PC World Komputer 1995 November

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Text File | 1995-05-01 | 35KB | 561 lines

****************************************************************************** Announcing PC/2 - Program Commander/2 Version 1.90 for IBM OS/2 2.x, 3.x Presentation Manager Copyright (C) by Roman Stangl May, 1995 Version 1.90 Draft ****************************************************************************** Dear User! If you are familiar with the LaunchPad for OS/2 Warp, then imagine PC/2 as a similar program for OS/2 Presentation Manager (but not requiring the WPS to be running), with many powerful features. Actually, PC/2 was available more than 2 years ago, and so has quite a lead on the LaunchPad! Moreover, PC/2 offers considerable RAM savings and increased response time for those who may not own the latest poweruser platform, or have oodles of RAM to run all of our applications. In RAM and CPU speed constrained machines, PC/2 offers some definite operational improvements over the standard WPS configuration. When optionally running PC/2 as the replacement for the standard Workplace Shell, you can save up to 4 megs over the memory consuming WPS, enabling faster response, and even MMPM operation or BonusPak applications in RAM hungry machines!! PC/2 is an addon or replacement for the WPS (Work Place Shell) that also adds a feature that OS/2 is definitely missing! After PC/2 is loaded, you may click mouse button 1 anywhere on the Desktop to display a user-configurable Popup Menu, where you can select an application to start. Alternatively, you may define a Hotkey for an application. Once the Hotkey is pressed, PC/2 switches to the application if it is running, or launches the application if it isn't running. This greatly simplifies starting any application - you don't have to click on folders/folder levels/icons anymore to launch it - no more messed up Desktop full of folders/icons, and the attendant video redraws of same. Even more, PC/2 allows you to expand your Desktop 81-fold. Just move the mouse pointer over the surrounding rows and/or columns of your screen, and you will be able to scroll your Desktop up to 1 screen-width and 1 screen-height in all directions. Just imagine the virtual Desktop as a further screen available left, left and below, below,... to your physical display. Of course, the Hotkey feature switches to the Virtual Desktop the hotkeyed application is running in, or has xy coordinates defined for. You may also switch to any Desktop by mouse button one doubleclicking on the overview window of PC/2. PC/2 also allows you to switch into a sliding focus mode, similar to X-Windows. Merely drag the mouse to a screen edge, and you automatically jump to the adjacent desk. PC/2 has also seamless WIN-OS2 support, even without the WPS running. PC/2 also provides a Spooler Control Window which lets you manipulate your printer queues and/or print jobs. When running PC/2 as a WPS replacement, the Spooler Control Window is the only interface for the OS/2 spooler. Running PC/2 on a 4 MB machine as the WPS replacement gives you more performance boost than running OS/2 Warp WPS (due to the much smaller memory requirements compared with the WPS). Of course the WPS can be started when required, just by typing START PMSHELL in a OS/2 command window or by creating a corresponding entry in the Popup Menu. Running PC/2 as the WPS in a 4 MB machine gives you decent performance, ***even when running Multimedia or applications from the Bonus Pack.*** For every application you start, the PC/2 configuration file contains: *) Program Data: Title, Path and Filename, working directory and parameters. For DOS programs you can enter the required DOS Settings in an entryfield or just use the standard OS/2 DOS settings dialog. You may also configure PC/2 to request commandline parameters before an application is started. You can also add WPS Program or Folder Objects to be started. You may add a program by dragging a program or folder from your Drives object or favorite file manager onto the dialog and dropping it. *) Program Style: Default, Maximized, Minimized, Invisible, no Autoclose, background execution and Autostart (which works like the OS/2 startup folder). *) Program Size & Position: User selectable size and position. You may even start an application on any virtual Desktop, if the application doesn't overwrite your choices. *) Program Type: WPS default, OS/2 and DOS