-3 using LotusScript as its programming language, and Star Office using Star Basic. Neither use Rexx.

Both also let you create charts by highlighting data and clicking on a chart creation icon. But we found that 1-2-3 was not only *much* faster than Star Office, creating a basic chart the instant you finish drawing its bounding rectangle and intelligently figuring out what's data and what's a label, but it was also faster at changing the chart's appearance later. Star Office, in comparison, wants you to go through its wizard before it'll actually create the chart, needs you to explicitly tell it if the first row or column contain the labels, and does not update the document's embedded chart on the fly like 1-2-3 does - only the dialog's preview thumbnail changes, and that's often too small. But both will update the charts on the fly if you change any of the data in the source table, of course.

Presentations and Graphics:

It's almost no contest between Star Office and SmartSuite for drawing. Star Office wins by a very wide margin, sporting some of the best drawing tools we've seen on the OS/2 platform. Star Office is what you'd want if you needed the closest equivalent to Corel Draw. It features sophisticated 3D modeling tools (that let you fuse basic shapes together to make complex ones), bezier curves, a range of "connectors" that will draw connecting lines between objects and adjust those connections -as you move- the objects they connect, and even the elusively simple "text on a curve". But Lotus Freelance offers only the basics, a big disappointment for us.

Freelance also competes poorly against Star Impress - the presentations editor for Star Office. It's very hard to beat the intelligent user interface that Star Office has for switching between views and layout modes. It's truly a gadget lover's paradise.

The only failing that Star Office has, and which may be a deciding factor for laptop toting executives, is the fact that it doesn't come with a stand-alone presentations player. Freelance will let you "compile" your presentations into a small, highly portable program that you don't need the original Freelance application to play. Plus, Freelance can generate Windows or OS/2 versions of your presentations without actually needing both operating systems installed on your production machine. Star Office has nothing like this. You need to have the whole 70mb suite installed on the machine you wish to use for the presentation.

Finally, we found that Lotus Freelance has a much better selection of templates and Smart Masters (guides for creating common presentations, such as competitor analysis and sales reports) that you could use as a beginning for creating your presentations.

Databases:

Star Office's database, despite claims of being updated with a new engine, still seems weak to us. Try as we might, we couldn't create a simple query that used multiple tables, despite its user interface -hinting- that it was supposed to be able to this. These kinds of queries are practically bread and butter for any database and are used for such simple tasks as identifying customers who have made more than X number of purchases or showing what employees are working on a given project. We also failed to embed a linked table into a form with Star Office. While it's possible to use drag-n-drop to insert the -data- from one table to another, doing something as simple as creating an order form (one that combines billing and shipping information from an address table with an items-ordered table) turned out to be a puzzle we couldn't solve.

Lotus Approach, by comparison, is easily a better database. It's easier to get started, it's more powerful, and if Star Office -can- create multi-table queries, it's Approach that has the more obvious method of doing it. Where Star Office fares better is integration again: the suite's address book is actually a database table that you can customize with its database functions, for example. Plus, you can use Star Office's "beamer" to display a table or query results so they're visible at all times, no matter what document or component you're using.

Both databases are suited only for home and small business use, however. These are not industrial strength databases that you could utilize as the back-end for a web site, for example, even though they'll both export reports to HTML format.

Personal Information Management:

And what could ever compete with Organizer? Good question, and Star Office has a good answer. It's Star Schedule module does a good job of keeping track of events and ToDo lists, letting you combine those - and your address book - into a single screen: a feature that Organizer only loosely emulates. Star Office doesn't try to mimic a paper-and-leather organizer the way that Lotus does, but its clean interface is remarkably intuitive nonetheless. We especially liked the optional and context sensitive properties frame; click on a calendar event and the frame's contents adjust instantly to show further details, alarm settings and attachments.

What impressed us the most about Star Office's calendar was its reminder system. Oh it has the usual "pop up" reminder and alarm sound, but it can also *send e-mail* at a prescribed time (up to 2 days before the event) to any address you choose. A fantastic feature for organizing a team of remote workers or making sure you don't miss something important when you're on the road.

Star Office can import a limited number of other PIM's files, including Microsoft Outlook 97 and vCalendar files. But while it claimed to import Lotus Organizer events and ToDo lists as well, we didn't have any luck importing our Lotus Organizer for Warp 4 files into it. The Star Office address book is even more constrained: it can only import vCard files. If you have your address book in any other format you'll be in for a few hours of re-typing.

Overall:

We think that the integration and data sharing abilities of Star Office are what you should consider the most when choosing between it and Lotus Smartsuite. Nearly everything else is a give-and-take. Not even file format support is a big issue, since the latest version of SmartSuite (1.1 for Warp 4, released recently), will import Microsoft Office 97 files as well as Star Office can.

The interface might be a deciding point for those who insist on using their own desktop rather than a secondary one that Star Office will impose. It might seem that Star Office would be slower than SmartSuite when it forces you to load the desktop, even if you only want the word processor, and while Star Office does take longer to start up than an individual SmartSuite component, we didn't find the margin of difference to be that considerable.

There's also, of course, the issue of continued support for the platform. Star Office 5 is the same on all platforms, even OS/2. All the extra features found in the Windows upgrade of 4.0 to 5.0 were found in the OS/2 upgrade too. And Star Division seems dedicated to OS/2 as much as for Linux and Mac. But Lotus SmartSuite cannot be viewed in the same light. Take Organizer, for example. On the Windows platform Organizer has been updated to a new version with more features and connectivity for Palm Pilot users. On OS/2, despite a refresh of SmartSuite being shipped only a couple of months ago, Organizer is still the same and Lotus have told us the newer version will not be ported. That, we think, is very important to consider.

