Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education
If you have an announcement you would like to have appear in our developer page,
please send it to secretary@os2voice.org
"We are putting plans together to release an OS/2 update of the product.
The product is about 5-6 weeks from completion, but the real issue is if people
will spend the money for an OS/2 upgrade. The OS/2 market is very slow these days
and in order for us to do an upgrade we need at least 1000 upgrade orders just to
break even.
The internal debate right now is how to best gauge the interest from our OS/2
base. We can't do the upgrade if we are going to loose money, so we are thinking
of offering a pre-order incentive and if we get 1000 orders we will do the upgrade.
What do you think?
Regards,
Brent"
Let's help them gauge interest by emailing them our interest to the support@cds-inc.com.
Cheers,
Serge Naggar
First and foremost I'd like to apologize for the lack of efforts recently on
the ProNews/2 project. A series of events have occured which have caused the project
to be in a state of flux. What it boils down to, is the programmers that were working
on the project have suffered from burn out and are taking either a long or permanent
leave. The departure was amicable, and revisions are still likely. However, I'm
concerned about timely updates and reliable support. Since the OS/2 development
group has since departed for the time being, that leaves us with the developers
who are exploring other platforms (Be, Linux and Win32). These people obviously
aren't qualified to update and support the OS/2 product.
This leaves Panacea Software with a few choices. First, and not my favorite,
is to call it a day and drop all OS/2 support. Since OS/2 users have always been
there and we appreciate all of the support, I'd like to do something a little more
beneficial to the OS/2 community. This leads to options 2 and 3.
Second, we have explored releasing the ProNews source code to other groups or
companies that have the resources to produce updates and provide support on the
OS/2 platform. We have also considered making the source public domain.
Third, which is the best for both the customers and Panacea Software is to recruit
OS/2 developers. This has been difficult, but I'm hoping perhaps this message may
bring out some interested parties.
I certainly appreciate your feedback. This is my personal email address in the
reply-to, and I welcome anything productive. Personal attacks will be politely ignored.
If I can garner up some positive energy and a sense of direction from others, I'll
move in that direction. If we cannot, then I'm afraid option 1 is the only option
I have left.
ProNews/2 and Panacea Software are not by any means "dead". We simply
had some devastating blows to our forward progress, and are stepping back to rethink
and reorganize to make that forward progress a reality once again.
Thank you again.
Bill Buchanan
President, Panacea Software
Greetings and salutations,
In the latest version of XFolder this new request for help was added by Ulrich
Müller the author of it. I think his development of the WPS is of great future
value for OS/2 Warp, as more apps are becoming Javabased. In this text he explains
his future plans for XFolder:
"If you like XFolder and would like to contribute to it, your support will
be very welcome. XFolder is slowly beginning to become too complex to be handled
by one person all alone.
You don't have to be a programmer to help. I'd appreciate any support in the
following areas:
1.Translations. XFolder is designed to be translateable in a fairly easy way.
All language-dependent parts have been separated from the actual "intelligence"
of the program into separate files, which can be translated independently.
If you're interested in translating XFolder to your language, you can simply
download the XFolder sources from my homepage, which contain everything neccessary
for this. You don't have to be a programmer to do this, but it would be of great
help if you knew HTML, since both
XFolder's Online Reference and the help file were originally written in HTML and
then simply converted to the IBM format, which I dislike very much.
In this case, please contact me, so I can add you to my mailing list to allow
you to get news about changes in time.
2.Documentation. I am looking for someone to take over maintenance of the XFolder
INF and HLP files. It just takes too much time away from programming to always have
to add documentation while adding new features, and I tend to overlook stuff sometimes.
This applies especially to the German documentation. So if you know German and/or
English and HTML, please contact me.
If you're a programmer and have some experience in PM and/or WPS programming,
please contact me also. I have great plans for XFolder's future and would like to
turn it into more of an "XWPS" package to overcome the most obvious WPS
limitations which exist today. Since there's little hope that IBM will do anything
about this, I believe the OS/2 community needs to do it themselves. The following
major things are on my to-do list (I am not listing the "little" features
that I'll add myself soon):
1.WPS file handling. This needs some serious reworking. I cannot believe that
the WPS hangs every other time one copies more than a dozen files. File handling
is the main task of an operating system's shell, and the current implementation
needs at least the following enhancements: thread-safety, speed, proper progress
bars when copying, a "Cancel" button that's not always disabled, more
meaningful error messages etc.pp. This will require all of the WPS file-handling
methods to be reworked (wpCopy, wpMove etc.).
2.Populating folders. One of the reasons that the WPS has become so much slower
in Warp 4 is that the WPS now seems to create object handles for every single file
while populating a folder, which wasn't the case with Warp 3. Object handles are
a thoughtful mechanism which is neccessary for program objects and shadows, but
they should only be created when neccessary. I suspect this misbehavior is situated
in wpPopulate, which therefore needs some rework too.
3.Icon handling. Drag'n'drop in the WPS always causes icons to be arranged in
a fairly random way. This should be improved.
4.WPProgram. I have never understood why there's an object for global DOS/Win-OS/2
settings if the program objects don't respect the settings there. We need support
for global settings and also global and individual environment variables in program
objects so that CONFIG.SYS does not always have to be modified.
5.WarpCenter. That thing is instable, slow, and does not conform very well with
the rest of the WPS. This hould be completely reprogrammed. Since XFolder already
has code for those "folder content" menus, this shouldn't be too hard
to to.
6.Multi-user support. The WPS is already designed to support multiple users thru
the use of multiple OS2.INI files and Desktop hierarchies, so I cannot quite understand
why IBM is not implementing this. XFolder could do this; I am thinking of replacing
the PROTSHELL and/or RUNWORKPLACE statements in CONFIG.SYS with some XFolder executable,
which will then start PMSHELL.EXE with a bunch of preset environment variables,
most importantly OS2.INI settings and a UNIX-like HOME environment variable to support
multiple configurations for applications in a "home" directory for each
user. XFolder should then offer a context menu item to "logoff" or something.
7.OS/2 also needs to be able to restart Presentation Manager somehow without
having to reboot, for example to change display resolutions. The current solution
is a joke. If you have any ideas about this, especially how to terminate and restart
PM without blocking the system, please contact me.
So if you're interested in adding any of these features to XFolder (or if you
have other suggestions), you'd be very welcome to join the project! Any help is
appreciated."
Sincerely Yours
Roger