Window or FullScreen, Presentation Manager, WPS Object and Seamless WIN-OS2. Seamless WIN-OS2 sessions may be common or separate sessions. *) Hotkey: You may define a Hotkey to quickly start or switch to a certain application. *) Program Priority: You may adjust the priority of programs. Warning: changing the default priority may induce serious performance problems, because you easily can give a program 100 percent of the CPU. *) Environment: You may replace the session's default environment, which gets inherited from PC/2 by an environment containing additional, replacement or modified environment variables of PC/2's environment. For OS/2 3.00 WARP and above, it is also allowed to specify BEGINLIBPATH and ENDLIBPATH here, even if both are not part of the session's environment. Full help is implemented, so I would strongly urge you to read the help panels to get a good idea how you can customize PC/2 to your needs. Installation: *) First unpack the archive PC2v190.ZIP file with UNZIP. *) If you are upgrading from a previous version of PC/2, save your Popup Menu configuration files (usually PC2.CFG), and stop PC/2 from running in order to allow the files to be updated. Warning! PC/2 Version 1.90 PC2HOOK.DLL is *not* compatible with any previous versions. When using an existing configuration file, the first time you click to show the Popup Menu, the Configuration dialog is displayed. This is because you have to add the Control Menuitem "Configure Popup Menu Settings" first. *) Then use the REXX installation script to install PC/2: Syntax: INSTALL PC/2's files will be copied into the drive, path and filename entered during installation. An object is then created on the Desktop and PC/2 is then started displaying the help panels. *) PC/2 should be started upon bootup. You can either click on the PC/2 icon and OS/2 will start PC/2 for you the next time you boot. This does not hold true if you have used the statement SET RESTARTOBJECTS=STARTUPFOLDERSONLY in your CONFIG.SYS. If you have RESTARTOBJECTS set this way, then you must create a PC/2 object/shadow in the startup folder. *) PC/2 may be used instead of the WPS. PC/2 looks for its *.DLL files in the directory PC2.EXE was started from. So PC/2's *.DLL must either be in PC/2's directory or in a path pointed by LIBPATH environment variable in CONFIG.SYS. PC2.HLP may either be in a path pointed to by HELP or in the directory PC/2 is installed and running from. Then edit your CONFIG.SYS to say SET RUNWORKPLACE=[path]PC2.EXE, and rem out your existing RUNWORKPLACE=PMSHELL.EXE The next time you boot, PC/2 has replaced your WPS. (Of course you can then start the WPS from a OS/2 command prompt by typing START PMSHELL or creating an entry in PC/2's Popup Menu.. Moreover, any time you wish, merely switch the rem'd statement, and you have the WPS back again! *) The syntax of PC/2 is: PC2 [-Profile Filename.ext] [-[Double|Single]Click] [-NoAutoStart] or PC2 [/Profile Filename.ext] [/[Double|Single]Click] [/NoAutoStart] where Filename.ext may be any filename for FAT or HPFS filename convention. If you omit the optional profile name, the default profile PC2.CFG is selected. Specifying the option DoubleClick means that the Popup Menu appears after a double-click on the Desktop, instead of a single click. If you don't specify any click option, the option from the PC/2 configuration file is taken. Specifying the option NoAutoStart means, that any sessions marked to be autostarted by PC/2, will not be started this invokation. The commandline options overwrite the settings read from PC2.INI. Warning! when using PC/2 as a WPS replacement don't add command- line parameters to the SET RUNWORKPLACE statement, because this prevents OS/2 from working. Version 1.xx Hints: *) PC/2 is currently under test, so there will be some misspells/ inconsistencies/bugs. PC/2 will NOT destroy any data under any circumstances! *) PC/2 was developed and tested on two different PS/2s under OS/2 2.1 GA (internal release 6.514) and OS/2 2.0 GA (internal release 6.307). PC/2 was also tested to work with OS/2 2.11 (Service Pack for OS/2 2.1 GA). Version 1.90 has no longer been tested under 2.0, but should work too. Version 1.90 has been tested under OS/2 2.10, OS/2 2.11, OS/2 WARP and OS/2 WARP Fullpack. You may contact me via (E-)Mail, if you have problems/suggestions/questions at: *) Internet: rstangl@vnet.ibm.com *) Roman_Stangl@ibm.co.at *) FidoNet: Roman Stangl @ LA BAMBA BBS 2:310/14 Tel.: (Int. Code +43 +1 +6156811) *) FidoNet: Roman Stangl @ IBM Austria National Support BBS Tel.: (Int. Code +43 +1 +21145-6600) *) IBM VNET: 61821799 at VIEVMA *) Snail Mail: Roman Stangl Strebersdorferstr. 