Next: Our final conclusions...

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Star Office 5.0 - Conclusions  - Chris Wenham

Summary: With two major office suites available for OS/2, why should you pick this one? We give our final thoughts on Star Office.

How do we dislike thee? Let us count the ways. Star Office is very very slick in its design and its functionality, but boy do we wish it wouldn't impose its own desktop environment on us. We can understand that Star Division was not only looking to be radical and innovative, it was also looking to provide a consistent and identical experience across all of the platforms it supports. But we also think they could have done the same without simply trying to create an mini operating system in the process.

Among our other gripes with Star Office is its painfully slow File Open and Save As dialogs, which are very graphical, but do not update as fast as the standard OS/2 ones do. Quite often we would click on what we thought was the file we wanted, only to discover that at that very second Star Office had decided to list a few more folders and we clicked on the wrong thing.

And then of course there's the issue of stability. Many times during our testing, the product closed with an abrupt, but at least polite error message (it also saved the files we were working on too, so they weren't disasters). And about as often we also discovered that Star Office had stopped responding to the keyboard. Mouse operations worked fine, the keyboard worked fine outside of Star Office, but within the application we couldn't type a thing. All of these problems required a restart of the program.

On the sunny side, Star Office is at least very efficient in design and coding. It's big, but there's a lot of code reuse going on. The second desktop notwithstanding, Star Office's user interface is extremely well designed. We really liked the way you could dock toolbars and palettes where you wanted them. The components themselves are also very powerful and seriously comparable to Microsoft Office and SmartSuite (except where noted, such as with the database).

There's a lot we didn't say about Star Office in this review that we would have liked to, but the simple reason for that is we'd still be typing it all up by the time 6.0 becomes available. There's *much* to be found in this suite.

Lastly, the price can't be beat at all. You have to admit it, Star Division has got its competitors nailed there. Go to their web site and you can download the full personal edition of the suite if you're prepared to give them a little information about yourself and wait through a 70 megabyte transfer.

As much as we hate to say it, we think Star Office has an edge over SmartSuite. If you're contemplating which suite to go with for now and the future, Star Office is the one we recommend the highest. It's the one we think has the best future.

Star Office 5.0 
by Star Division (http://www.stardiv.com/) 
	MSRP: Free for personal use  

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Norton AntiVirus Solution v. 3.03  - Pete Grubbs

Summary: After years of waiting, OS/2 now has its very own utility from Symantec . But if you're a SOHO user, don't break out the party hats and noisemakers. This product is being peddled to the enterprise market; smaller customers need not apply.

The names Symantec, Peter Norton and the Norton Utilities are probably as familiar to seasoned computer users as their own phone numbers, particularly if those users are (or were) committed to anything on a FAT partition. Given my own background, I remember Norton Disk Doctor as one of the most important utilities in my kit, and while I don't want to appear disparaging towards either the GammaTech or Graham utilities suites, I've been hoping that some miracle would bring me an OS/2-native Symantec product for nearly as long as I've used OS/2. Those dreams were fulfilled early this year with the release of the Norton AntiVirus Solution: a full-blown, OS/2-native application which now takes the place of IBM's anti-virus product. As the version number indicates, this is supposed to be a mature product and users will notice some polish right away, however, it's pretty apparent that this release doesn't signal Symantec's committed entry into the full OS/2 market. To put it another way, it's not a complete meal. It's more like a bone with a little meat and gristle on it.

Test System:

The system used to rate this product is a Frankenstein of my own creation. I have a Shuttle Skywalker Hot 603 MB with 128 M of EDO RAM; a 1.0 G Fujitsu hard drive slaved to a 1.2 G Western Digital drive and a Memorex 40x CD drive. Graphics are handled by a Diamond Stealth card with 4 MB of memory. The operating system is Warp 4.0 with FixPack 9 comfortably in place.

Installation:

As you can tell by the following system requirements, the Norton AntiVirus will run on a very basic machine: 386 DX or faster CPU; OS/2 2.11, Warp Connect or Warp 4; 16M of RAM; 24M of disk space. The Norton CD (colored a Tweety-Bird yellow) is loaded with 10 different incarnations of the anti-virus software. It includes versions for Windows 95/98, NT, the Mac, Tivoli Enterprise and IT Director, MS Exchange, Norton System Center, Netware and OS/2. It needs 10 M of disk space to install (the rest of the space appears to be for updated virus signature files) and defaults to the C partition, but accepted another drive without comment or problem. It took 4 minutes to install and put a plain vanilla folder with the AV program objects on my desktop. I regard the fact that I don't have a sheaf of notes describing the whole installation process as a pretty good indication that it was as unremarkable and as easy as it should have been. According to Symantec, this is a year 2000 compliant application, but I saw no indication of any second party certification. It's also a pleasure to be able to say that the printed documentation included with this package is well-developed, accurately proofed and generally intelligible. At least Symantec got the manual right. Unfortunately, the product itself isn't quite as well-realized.

Up and Running... sort of...:

After running the installation, I opened the new folder on my desktop, selected the Norton AntiVirus object and got to work. I was informed that the virus signatures I had installed were more than a month old and that I should run LiveUpdate (more on that below) immediately. Since I wanted to get a feel for the product, I deferred updating the signature file and started my first scan. While the Norton AntiVirus uses its own proprietary code (named Bloodhound) to track down and eliminate viruses, its implementation is pretty much the same as any other virus software I've ever used. It identified all of my drives, including my Zip drive, without a hitch and proceeded to scan them. I didn't take note of the time and, unlike the old DOS Disk Doctor, I didn't find an elapsed time counter with the application. No matter, thought I, I'll just make a point of running the scan a second time with my stopwatch in hand. After receiving a clean bill of health, I set about checking the rest of the package. The AV window has five icons which allow users to scan their drives immediately or select a scheduler which will perform the scan at another time. It's also possible to access LiveUpdate, view the scan log or virus list and set options with a mouse click.

