RAndY's RumOR RaG June 1992 NEW MICROSOFT SKU Microsoft is currently doing marketing studies in preparation for a summer launch of a combined DOS 5/Windows 3.1 product. This will enable users to install both products more easily. I reported on this last month, but I've since gotten a few more details. What is clear is that there will be a common installer for both DOS and Windows. Right now, Microsoft is evaluating the demand for a shrink-wrapped version of a DOS 5/Windows 3.1 package. They're also trying to figure out which market segment this type of product would appeal to. As I get ready to wrap things up, this product is now on the market. --------------- NEWS IN YER FACE Spinnaker has finally released PFS:Publisher for Windows. The package combines a word processor, style sheets, 12 scalable fonts, clip art, layout tools, and preset templates. A browsing feature lets you scan through clip-art libraries and template libraries visually --------------- I finally saw the famous After Dark screen blanking program for Windows. What a bunch of crap! Who needs this junk clogging up their hard drives anyway? DEL *.* --------------- When Bill Gates was asked about Kaleida (the IBM/Apple joint venture) at a NYPC user group meeting, he called the start-up nothing more than a "press release". --------------- Microsoft is attempting to woo some dBase experts at Borland's dBase conference. The carrot being dangled is FoxPro and Cirrus. --------------- By now you've surely heard the flap about the Wingding typeface included with Windows 3.1? If you type in NYC it gives you a skull-and-crossbones, the Star of David, and the thumbs-up symbol. Some imbecile somewhere decided that Microsoft is deliberately saying that dead Jews are good or some such nonsense. Get a life! --------------- I hear that Texas Instruments is thinking of buying Cyrix and putting the pressure on Intel. Makes sense to me. --------------- Chips & Technologies has filed a counterclaim against Intel, alleging that Intel's 386SL architecture relies on technology patented by C&T. --------------- In other chip news, AMD has been granted a license to manufacture its version of the 386 chip. Of course Intel will appeal and says that the court decision has no relationship to the 486 chip. --------------- The first bug in OS/2 2.0 has surfaced. OS/2 users cannot cut and paste between some Windows and Presentation Manager applications. A fix will be included in an OS/2 upgrade later this year. Until then, users can copy and paste rather than cut and paste, or start the Win-OS/2 session first, then launch the Presentation Manager session. --------------- Lotus is pumping the development cycle of Ami Pro. They hope to announce Version 3 in June with a release date this summer. Improved performance and drag-and-drop editing are expected to be among the enhancements. Expect an OS/2 version out by Labor Day. --------------- FoxPro for Windows is not yet in beta testing. Fox executives have shown it to some prominent xBasers, but the rumor is that Microsoft wants to incorporate some of Cirrus' Windows interface into the product and that will take a while. --------------- Intel recently slashed prices by 58% on 486SX chips (yawn) in a move obviously aimed at competitors AMD and Cyrix. Predictions are that by the end of the year you'll see 486SX systems selling in the $1,000 range. All of this is real nice, but my advice is to go with the DX. --------------- Developer will finally get a chance to get a Windows NT developer's kit this summer. Until now, Microsoft has been carefully controlling these things with only a couple of hundred out there. Expect this to take place in mid-July at an NT developers conference. --------------- Borland will unveil Paradox 4 for DOS at a developers conference in early June. The product will feature support for memo fields, hastened query performance, and event trapping. It will also be able to read more data formats including dBase DBF files. (No one knows if it will be able to utilize Paradox for Windows tables.) The outlook in the Windows spreadsheet department are not so promising. Borland has cancelled a June 22 event which would have featured Quattro Pro for Windows. Apparently, they are adding features to compete with Excel 4.0, including a "Turbofill" function. --------------- Somebody's Thinking Department: Hewlett-Packard recently introduced a high-capacity cartridge for their popular DeskJet printers. These cartridges have a see-through case so you can see how much ink you have left. Good idea, eh? --------------- FACELIFT FOR WINDOWS 2 Facelift was the first scalable font package that I used for Windows. Back then, the idea of scalable type was an incredible idea. And I've always thought that Bitstream fonts looked better than anybody else's. But Facelift was not entirely compatible with Windows 3.1, and it was certainly slower with the new Windows. Facelift 2 sports a new interface that is much friendlier than the original. Huge icons along the right of the panel let you choose different options with a choice of beginner and advanced user. Installation is as easy as it gets and it now supports both Speedo and Type 1 fonts. A one-line help message is displayed whenever your mouse moves over an option in addition to the regular on-line help system. The program seems just as fast as ATM with Windows 3.1 and there are plenty of options to let you customize the way you want things to work. There's even an option to let you create specialized fonts with fills and shadows (from existing