46 A-2103 Langenzersdorf, Austria If you find this utility useful and want to honor many many weeks of work, you are welcome to send me 50 to 150 Austrian Schillings (about 5 to 15 US Dollars) to my home address. Please send any donations in CASH, because its much easier for me to exchange foreign currency, than money orders, checks,... Of course, you don't need to pay again, if a new release comes out. Because of the Freeware status of PC/2 I am *not* going to send new versions of PC/2 or anything else by mail (which is likely to become a never ending story), however I will try my best to do support via E-Mail! History: Version 1.00ß: *) First public release Version 1.10: *) Installation improved *) IDLE_SECONDS=10 and IDLE_SENSITIVITY=100 added for DOS sessions *) Source code now included Version 1.20: *) All DOS Settings now configurable *) Standard file dialog added to find the application you want to install to PC/2 *) PC/2 may now be used with or without the WPS - it may even replace the WPS. *) I know the bug occurring occasionally when deleting entries is not removed, but other things have a higher priority. Version 1.30: *) CR, LF added to DOS Settings, if missing. *) DoubleClick command line option added, installation prompts the user, if the user wants to install this option into the PC/2 object. PC/2 now pops up after a double-click, if no click option or the option [-|/]DoubleClick is specified. *) ShutDown OS/2 entry and dialog box added. *) PC2.HLP may also be in the directory of PC/2 instead of a directory pointed by the HELP environment variable. The same applies for PC2HOOK.HLP and the LIBPATH environment variable. PC/2 first attempts to find these files, where it is started from, rather than the paths included in the environment variables. *) Popup Menu now doesn't select an entry, if button 1 is clicked at the bottom of the screen. *) PC2.c V1.20: 257, 564: File close of unopened files removed. Utility.c V1.20: 399, 457: Free of unallocated memory removed. *) DOS and OS/2 batch files automatically added as parameters to their command processors (HPFS names with spaces under two double-quotes). *) FAQ list added. *) Entry-removing bug solved. *) Directory changed to root if only the drive is entered as the working directory. *) User enterable commandline-parameter at run-time added. Now you may enter commandline-parameters immediately before an application is launched. Version 1.40: *) WPS Objects may now also be started by PC/2, even if they are seamless WIN-OS2 sessions. *) PC/2 changes to the root of each non-removable media attached to your system, except for the defined working directory. *) Drag & Drop is now supported. *) PC/2 checks every 2.5 seconds to see if the Desktop window handle has changed, so if you run PC/2 as a WPS replacement, you can start PMSHELL without needing to close PC/2 once after PMSHELL is ready. *) You can now resort (Sub)menus manually. Version 1.50: *) PC/2 configuration file completely rewritten. Should avoid redundant storage and increase fault tolerance. Downwards compatible, so old files can be read, but will be written in the improved format. Some more useful demos, that you may incorporate in your configuration by using an editor, added. *) Optional sliding focus a-la X-Windows added (thanks to Markus Hof and Roman Fischer for providing their source code of XFEEL as a valuable basis). *) Optional virtual Desktops added, expands your physical Desktop to a 9-fold virtual Desktop (thanks to Carrick von Schoultz for giving me the tip to use the flag SWP_NOADJUST). *) Code that handled priority settings completely removed, because applications can't be started as parent process/ child process which would be required to change the priority of processes. *) PC/2 now traces clicks both on the WPS and/or PM, so you can move the WPS into the virtual Desktop and click on the PM. *) PC/2 now maps the coordinates on the window, where you clicked, to the coordinates of the display. This should avoid bad positioning of the Popup Menu (PC/2 now works together with 9LIVES). *) Code that changed to the root directories now should also work, if a removable media is inserted, but not a valid file system (f.e. a CD-ROM with a music-CD inserted) (thanks