LiveUpdate, as one might imagine, is a utility that automatically connects the Norton AV to a Symantec FTP site, downloads, extracts and installs new signature files. I got online, loaded LiveUpdate and sat back to wait. And wait I did, with very little to do since I was completely unable to access my desktop the entire time my machine was connected to the FTP server. After more than an hour, my modem dropped carrier. An error message popped up to inform me that LiveUpdate couldn't install the new signature files. While I don't know for certain, it seems that I never got all of the files, so I tried again. And again. And again. In all, I've spent at least eight hours logged onto that FTP site with nothing to show for it.

Well, not quite "nothing." Now that I've attempted to update these files, I can't use AntiVirus to scan my drives at all. Apparently my update attempt wrecked the existing files, disabling the auto-protect module for my Windows/DOS apps and making it impossible to use the product for its created purpose. Since I couldn't run any further tests of the product, I can't say whether it will find the dummy viruses I had waiting for it or not.

Even if this product did work here, it isn't designed to automatically protect an OS/2 desktop from viruses. That capability is reserved for -- you guessed it -- DOS and Windows installations. What AntiVirus will do, when it works, is run Auto-Protect any time you load up a DOS or Windows application. In other words, when it works it's protecting less than 10% of my tools full-time.

Other Quibbles:

One of the hidden gems in this program is a scheduler with a variety of uses. When I first loaded the Norton Program Scheduler, I was impressed with its simple interface and the range of options it included. Rather than including a mini-application with severely limited functionality, Symantec included a useful, versatile tool. Or, at least, they attempted to. This scheduler exists as a separate program and can be loaded without running the whole AntiVirus package (although Symantec doesn't make this an installation option nor is there any indication that they intended it to be run this way). Program Scheduler is flexible enough to launch the LiveUpdate module, accept path/filename statements to launch programs and will also pop up a customized message. Given my experiences with LiveUpdate, I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I didn't attempt to use it for that specific purpose and scanning my system for viruses wasn't an option either.

My attempts to set pop-up messages worked perfectly but when I tried to use it to load another program, my system came to a halt as soon as the scheduler tried to do its thing. Each hang required me to clear my system by using Control-Escape to bring up a window list. (On two occasions, I had to use Watch Cat to close the scheduler when I couldn't get to a window list.) After 5 or 6 trials I called it a night. I'm guessing that this mini-app works fine with its anti-virus counterpart, but that's only a guess. It does do pop-up messages with ease, but nothing else. At least, not on this machine. For my money, one out of four just isn't acceptable.

The Wish List:

Perhaps Symantec figured that Warped users didn't need Auto-Protect support for the OS/2 side of their systems since there aren't many OS/2-native viruses, but that reasoning doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me. Frankly, I'd be much more impressed with the product as a whole if it offered comparable support across platforms instead of listing heavily in the MS direction. I'm also mystified by the decision to offer virus signature updates in one huge file. Is there some compelling reason that this data can't be broken into smaller chunks and then reassembled on the host machine? For those with ISDN lines or T-1 access, it isn't an important issue, but when you're connecting at a nominal 28.8 over dirty analog lines, downloading virus updates can be an all-night affair, especially when your server keeps dropping carrier in the middle of the download. If it is technically unfeasible to break this file down, perhaps Symantec could include a script that allows LiveUpdate to resume an interrupted download instead of starting the whole rigmarole from the first bit every time. If nothing else, I'd appreciate a method to secure these files via ordinary FTP clients and then install them later. LiveUpdate doesn't even have a download gauge!

I'd also like to see the LiveUpdate particular feature learn to play better with the other applications on my machine. Unlike any of the other Internet/communications software I use, I couldn't do any other work or access my Desktop for the entire time LiveUpdate was connected to the FTP site. Windows users may be prepared to accept this kind of performance, but I doubt that it will win many hearts in our community.

To Buy or Not to Buy:

However, the most disturbing fault with the Norton AntiVirus isn't a matter of code or implementation. It's a matter of marketing. According to a source at Indelible Blue, Symantec will only sell Norton AntiVirus *in lots of ten*. While independent OS/2 vendors would probably be happy to sell single units, this, apparently, isn't part of Symantec's plan. I followed a link from Symantec's home page and found single-user licenses of the various Windows flavors at Egghead's web site for about $35 US, but don't bother looking for single-user licenses of the OS/2 version. They aren't there. A phone call to Symantec's direct purchasing line at Comp USA turned up prices and availability information for Windows and Mac versions, but nothing at all for OS/2. I did get a toll-free number for their Customer Service (800-441-7234 M--F 6 AM to 5 PM, PST), checked their fax back service for OS/2 information and listened through 7 different choices, none of which mentioned OS/2.

If you're like me, you aren't going to rush out to purchase a ten-pack of any software this month, so there's little sense in my making any kind of purchase recommendation for this product. Moreover, it seems apparent that Norton AntiVirus has been specifically targeted away from users like us, a troubling possibility when one considers how many SOHO users made up the core of beta testers during product development. However, the problems and shortcomings I've encountered might be even more significant for the very market that Symantec has targeted this application for. As you may already know, Symantec licensed IBM's anti-virus code and agreed to IBM's stipulation that their anti-virus product support OS/2 users. Apparently they consider "OS/2 user" to refer to the enterprise market only but I suspect that true enterprise OS/2 users are likely to demand even more of this package than I am. If I can't get to my desktop, I'm inconvenienced, I'm grumpy but I'm not losing a ton of money. I can't imagine a member of the banking community drumming his fingers on his desktop while he waits for LiveUpdate to finish and being anything but, shall we say, perturbed.