fonts ). Go for the upgrade, it's worth it. --------------- NEW PRODUCTS Two new products have come to my attention that you may find interesting. Autosketch for Windows takes the popular DOS program and makes it easier to use under the Windows environment. You've got customizable, on-screen toolboxes, OLE support, and more. A Quick Start manual is included to get you going right away and an extensive tutorial takes you through the initial steps for creating a drawing. Features include associative dimensioning, multiple layers, sixth decimal place accuracy, and tools such as stretch, scale, chamfer, and fillet. Also included are over 2,000 pre-drawn symbols drawn in realistic scale and to an object's true size. From the folks who brought you the Far Side Computer Calendar comes the CATHY Daily Planner. This has the same features as the Far Side Calendar including 365 cartoons along with the day- organizer planner features. It's available in DOS, Windows, and Mac versions. --------------- WINSPEED How would you like to speed up Windows without putting out several hundred dollars for a co-processed video card? The low cost solution is Winspeed, a software-only accelerator. You need a VGA card with at least 512K based on one of the following chip sets: Tseng Labs ET-4000, Trident 8800 or 8900, Paradise, Western Digital, Video Seven, or ATI. Fortunately, all of these are extremely common. You get a choice of resolutions in either 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768 - all with 256 colors (the resolution depends upon the capabilities of your card). The installation program will automatically detect the type of card you have and then unpack the drivers to your hard drive. Then just run Setup out of Windows, select the resolution you want, and that's all there is to it. You need to understand that there is only so much you can do with software. You can not expect the same performance that you get with a co-processed video card. But the results are definitely noticeable. Not everything you do with Windows will move faster, but the difference is very evident as you work with applications. --------------- MAINTENANCE RELEASES If you're a registered owner of WordPerfect for Windows, call their order department or contact your reseller for an interim release. Besides fixing problems reported since its release, you now have drag-and-drop editing, a zoom edit button (on the ruler) so that you can edit your page in any magnification from 50% to 400%, bullet and envelope macros, a provision for adding dialog boxes to macros, on-line macro help, table math, and remappable alphanumeric keys. The cost through WordPerfect is $15. They still need to fix it so that when you're done spell checking a document, the spell checker box disappears. When you switch from portrait to landscape with a Windows printer driver, it still takes forever for "Updating Printer Information" - JEEZ. And who's the genius that decided to ship the interim release on 19 360K disks? Ever heard of high density? Word for Windows is also scheduled for a maintenance release which will fix a problem that generated a UAE when spell checking headers and footers. Improved will be printing large and complex TIFF images, glossary problems, and file corruption problems with Word 1.x. This should be available as you read this and is designated Word for Windows 2.0a. --------------- WINDOWS 3.1 TIPS & CHEAP TRICKS How would you like having a windowed DOS session display 50 lines instead of the normal 25? Edit SYSTEM.INI so that there is a line under the [NonWindowsApp]section that reads "ScreenLines=50". You can also use a value of 43, but this only works with VGA, of course. Apparently this also works with Windows 3.0. Want to cheat at Solitaire and Minesweeper? Hold down CTRL-ALT-SHIFT when you play a Draw Three game and the cards actually turn over one at a time without counting against you. For Minesweeper, you first change your Desktop color to black, then minimize all your applications. Move the mouse pointer into the playing area, then type "xyzzy" on your keyboard and press ENTER. Press the SHIFT key and move the mouse slightly. A single white pixel will light up in the upper left corner of the screen if your pointer is on a "safe" square. Check out a book called "Winning!" by John Hedtke and published by Peachpit Press (510-548-4393). It sells for $14.95 and has tips on the games in the three Entertainment Packs. --------------- MORE WINDOWS 3.1 ERRATA Have you ever looked in your WIN.INI file and wondered what the [Compatibility] section was all about? These are known collectively as AppHacks. We've had two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1, and one of the things Microsoft did was to find performance enhancements in Windows' code. Some of these improvements broke the back of Windows applications that depended upon the original behavior. This is why some applications have needed minor tweaking to work right with Windows 3.1. Check out the line for Excel, for example. The Excel=0x1000 fixes the fact that Excel developers hard-wired the bit-mapped font names Tms Rmn and Helv into the tutorial. With the flag set, Windows 3.1 supplies Excel with the old names it needs, instead of the new names MS Serif and MS Sans Serif. The Wpwinfil=0x0006 flag partially corrects a WordPerfect for Windows module's inability to print graphics on landscape-oriented pages. I mentioned above when discussing the WordPerfect for Windows interim release that you still get that irritating "Updating Printer