to Mario Semo for his assistance with DosDevIOCtl). Version 1.60: *) Seamless WIN-OS2 support added, only separate sessions and under 2.0 GA with WPS installed though. Thanks to Alex Stewart for pointing me out how to do this. *) Fixed not moving minimized windows (icons) when Desktop is moved. *) For sliding Focus, added a flag to preserve Z-order of the windows. *) ShutDown message now changes if ShutDown completed. *) Enhanced MakeObj utility, thanks to Ingo Pflanz for his work on this. *) Now PC/2 should also work with networked drives, at least it works with NFS-mounted drived with IBM's TCPIP 1.2.1. Version 1.70: *) First release of an "IBM internal use only" version on OS2TOOLS. *) PC/2's Popup menu now completely configurable, even PC/2's Setup, Config, About, Help, Exit and ShutDown options. *) The Program Installation dialog is now a notebook. *) Separators and Break separators are now supported to improve the clarity of the Popup Menu. *) Exit PC/2 and ShutDown OS/2 message boxes now default to OK, just press Enter to perform action. *) PC/2 now supports user defined Hotkeys to be used to switch to sessions, even on another virtual Desktop. 72 different keys are available. If the application the Hotkey is defined for is not running, PC/2 launches it. *) PC/2 supports specifying the priority of a program to launch. *) Window List support on PM background. This is useful if you are not running OS/2 with the WPS (which saves up to 4 MB memory). *) PC/2 now saves it's size & position along with the default click flag. *) Overview window improved, you may directly switch to any virtual Desktop just by doubleclicking with mouse button 1 on the overview window. *) Bug fixed that dismissed the ShutDown dialog by pressing the ESC-Key. *) SMALLFNT.CMD supplied that replaces the standard system font (10pt. proportional Systemfont) by a smaller 8pt. Helv font. Applying this batch file and rebooting reduces the size of most dialogs to about 2/3 of the previous size, giving you more "workspace" on your Desktop. *) Smarticons added to improve control of windows on PC/2's overview window. Thanks to Michael Wakunda for helping me designing the icons. *) Support for EMX C/C++ added upon a suggestion from Rolf Knebel. *) The user defined position now works, even if the application decides to use its own position. *) PC2HOOK.DLL is now statically linked, and PC/2 is now a multithreaded application. *) The overview window now displays a scaled image of the Virtual Desktop. The windows are named and can be manipulated by applying the currently active smarticon with mouse button 2. *) PC/2's configuration file was enhanced to support the new features. You may use the configuration file from a previous version of PC/2. It will be upgraded the first time you make modifications (and you need to add the Configure Popup Menu Setting when upgrading). *) You may enable mouse button 2 clicks on a window's title- bar to set this window to the bottom (lowering its Z-Order). Thanks to Rolf Knebel for sending me this suggestion coded into PC/2, although I changed it a little bit. Version 1.80: *) Added support for PM background bitmaps. *) Notebooks now size themselves to ensure that all notebook pages are visible, regardless of the video resolution and display used. *) Clicking mouse button 2 on a window's titlebar not only sets this window to the bottom, but also activates the next window below the mouse pointer. Pressing the Ctrl key while clicking on the titlebar only moves the window to bottom, pressing the Alt key activates the default actions of titlebars (usually activating the tracking frame). *) Holding down the Shift key while using the Sliding Focus or a Hotkey will temporarily deactivate these two features. *) Installation now finds the CONFIG.SYS used during boot, not just the one on drive C:.Thanks to Stefan Hora for sending me the sample REXX code. *) Fixed Window List so it is not partly destroyed by Popup Menu when SingleClick is selected. *) Fixed PC/2 sometimes locking up during closing (e.g. closing it from Window List). *) Enabled expanding the WPS to the Virtual Desktop. *) The number of vertical and horizontal Virtual Desktops is now configurable in range of 1 to 9, giving up to 81 Virtual Desktops. *) Now first menuitem of Popup Menu can be configured not to be selected automatically. *) Within the Popup Menu you can now define mnemonics to navigate (the tilde ~ to define a mnemonic is not