Once again, we members of OS/2's SOHO contingent have been excluded from the toys the big boys get to play with. If this were a better product, that might be a loss. As it stands, something this mediocre should be well-suited to an environment that thrives on mediocrity. In a Windows world that accepts daily crashes, loss of data and limp-wristed multitasking, I doubt that anyone will notice the faults running rampant in Norton AntiVirus Solutions. For -any- segment of the OS/2 market, however, I'd look about for another answer, something that's more like a full meal and less like scraps for the cat.

Norton AntiVirus Solution v. 3.03 
by Symantec (http://www.symantec.com/) 
	MSRP: Not available for private license  

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

Rumors, Winks, And Brad Wardell  - Chris Wenham

Summary: With the proliferation of rumors that suggest Stardock is negotiating with IBM to be the publisher and marketer of a new OS/2 client, we interviewed Brad Wardell of Stardock Systems to get the dish.

Stardock was mum for a while as Ziff Davis reported and the newsgroups exploded on the idea that the small OS/2 and Windows software vendor from Michigan could get the nod from IBM to produce, publish and market a new version of OS/2 for the home and small business. It was a study in speculation, a patchwork of guesswork, thousands of people wondering just exactly what would it mean. Would Stardock get the hallowed source code? Would they assume development? Would they write the drivers and Fixpacks?

Ready to talk about this issue for the first time, we took the opportunity to have a chat with Brad Wardell -- the president of Stardock Systems -- and drill him for all he could tell us. But even yet, there's still much that he's keeping under wraps.

*Is there any truth to the rumor now prolific on the newsgroups and even Ziff Davis UK that Stardock is negotiating with IBM to be the distributor and/or marketer for a new version of Warp Client?*

Brad: There is some truth. Though the rumor implied that we'd somehow be getting the source code and developing it. What we're actually working on is if IBM chooses not to release a client version of the next version of OS/2, to allow us to *publish* a client version ourselves. This way, OS/2 customers who do want a client based on Aurora technology can obtain one.

*What makes you think you can offer anything more than a trivial marketing effort?*

Brad: Our viewpoint is that we would take the Linux route -- Stardock would essentially be like Redhat. What OS/2 needs more than anything else is a perception face lift. From a client perspective, nothing touches OS/2 in many regards -- certainly not Linux. Where Stardock will put its resources into is trying to help build a grass roots community. What most people don't realize is that most parts of OS/2 can be changed by end users. IBM never expected to be in the position of having to write all the file systems, drivers, and other low level stuff. A lot of OS/2's early budget was put into making OS/2 expandable without IBM being involved in that expansion. Many people, particularly Linux advocates, feel that you have to have the source code in order to extend the OS. That's only because of the way Linux was designed. OS/2's superior design allows developers to add a great deal to the OS. What Stardock will try to do is create an environment where the community will work together in bettering OS/2 in the future through a coordinated effort.

*As evidenced by Warpstock and The OS/2 Netlabs, OS/2 already has pretty good grassroots support from both users and developers. What's wrong with these two existing organizations, and just what exactly is it that Stardock can add?*

Brad: These organizations are a good start but the coordination still needs to be done. For instance, nothing is being done to coordinate improving the OS itself. I.e. "We need a Device Driver for X, who wants to do it?" and having people sign up to do it. This is done on Linux all the time but on OS/2, end users have tended to sit by and wait for a commercial vendor to do it all for them. We need to help create a community that does more for itself.

Obviously Warpstock is great for trade shows and OS/2 Netlabs is a good start for building on a freeware community, but there is so much more that can be done as evidenced by the Linux community.

*How did these rumors get started anway?*

Brad: Our theory is that Stardock's newsletter to customers (Stardock Magazine) which mentioned our endeavors (which was last Fall) simply got forwarded by a user to someone at ZD. The ZD writer than extrapolated a quite a bit and we end up with the article. Some OS/2 users have accused us of leaking these rumors to the press. Though, if we had done that, it would have been someone who works for ZD US such as Esther Schindler or something.

*How far along are these talks and who at IBM have you spoken to?*

Brad: That I cannot comment on in detail except to say quite far.

*What actions has IBM made so far that lead you to think they might agree to your proposal?*

Brad: I can't comment on that yet.

*Everyone is assuming that if you get to publish a new OS/2 client, Stardock products like Object Desktop are likely to be bundled. Would they? And would it be a co-branded box or have only one or the other company's name on it?*

Brad: No. While we would integrate some new features into the OS, Object Desktop would not be part of the OS.

The new OS would have a new name entirely with a moniker such as "Powered by IBM OS/2 Warp technology" on it. It would be a Stardock product however.

*Would you then release an updated Object Desktop that gave these features to customers who want to stick with Warp 4?*

Brad: Probably not.

*Did you at any point pursue IBM to release OS/2 as an open-source product?*

Brad: No because we already knew IBM couldn't do that. IBM licenses major chunks of OS/2 from third parties already.

*Would you have access to the OS/2 source code yourself?*

Brad: No. IBM would continue to create Fixpacks and device driver support for its OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business customers. [These] would also work on the new OS/2 client.

*We're also assuming you'd supply the customer support for a Stardock branded Warp Client. Are you set up to handle this? What's the limit to the user base that you could comfortably handle?*

Brad: No, in actuality, customer support would be done using open forums and such that Stardock would set up, but we would not provide free technical support. We would be taking the Redhat approach except that we would ensure that there was an infrastructure in which users could help each other. We would have support staff helping on the news servers we'd create but there would be no *free* voice technical support or free email support. Which, by the way, is the case now for OS/2 (IBM does not provide long term free support for OS/2 Warp 4 for instance).