Information" message when changing printer drivers. Try changing that line to Wpwinfil=0x1206, according to Kevin Adamson (Manager of WpCorp's Windows testing). --------------- WIRED FOR SOUND PRO Here's a utility for those of you with sound cards. You get a clock that talks, a talking system monitor, a sound editor, and the ability to attach sounds to almost any system event (not just the six or so that Windows allows) - and you get 100 sounds too. The talking alarm clock will speak the time as well as allow you to set an alarm which is announced with Big Ben chimes, a Cuckoo, or a prerecorded sound. The talking system monitor tells you available system resources, free RAM, and disk space. This thing would drive me nuts real quick. Windows 3.1 allow you to attach a sound to one of seven system events, such as System Start, System Exit, and Exclamation Point. Wired for Sound Pro enables you to go beyond that and attach sound to dialog boxes, printer timeout messages, Save Data dialogs, and much more. The sound editor is similar to the one that comes with Windows, but gives you more options for editing and effects. The biggest plus is that you can convert sound files between WAV, VOC, SND, and other formats. The big draw is the inclusion of 100 sounds ranging from somebody saying "Pick One of These Things" to burps and farts (really). Some of these samples are pretty stupid, but others are quite useful. Wired for Sound Pro supports a SoundBlaster or any Windows 3.1 compatible sound card. Street price is around $50. --------------- STAR TREK 25th ANNIVERSARY If you're a Star Trek fan like I am, you'll be interested by Interplay's game, Star Trek 25th Anniversary. The game supports EGA and VGA as well as popular sound cards. Installation takes 30 minutes to 3 hours depending upon your CPU. Once the laborious process is done, you can play the game. The 256 color VGA graphics seem crude compared to the Sierra games. The music is good, too. My complaint is in playing the game. The documentation is more than adequate, but there are too many things to remember (or maybe I'm just getting old). You have to remember to talk to Spock and the other characters, remember which mouse button does what as well as remembering that "S" turns on the shields, etc. In addition you have to control the phasers, photon torpedoes, communications, warp drive, and more. The installation takes too long, the graphics are somewhat crude, and it's too hard to remember all the keystrokes. --------------- WILLIE BEAMISH This game is billed as state-of-the-art gaming using the animation talents of the Disney organization. Of course, the graphics are very well done and the use of color is very reminiscent of a cartoon. The installation determines your configuration without asking you a bunch of questions. The interface is totally mouse-oriented. You're a nine-year-old kid who has to solve problems which are multiple choice scenarios. For example, you're in the back yard pushing your little sister on the swing. She wants you to push harder and swing higher. Do you do wimp out or see how high you can make the little brat fly? Do you smart mouth the school principal when you're in his office and risk ending up in military school? These are a couple of the scenarios you'll be involved with. The whole package is very well done, but I'm guessing this is a game aimed at at least teenagers. This is not for little kids and the point of the game seems vague until you get used to playing it. I haven't finished it yet, but most of the situations aren't too difficult to figure out. This is lots of fun and the music is pretty good for sound card owners. So, what do you do when the school bully corners you in the pizzeria's restroom and tries to bash your brains in for farting in the booth next to him? --------------- OS/2 2.0 Well, we've all been waiting for this one, but is it worth the wait? First you open the Excel-class box to find 25 high-density disks (1.2MB). The written documentation is sparse for such a complex product, but the majority of the information is available on-line. Insert the Installation disk and reboot your computer. After a little while, you see the big IBM logo and you insert the first of 18 disks(not to mention six printer disks). When you get done with disk #6, the computer will reboot and installation will continue while OS/2 is running. You're presented with a list of options from which you can install the whole thing, or just take what you need. The installation takes a good 45 minutes or so, most of which is doing the "floppy shuffle". Once OS/2 is up and running, you're greeted with a rather mundane color scheme (which is easily changed). Remember, this is a graphical 32-bit operating system. If you install DOS and Windows support you can kiss about 25 megs of your hard drive goodbye. OS/2 has taken some lessons from the Macintosh. The Workplace Shell operates very much like a Mac, but that's not all bad. One of my complaints with Windows is that you have to highlight a file or group of files, then tell it to delete them. It's much easier to drag their icons to something resembling a garbage can. But since IBM designed OS/2, they've taken the corporate metaphor and replaced the trashcan with a shredder. Working with OS/2, you're no longer concerned with directories, paths, and such mundane things. The idea is to get some work done. They've included a number of "applets" similar to Windows. You've got a daily planner, calendar, text editor, charting package, terminal package, and even some