displayed on the window's titlebar when started). *) For DOS sessions you can now use the standard OS/2 DOS settings dialog, special thanks to Monte Copeland for sharing his knowledge of this undocumented OS/2 call. *) WIN-OS2 sessions now can be started into a common VDM and separate sessions, thanks to Monte Copeland. *) PC/2 now provides an interface to the OS/2 spooler, allowing you to manipulate printer queues and printer jobs even on a system running PC/2 as the WPS replacement. Again thanks to Monte Copeland to make the source of MSHELL available. *) PC/2 is now event triggered when tracking all windows on the Desktop instead of permanently polling OS/2. This greatly reduces CPU load (which averaged 15 % even on an idle system for 1.70) giving 0 load when no windows are created, sized, moved or destroyed (PC/2 idle). The cost of this event triggering is that sometimes the overview window gets painted more than once for an event, simply because OS/2 creates many events on window manipulation where PC/2 can't differentiate between "important" and "unimportant" ones and sometimes the Overview Window contains not exactly the state of windows on the Virtual Desktops immediately. *) PC/2 now opens folders when selected from the Popup Menu after adding them with Drag & Drop to the Program Installation dialog. *) To avoid delay to movements on the Virtual Desktop, movements are no longer queued. That means that as long PC/2 is moving windows on the Virtual Desktop, another moving request is ignored and not queued. Therefore when PC/2 is busy, movement requests are ignored, until PC/2 is ready again. *) You can now hide the titlebar and smarticonbar of PC/2's overview window, which increases the space available to paint the reduced image of the Virtual Desktop. *) The sliding focus has been largely redesigned and now works much better. Warning! Personal experiences show that using a sliding focus on development machines may lock the machine when using the IBM debugger IPMD. *) The Break Separator now is implemented as a special style of a menu entry (working now exactly like in any OS/2 menu). Therefore a menu entry must be available to add this style afterwards, and the Break Separator style must be removed first before removing the menu entry it was defined on. Also resorting of a (sub)menu causes that the Break Separator is resorted together with the menu entry it is defined on. *) Hide button added to smarticonbar. *) In listboxes you can doubleclick on an entry to perform the default action, e.g. doubleclicking on an entry in the Setup dialog automatically opens the Program Installation dialog for this entry. *) Updated sample configuration files. These *.CFG files can be tested by starting PC/2 for example by typing: start PC2 -profile Prompts.cfg *) Menus are disabled during the operation of the last selection of a menu until this operation finished. E.g. you can't click on the Exit icon again, when you have not answered the message box initiated by the previous click on the Exit icon. *) You can change the font used by the Popup Menu, the Spooler Window and the Overview Window by just dragging a font from the font palette onto PC/2's Smarticonbar, the Spooler Container or the Overview Window itself. *) The PC/2 package now contains the WPS applications WPS 2 PC/2, that allows you, to extract settings of WPS Program and Folder Objects, or any other Object that has a Object ID defined, for use within PC/2's Popup Menu. To extract these settings, a simple Drag'n Drop interface is provided. *) Installation now also allows you to recreate WPS icons and to deinstall PC/2. Version 1.90: *) Fixed that PC/2 always defaulted to double-click when invoked. *) Fixed that Menucontrols within PC/2's Popup Menu had not always been treated as Menucontrols, but Menuitems. *) Fixed that when restoring a minimized window on different Virtual Desktop the minimized window get restored and then the Virtual Desktops get switched, moving the just restored window out from the screen. *) Fixed some settings not being saved, when PC/2 was closed due to a ShutDown started by its ShutDown entry or Smarticon. *) Now fonts dragged from the Font Palette over to PC/2's overview window are drawn more exactly. *) Improved resort dialog, you may now select multiple items. *) Fixed that autostart of applications didn't work sometimes, caused due to non-deterministic thread startup times. *) Double-clicking on checkboxes caused