*Who would developers work with if they wanted to port or publish their applications on OS/2, Stardock or IBM?*

Brad: Either. What the market needs is a viable alternative to Windows 98/NT on the client side. We think that developers would love to see a viable alternative too. Depending on the type of product they were writing, going to Stardock or IBM would make more sense.

*Since you're comparing your approach so much to Redhat's, why OS/2? Why not just complete the same model all the way and produce a Linux distribution?*

Brad: Because I don't see Linux as a good alternative client. It's still far too unpolished and well, to be honest, I like OS/2 a lot better.

*What business advantages do you see from choosing to publish a version of OS/2?*

Brad: First of all, with some control over what gets put into the box, I think we can help the third party community by bundling software and services with it. I also think we could make it a far far better OS than Warp 4 or Warp 3. We'd bundle things like Apache web server, integrate the new OS with Stardock.Net to make internet connectivity easier, we'd include the GNU compiler and have it install ready to go so that users can start writing OS/2 software, etc. It's very exiting just thinking of the rebirth the OS/2 operating system could achieve with an enthusiastic publisher.

*Most people see Stardock as a games company that also does utilities. Jumping into operating systems is a wild departure. What do you see Stardock doing in a year from now?*

Brad: Well, the funny thing is, Stardock's an applications software company first and a game company second. I think OS/2 -e-Zine!-'s Readers Choice Awards back that up pretty well, we won awards in most of the categories but only got a runner-up in the games category this year. :-)

I don't want to imply, however, that Stardock's going to abandon its cross platform strategy. Even if the next OS/2 client were to come from Stardock we would still put a lot of emphasis on our Win32 software. Object Desktop for Windows would continue forward (as a side note, Stardock WindowBlinds is the #5 most popular download on (http://www.download.com/)download.com for instance -- 46,000 downloads in one week so you can imagine that most of our revenue comes from Win32 software). But hopefully, within a year of having an OS/2 client, we and other OS/2 ISVs could work together with the shareware and open source community to build OS/2 up again as a true and viable alternative to Win32 as a desktop client.

*This project sounds like it's still not going to materialize   within the next couple of months, but if IBM says yes, what's your most optimistic goal for a release? Late '99, early 2000?*

Late 1999 would be our goal with this.  It is really up to IBM, if they don't want to do a client, I think it's best to let someone license the new version of OS/2 (OS/2 Warp 5 for e-Business) minus the server parts and let them run with it.  Given the cost of doing this (you have to pre-pay for a large number of licenses up front which obviously keeps most companies from being able to do this), we'll only move forward if IBM chooses not to do a client which right now appears to be the case (it doesn't look like IBM's going to do their own client as I write this but that may change).

*If the deal falls through and IBM walks away from the table, are you still going to have anything to do with OS/2 beyond "maintenance mode"?*

Of course.  Stardock is committed to OS/2 either way. In the near term, we still plan to do OS/2 API based software and someday JAVA will mature enough where we can put some focus on that as well.

(At this point the interview concluded)

Editor's Commentary:

One thing that bothers us the most is the fact that, by publishing a version of OS/2 under Stardock's name, the company will be trivializing the importance of the operating system. OS/2 has literally billions of dollars of development history behind it and, while not meaning to belittle Stardock in any way, a company that small and which still has a strong Windows software focus couldn't possibly give OS/2 the prestige it deserves. We think that's important, since as Brad himself pointed out: OS/2 already has an image problem.

What real, measurable impact a Stardock branded version of OS/2 could have is also highly questionable. Brad's motives are good, and the world certainly does need a healthy alternative to Windows. But at the moment the poster child of that movement is Linux. It's not as if OS/2 could slip back into its old role as "The Other PC Operating System." Making anyone beyond those already interested in OS/2 take notice would require either a genius marketing scheme or staggering amounts of energy. "Let's emulate Redhat" may or may not be a genius marketing scheme. After all, OS/2 still isn't a free operating system, and freed software is half of RedHat's business plan right there.

We're giving Stardock the benefit of the doubt, despite our reservations. If this incredible deal ever happens, we'll be there to cover it as equally as if it'd come direct from IBM. There's no way we'll ever complain if Brad actually makes it work.

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

Logical Arguments For A New Client  - Bob St. John

Summary: As a former IBM employee and now IBM Business Partner, Bob St. John has a clear understanding of why a new OS/2 client would make sense for IBM.

The day before I wrote this I sent an e-mail to some former colleagues at IBM NCSD (Network Computing Software Division, the division now responsible for OS/2) regarding the possibility of a new OS/2 client based on the OS/2 Warp Server for e-business; Aurora. It was triggered by the survey results in the Ziff Davis (http://www.zdnet.com/sr/) Sm@rt Reseller magazine on this topic. Considering the channel orientation of SR, I was surprised that OS/2 warranted attention. Not only that, but the results were overwhelmingly for a new OS/2 client. The key message: a new client would help me sell the new server product.

This is a message has always been a problem for IBM. IBM deserves its excellent reputation for innovative technology, for technical elegance and reliability. Couple this with IBM's presence in every other aspect of computing, mainframe, storage, networking, AS/400, RS6000, Internet, service, even financing. Amazing.

And there is IBM's ability to understand the enterprise as no other vendor can. IBM's account teams have enterprise penetration and influence that may be the company's most significant asset. But the message from the Sm@rt Reseller poll may be indecipherable by IBM.