games. There's an on-line tutorial to get you acquainted with the interface because you'll need some practice. Both mouse buttons are used to perform operations and if you're a Windows fan it will take some getting used to. After working with it a while, the process is very intuitive. Before turning off your system, remember to use the Shutdown command so that all data is saved. Performance isn't bad, but I think it could be better. I imagine that the graphic nature of the interface extracts a high price in processor time. It's hard to say how useful or popular OS/2 will become until there are some applications out there. DOS performance is excellent. It will run almost any DOS application with the snap you'd expect at a DOS prompt. Windows support, however, needs a bit more work. The mouse feels jerky to me and the performance of the Windows 3.0 emulation seems slow. (Maybe I'm just used to Windows 3.1.) Now, you're not really running DOS or Windows. OS/2 emulates both of these by first shelling to an OS/2 command line, then running the emulation. The Windows 3.0 emulation was pretty accurate though. I use an application that would not print to the DeskJet in Windows 3.0 and it won't do it in OS/2 either. The games that are included are interesting. There's that bizarre Reversi that's been bundled with Windows since forever. A Cat & Mouse game lets new users get used to using a mouse. (By the way, the mouse driver is very dynamic and takes a little getting used to.) There's a puzzle where you slide numbered tiles to get them in order. Klondike is the classic solitaire game, but IBM gives you an option to cheat if you want. A chess game is also included which can be played over a network. Graphics in all of the games are crude compared to Windows games. So, now comes the question. Is OS/2 for you? The minimum requirements are a 386SX with 4 MB of RAM and 30 MB of free hard drive space. Yeah, right! You'd better have a DX processor, the faster the better, the most RAM, and biggest hard drive you can afford. IBM has done a remarkably good job considering their track record with writing code. The test will be to see who supports the environment. --------------- COREL DRAW! 3.0 As you read this, Corel Systems should be shipping Version 3 of their popular illustration program. Upgrades through the channel will be $149. Text has always been a strong card for Corel and now you will be able to type and edit text directly on the screen, combined with a spell checker, thesaurus, hyphenation, and columns. You will be able to do a dynamic blend along a path with a rainbow option for multi-color blends. You can generate simple 3-D objects with all the extrusion, perspective, and envelope functions you've had before as well as the color options. The screen redraw has been enhanced so much that one beta tester says it's faster in preview mode than it is now in wire frame mode. The preview is in full color and editable. Finally, you'll have context-sensitive help online with a consistent interface. There will be all of the importing and exporting you're familiar with along with color and grayscale bitmap exports with user definable resolution. CorelPHOTO-PAINT is another included module which contains all the editing tools you need for working with 24-bit color images. CorelCHART is module which gives you true 3-D charts, pictographs, and almost every type of chart you've ever heard of. Data input is freeform with analysis tools like mean, standard deviation, and more. Of course, OLE server capabilities and DDE links to Excel and Lotus are built-in. CorelSHOW will play animated flicks from within a presentation and includes a slide sorter for easy organization. This module can act as an OLE client. CorelMOSAIC previews application files such as BMP, EPS, GIF, and more. It has batch printing capabilities and will also print simple catalogs of your artwork. CorelTRACE is still included featuring standalone color and black-and-white autotracing. The package requires a 386 or better (286 in protected mode with 4MB of RAM). Windows 3.1 is required for TrueType fonts and Windows 3.0 font support is provided by ATM if you have it. This looks like a killer. A Macintosh version of Corel is due out this fall along with a networking version of the Windows product. --------------- STICKER FUN Why is everyone all of a sudden including stickers of their product logos? The new Procomm Plus for Windows has a page of stickers, OS/2 has a page of stickers, Willy Beamish comes with some, and the Windows Resource Kit has one big sticker. Why are companies including these in their software packages? I took the big one from the Windows Resource Kit and put it in the back window of my car. It's one of those plastic jobs that doesn't require adhesive. I guess if we have to have these things in the software packages for a while, I'd like to cast my vote for the non-adhesive kind. Instead of having my rear window cluttered with decals of states I've visited, I can have decals of software I don't use. --------------- PROCOMM PLUS FOR WINDOWS I've looked at several telecommunications packages for Windows and they've all left me cold. You spend too much time pulling down menus and it just doesn't work well for this type of software. Datastorm has done an excellent job in bringing their popular DOS program to Windows. Installation is through Windows and is very easy. The screen is very clean without a bunch of crap cluttering it up. There is the obligatory "Action Bar" as they call it, but it contains icons for the