controls depending on the state of the checkbox to become invalid. *) Default values for a new installation are now a little bit more intuitive. *) Fixed bug when sorting the root level menu and requesting the Popup Menu immediately after the last menuentry was sorted, but the Resort dialog was not dismissed, caused a trap. *) Fixed that a session was not started in foreground when launched by a Hotkey, and any window but PC/2 previously had the focus, but the session should be started in foreground according to the settings. *) Fixed that PC/2 does not catch the focus from a window, when a Hotkey is pressed that starts another session in background. The same applies when starting a session by selecting it from the Popup Menu. In other words, when you use PC/2 to start a session in background, the input focus returns to the application that had the focus after the selected session has started. *) Fixed that DOS Settings sometimes got corrupted in DOS Settings MLE in Program Installation dialog. *) Fixed that changes didn't get saved into PC2.INI, because code to close PC2.INI after update was missing. *) Fixed that a application's Hotkey got deleted when just opening its Program Installation dialog and pressing CANCEL. *) Now Hotkeys may also be pressed in OS/2 and DOS windowed sessions, however the Hotkey feature is no longer NLS independent. You have to specify the letter as the Hotkey, which is printed on a US-keyboard at the physical key position of the letter you want to define as a Hotkey. *) Hotkeys can now be defined NOT to be systemwide, that is PC/2 will detect them only when either PC/2, the Window List or the WPS has the focus. This will prevent PC/2 from stealing keys from applications. However, to enable PC/2 to "see" the Hotkeys, you have to ensure that either PC/2, the Window List or the WPS has the focus. *) Added the possibility to add, replace or modify environment variables in PC/2's environment, which gets inherited to a session started by PC/2. For OS/2 WARP 3.0, it is also allowed to specify BEGINLIBPATH and ENDLIBPATH, which means that you may not have to reboot after installation of a product which requires changes in the LIBPATH. Just specify the additions to the LIBPATH required by the product in the BEGINLIBPATH or ENDLIBPATH variables, and voila, run the product without rebooting. However, there is no guarantee that this is sufficient for every program, but its definitely worth a try. *) The executable of PC/2 PC2.EXE can now be built in two flavors, one for systems with "slow" video, that is, video chipsets that have sluggish performance when moving data from main memory to video memory (e.g. 8514/A because of its IO-mapped design), or one for systems with "fast" modern chipsets (e.g. XGA, S3) which is the default of PC2.EXE shipped in this package. The compilation for "fast" video does not flicker so much when the overview window is repainted, because most painting is done in main memory than in video memory directly. The compilation for "slow" video is named PC2SVID.EXE, and can either be renamed to PC2.EXE, or you can modify the WPS Program Object of PC/2 generated during the installation. *) Changed the commandline parameters from argc and argv[] to a method I've heard that would be the only working method for OS/2 for PowerPC too. *) WPS 2 PC/2 is now able to extract "WPShadow" class WPS Objects, by locating their original Object and extracting it. *) When running PC/2 as a WPS replacement, PC/2 is selectable from the Window List, to give the possibility to unhide it, but can't be closed, neither from the Window List nor from the Exit smarticon or Exit OS/2 menuitem. *) PC2.CFG is now saved completely human readable, but for backward compatibility, PC/2 will still be able to read configuration files containing previous formats, containing binary values for session types and styles. *) Improved messaging, so that most message boxes have also online help available. *) Embedded PC2.FAQ in online help of PC/2 too. *) Added feature when starting a session into background via a Hotkey, the session that has the focus previously gets the focus returned when the new session is started. *) Invoke SMALLFNT.CMD with the parameter RESTORE to revert back to the standard OS/2 system font. *) When running PC/2 as the WPS you will no longer be able to terminate PC/2 by pressing F3 (the WPS does not allow you to terminate it too). Please read the help panels and enjoy! Roman