The "Intel space" ... the computing environment once referred to as "IBM PC Compatible", aka Windows compatible or "Wintel", has always been a marketing challenge for IBM to understand. Future graduate school case studies will revolve around IBM's failures in this computing environment. IBM's reluctance to commit to a new OS/2 client is simply the most recent chapter in this case study.

While still in IBM, in May 1997, I attended a marketing meeting and demonstration of "Bluebird", the product which became WorkSpace on Demand. At that meeting, the Director of Strategy and Market Intelligence told the assembled audience "It turns out you need a client to sell the server". Everyone chuckled. I'm not sure he intended the remark to be humorous. "Well, of course you do" was the murmured response. It sounded more like "duh!" but they meant "Well, of course you do".

The issue was and continues to be that the customer -- the user -- views their computing environment as being seamless. It is their computing environment. One entity. Vendors want to divide the environment up, applications, networks, platforms, devices ... but users don't. To them it is one asset, one tool. To gain acceptance for an isolated component ... a NOS (Network Operating System) in this case, is very, very difficult. Ask Novell. Ask Microsoft. I would not suggest asking IBM at the moment. IBM appears to be in denial, again.

An aspect of this user decision making which has eluded IBM on the conscious level is the fact that many of these decisions are not simple product selections. The vendor is being selected as well. Every decision to buy Microsoft Windows NT is also a rejection of IBM. Harsh words, but often true.

IBM would argue this point. Fine. Perhaps I'm mistaken. Let's look at some marketing campaigns from 1997 and 1998. How about the "IBM sells more software than Microsoft", remember that? It omitted how much of IBM's software revenues come from Intel space and comparing that apple to Microsoft's apple.

Then there was the "IBM is the leading software vendor for applications running on Microsoft Windows NT", which proceeded the expansive "IBM suites for NT" campaign. This must have referred to leading in the sense of having greatest number of products, not leading in sales volumes. And those "IBM NT Suites", how are they doing? Making people forget BackOffice, FrontOffice, any office?

The challenge for IBM is the fact that they have superior applications and technologies, they have superior account penetration. IBM ought to own this market. But, as long as IBM cedes the basic platform to Microsoft, they also cede the environment because the environment is more homogeneous than IBM realizes. Not homogeneous in the strict product sense. It isn't that simple. It involves thinking as a user of technology to service customers. In that sense, the computing environment is not a set or products. It is one tool.

As a vendor IBM has said, in many ways, "this is not a market we choose to serve". Despite the moneys spent on development and marketing, the IBM message which is communicated is not clear or encouraging. This reduces IBM's attractiveness to these users. It actually is a market IBM wants to serve, but IBM has never mastered "walking the talk". The actions belie the words and that's what counts. Not the good intentions.

The United States steel industry made many mistakes, not just one. But a significant mistake was choosing which market it wanted to serve; ceding other markets to competitors. Those competitors were grateful to have those niches and developed into profitable enterprises until they were able to compete and win against US steel interests. It isn't that simple but, in a way, it is.

To bring this down from high orbit and return to the finite decision regarding an OS/2 client, IBM will deliver Warp Server for e-business this spring. It will be a beauty. Will anyone care? Sure. But how many more would care if there were also a positive message about the client in the material?

IBM needs to deliver the new OS/2 server with a statement of direction regarding the new client. An Aurora client would be the right complement to Merlin and WorkSpace, not to mention JavaOS. A family of IBM clients to work with and the excellent support IBM servers provide for Windows, Apple and *IX clients, and servers. This would allow marketing people, IBM and channel people, to weave a compelling story of client and server support; true cross platform support.

And this strong platform story strengthens the application story. UDB, MQSeries, Notes, and others. Only IBM is in the position to tell this story; "support for your environment the way you choose, protecting your investment in product and skills. Don't accept a vendors decision, make your own." And the IBM story can be told with superior products by superior people.

But, like the man said, it turns out you need a client to sell a server. And you need the client and the server to sell database. And you ... well, you get the picture. If IBM wants to be a force in the Intel space, it must exceed expectations of the market. Producing a new OS/2 client buys IBM some credibility in an area where it desperately needs it.

I've heard that some in IBM are saying, "It's ok not to do a client. We told people we wouldn't do a client, so how would we look if we did one now?" This reasoning brings to mind the "It hurts when I do this" and the response "Well, stop doing that". People didn't like the "No client" story, so stop telling it, or at least change the ending. Let's forget credibility and go directly to relevance, if IBM wants relevance, it must make the market forget OpenDoc, Taligent, Kaleida, CommonPoint, micro channel, and I don't have to stop there, but I will.

IBM has to stop sending the "don't use our software" message. This is, in fact, what IBM does when it fails to support OS/2. Specifically, I'm referring to the failure to support OS/2 with IBM programming tools. OS/2 has a home in the international enterprise and those accounts have in-house applications. That means they have in-house programmers. I'm not talking about shrink wrap or games. I don't want to go down that road today.

But IBM claims to listen to the enterprise account. I watched a large transportation company change from OS/2 to NT, almost 10,000 licenses, and it wasn't pretty. What drove the change was the inability of the enterprise in-house programmers to get good support for programming on OS/2. And it just isn't a large leap from "developing on NT" to "developing for NT". This is simply another lyric in same song; lose the programming tools, lose the platform, lose the applications, lose the account.

So, I want to give some simple messages to IBM Software Marketing, specifically the International Product Development Team. You will always derive greater benefit from things you do than from things you don't do. Performance against expectations is more important than performance. Offer users the opportunity to do business with you. Do not cede advantages to competitors.

My business affiliations with IBM include being an IBM Business Partner, authorized IBM PC Reseller, Software Developer Organization and IBM BESTeam member. I think I can deliver better business solutions using IBM products and technologies than working with any other vendor. But like many other IBM business partners and customers, I sure wish IBM would not make it so difficult for me.