functions you need the most. You'll find an icon for your dialing directory, script files, system setup, scrollback buffer, clipboard, uploads and downloads, phone hang-up, and a few more which will display if you run in 800x600 or higher resolution. You can use your dialing directory with parameters for every entry displayed, or just click on an arrow next to the icon and highlight the name of the remote you want to call. The script icon is of a man running and it's animated when a script is running. I hope you've saved your old ASP files, because the new Procomm will need to recompile them. There is provision for converting your old dialing directory, however. So how does it work? It works great! I called a local BBS and hit the minimize button while I was downloading a file, played FreeCell, and when the transfer was done it beeped at me. There seemed to be no loss in download speed when I ran it in the background. If you have a modem that runs faster than 2400 baud, Datastorm suggests you use a 16550 UART to avoid dropping characters. Host mode is done through a script file, the source code of which is included so you can make custom modifications if necessary. I've only experienced one problem so far. I have turned off connection logging, but it still does it. If you turn off the Meta Key display, remember to turn it off in each of your dialing directory entries. The documentation is as good as it gets for a comm program. My favorite feature is the ability to view GIF files as you download them. The help system goes beyond the normal help in Windows. You get a screen that looks like what you've asked for help on. Just click on the area of the screen you need help for and it goes from there. I just read a review by a computer columnist in the big Seattle paper and he raked this program over the coals claiming it was too difficult to use. He's obviously an idiot. Upgrades are $76 (shipping included) from Datastorm. --------------- FONT EMBEDDING As if you don't already have enough to worry about, there's currently a lot of talk about new technology called font embedding. The soon to be released PowerPoint supports this and the industry is buzzing about its implications. An application that supports font embedding will save the fonts as part of a file, so if you transport the file to another computer where the font is not available, you can still print your document. There are options for making this feature read-only, but then you could not edit your document. Making a file read-write lets the user edit the document, but also gives them a font they did not pay for or otherwise obtain a license. What do you think? --------------- AMI PRO 3 BETA PROBLEMS Lotus is expected to announce Ami Pro Version 3 at PC Expo, but word is that they're having some problems with the beta version. A partial redesign is necessary in the area of mail merges. When using the new SmartMerge feature to merge a list and form letter skeleton with fields that don't match, Ami Pro has no way of terminating the erring merge. Rebooting the computer is the only recourse. Apparently there's another difficulty in the inability to override formatting options assigned via a style sheet. When they finally get the thing working, expect to see Fast Format, using the mouse to invoke often used formats, SmartMerge, SmartIcons that can be sized and edited, and a style sheet viewer. You'll have text drag-and-drop editing, implementation of the right mouse button, automatic bulleting, grammar checker, and automatic numbered lists with right-aligned numbering. A significant speed increase over the current version is also part of the product. --------------- MIDI INTERFACE I finally picked up the MIDI interface for the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card. It's just a little box with a joystick port, and MIDI IN, OUT, and THRU (actually, there are two out's). You can get it bundled with Passport's Trax, sequencing software for Windows. I haven't had a chance to hook up a MIDI keyboard yet, but just playing with the sample files is very easy. The band I play in is just starting to record a tape, so I'll keep you informed on how things are going. We hope to use the computer for some of the duties just to make the process easier with what equipment we have. I've used DOS-based sequencers and it looks like Windows is a much better way to go. --------------- NEXT MONTH If Microsoft ever sends me my copy of Excel 4.0, you'll see some talk about that. I've seen and worked with the product and it is incredible. There might be some talk about MIDI and hopefully Sierra will finally ship Pinball for Windows. ================================= DISCLAIMER RAndY's RumOR RaG is published on a monthly basis by AINSWORTH COMPUTER SERVICES and is available on various BBS's, GEnie, and America Online as well as in Modem News. In case anyone cares, RAndY's RumOR RaG is produced on a DTK 386-33 with 16 megs of memory, Cyrix Fasmath co-processor, ATI VGA Wonder+ card (1 MB), Pro Audio Spectrum 16 Sound Card, 105 MB Toshiba IDE hard drive, Teac 1.2 MB, 360K, and 1.44 MB floppies, Sceptre SVGA display, Microsoft mouse, WordPerfect for Windows and transmitted through a US Robotics HST Dual Standard modem. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Comments should be addressed to Ainsworth Computer Services on GEnie, America Online, phone, analog mail, or whatever method makes you feel good. AINSWORTH COMPUTER SERVICES 605 W. Wishkah Aberdeen, WA 98520-6031 (206) 533-6647 GEnie Address: RAG America Online: RumOR RaG