Here is an area for improvement. IBM, please finish Aurora. You are doing great, it is an excellent product. I hope the fact that it is coming from IBM will not hold it back. You could help it by issuing the following statement. "We are continuing to evaluate delivering a workstation client based on this server kernel. If the market demand exists, we think we can manage to it and deliver a quality and exciting product later this year." Making such a statement will help the entire Software Marketing Group.

I'm not saying that folks would have to step back to avoid being trampled in the rush for the new OS/2 client. But I see the demand and I don't doubt a new client would be profitable. IBM Software Marketing and NCSD should be more than a little embarrassed by the outstanding sales of the OS/2 client in 1998. It is testimony to the excellence of their direct sales force, the product, and the reality that an OS/2 market exists.

The fact is, the market is willing to consider alternatives to Windows. This trend is growing. In my opinion, Windows has hit the high water mark. Windows does not have a good story to tell in 1999 and 2000 and this opens the door for products like, Linux, Java, and ... yes ... even OS/2. OS/2 may never regain the market acceptance it had in 1995. Remember when there were three trade publications about OS/2? But it can be much more than a jumping off point for users heading to other platforms. OS/2 can still be a destination. It is an excellent product.

Can IBM improve the Intel space revenues? Of course. Will a new OS/2 client do that? Of course not. But a journey of a thousand miles begins by reclaiming some credibility in this market.

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

Building Dynamic Web Sites, Part V  - Chris Wenham

Note to readers of ASCII version. Since this article deals primarily with HTML related issues, some of the examples given did not translate well into ASCII representation. We apologize for any confusion it causes.

Summary: Learn how to write macros for PPWizard and use them to implement nifty and time-saving widgets for your web pages.

_Widgets and Macros_

In the latest releases of PPWizard -- arguably now the most powerful pre-processor for HTML, Rexx, INF or otherwise -- there have been a lot of improvements that make it extremely easy to add what web developers drool over: widgets.

You've probably seen a few crop up here in the pages of OS/2 -e-Zine!- as I play with this program myself. The most recent are the improved screenshot links that include a button for optionally viewing the screenshot in a pop-up Javascript window, but omit that button from the Printer-Friendly version to help save ink and make life easier for Lynx users. These links are created by a macro that PPWizard interprets, and while all I do is give the name
of the screenshot's file and the text to link it with, the macro figures out 1) the file's size, rounded to the nearest K; 2) the file type; 3) the image's dimensions; and 4) the Javascript code to open the pop-up window. These are what I call labor saving devices for webmasters, and here I'm not only going to teach you how to make your own, I'm also going to give away a few -e-Zine!- trade secrets.

What is a Macro?:

A macro, in PPWizard terms, is a lot like the functions you might write in C, Java or some other programming language. It's an encapsulated portion of code that works almost autonomously and accepts parameters to alter its behavior. Here's an example of a simple one that creates an e-mail link:

In your web pages you could then call the macro like this:

<$Email address="feedback@os2ezine.com">

And after "compiling" the page with PPWizard, it would produce a functioning link like this:

(mailto:feedback@os2ezine.com)feedback@os2ezine.com

If you've been reading the Dynamic Web Sites series so far, you'll notice the standard convention for calling #defined variables (embed the variable's name in a tag, preceded by a dollar sign, like this "<$variable_name>"). You'll also notice a new one, where curly brackets were used instead of pointed ones. In our example, this was "{$address}". The curly brackets tell PPWizard to look for a parameter with that same name. Of course, you can name parameters anything you like, and you can have as many as you like.

<p>You can also make a parameter optional by telling the macro to give it a default value. For example, let's say we use the "feedback@os2ezine.com" address all the time, but also occasionally use other addresses in our web pages. For convenience, we'd like every <$Email> tag to point to the feedback address by default, but we'd also like to override that. Here's how you'd do it:

#define Email <a href="mailto:{$address='feedback@os2ezine.com'}>{$address}</a>

In between the curly brackets, after naming the parameter, we added an equals sign and gave it a default value: our feedback address. As long as you give a parameter a default value at least -once- at the beginning of the macro, PPWizard will use that default everywhere else in the same macro. That's why we only had to type the feedback address in once, even though we used the {$address} tag a second time.

Now, all we have to do to insert our feedback address anywhere in a web page is type:

<$Email>

And PPWizard, once run, will resolve it to a complete and functioning link that looks like this in a browser:

(mailto:feedback@os2ezine.com)feedback@os2ezine.com

But if we wanted to override the default with a different address, it's easy. We type this in our web page's source:

<$Email address="editor@os2ezine.com">

And PPWizard resolves it to this:

(mailto:editor@os2ezine.com)editor@os2ezine.com

Correctly linked, simple and easy.

But what makes Macros really show their power is when you start treating them as fully programmable objects. Imagine what my problem was: I had to add links to a lot of screenshots in every issue of OS/2 -e-Zine!- The traditional way called for me to look up the screenshot's filename, go back to the HTML document, paste it in, go back and find it's file size, go back to the HTML document and paste that in, type the file's extension in the little parenthesis, and type the "<A HREF>" business to make it link properly. Boring stuff. So I wrote a macro to do it for me, one which only asks for two parameters: The screenshot's file name and the text to link to it with. The call, in the body of the "uncompiled" article, looks a bit like this:

<$Screenshot shot="screen1.gif" text="This is a sample screenshot">

And when "compiled" with PPWizard it looks like this:

This is a sample screenshot

When it came to writing the macro itself I started with the simplest functionality:

#define Screenshot <a href="{$shot}">{$text}</a>

All that would do is link the image to the text and is barely worth getting excited about. But I still had all those trips I had to make back and forth between a directory listing and the file I was editing. So I started building and expanded the macro to this:

<pre>
#define Screenshot 									\
        #evaluate+ rc "SysFileTree('{$Shot}', 'hh_Tree', 'F')"			-\
        #evaluate '' "Parse var hh_tree.1 hh_date hh_time hh_size remains"	-\
        #evaluate+ hh_size "Left( hh_size + 500, length( hh_size) - 3)"		-\
        ;--- Supply the standard link -------------------------------	-\
        <a href="{$shot}">{$text}</a>						-\
        ;--- Label it with the file size ----------------------------	-\
        (<$hh_size>K)
</pre>

I've got some explaining to do. First of all, the "dash-slashes" ( <tt>-\</tt> ) at the end of each line tell PPWizard that the macro is continued on the next line. Otherwise it'd assume the macro ended before we got to the first #evaluate line. PPWizard doesn't yet have any "Begin/End" pairs that you find in other languages for marking the boundries of functions and macros.

Secondly, the #evaluate statements tell PPWizard to execute a line of Rexx code. They take the following syntax:

#evaluate name_of_variable_to_store_results_in "Rexx code to run"

The variable that you store the results in will be a PPWizard variable, not a Rexx variable. There is a difference!

What we were doing in those three #evaluate lines was this:

*Use the *SysFileTree* function to get the directory listing of the screenshot in question.

*Use the *PARSE* function to separate the date, time and size that are included in that directory listing

*Concerning ourselves with the size only, we add 500 to it, then throw away the last three digits. What does that do? It rounds the file-size up or down to the nearest K. If it was 16,600 bytes, for example, adding 500 to the value would bump it up to "17,100". Dropping the last three digits then leaves us with just "17". If it was 16,499 bytes or lower, adding 500 would have brought the total to 16,999 and the macro would be left with "16" after dropping the last three digits. It's a simple way of rounding up or down to the nearest K. You can do away with all this mathematical gymnastics if you like and just drop the last three digits - always rounding -down- every time. Simply delete the "+ 500" bit.

I should point out that this rounding mechanism is only as simple as it is because Rexx can interchangeably treat variables as strings of characters, or as numbers; even in the same line. At the beginning we treat it as a number by adding 500 to it. But then we're suddenly treating it as a string of characters again; measuring its length in digits and dropping the last three with the LEFT function. This is not always something you can get away with in other programming languages.

There's a comment just after the #evaluate lines. PPWizard ignores any line that begins with a semi-colon, so we use it to stick in a reminder. The line just after it inserts a simple link to the screenshot.

The next line inserts our rounded file size in the parenthesis, appending it with the letter "K" so the reader knows what kind of measurement it is. As it's the last line of the macro, we don't put a "dash-slash" ( <tt>-\</tt> ) at the end of it.

The code to put the file type (".GIF") in the parenthesis too was even easier, just grab the last 4 characters of the file name. In addition, I also used one of PPWizard's built-in functions called GetImageWidthHeight which, after passing it the filename of a GIF or JPG image, will return the "WIDTH=xxx HEIGHT=xxx" parameters that you can put in an <IMG> tag. But in this case, I used it to size the Javascript pop-up window instead. It's a handy alternative to jumping back and forth between your HTML editor and PMView just to get an inline image's tag right.

This final version of the multipurpose, widget-enhanced screenshot-linking macro with the pop-up Javascript windows is included in the ZIP file attached to this article. It also includes the e-mail macro and an "easy peasy" image macro that not only figures out the picture's dimensions by itself, but also sets a default (and override-able) ALT and ALIGN tag. There's a sample web page in there that uses all the tags too, so you can easily see how to use them in your own pages.

Download the source for this week's article: ( http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/dws.zip ) dws.zip (53K)

PPWizard 
by Dennis Bareis (http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dbareis/index.htm) 
	download from Dennis Bareis' Homepage 
	http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dbareis/ppwizard.htm (263K) 
	Registration: Freeware  

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Mensys Top 10 Selling Software  - Mensys

Summary: A list of the Top 10 selling OS/2 software titles, according to Mensys

Position	Product				Developer

1		OS/2 FixPak CD		Mensys
2		Warp V4 Upgrade		IBM
3		StarOffice Personal CD	Star Division
4		Lotus Smartsuite 2.0		Lotus
5		Aurora Beta			IBM
6		Warp V3			IBM
7		Warp V4			IBM
8		VisualAge C++ V4 Upgrade	IBM
9		StarOffice de Luxe		Star Division
10		Borland C++ for OS/2 V2	Borland


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The following are the companies that made this issue possible.

(http://www.rsj.de)RSJ Software
The successful software CD-Writer for OS/2 by RSJ. CD-Writer is suitable for backup, data filing, creating Audio CDs etc. and is compatible with most CD-Recorders.

(http://www.crosstec.net/)CrossTec
NetOp - A cross-platform solution to remote-controlling any PC from anywhere in the world.

(http://www.prioritymaster.com/)ScheduPerformance, Inc.
Dramatically improve performance on your OS/2 system now with the patented priority scanning logic and visual priority identification of Priority Master II.

(http://www.perfectniche.com/html/smack/smindex.html)Perfect Niche Software
Smack! The easy to use, fast, intuitive and fun software for all your labeling needs in OS/2

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

(http://www.bmtmicro.com/)BMT Micro
Your complete source for over 175 of the best OS/2 shareware applications available.  Drop by today and check out our WWW catalog or download the .INF version.

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Copyright 1999   -   Falcon Networking
ISSN 1203-5696

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