
  
  





                       W  I  N  D  O  W  A  T  C  H



             The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet





  
   November 1996                                             Vol.2  No.9
  


  page 2
    WHAT'S INSIDE                                           Vol.2  No.9
  

                                 The Editor's Soapbox  Lois Laulicht
                                        Lean and Mean  Herb Chong
                       A Windows User Looks at Merlin  John M. Campbell
                  NT and Unix: Issues of Connectivity  Jim Plumb
                                    A Matter of Taste  Peter Neuendorffer
   Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: HTML II - A Tutorial  Gregg Hommel
                                    It's ToolBar Time  Jack Passarella
                         Reflections of A ModemJunkie  Leonard Grossman
                     Welcome Back: Quattro 7, Part II  Frank McGowan
                         Symantec's Internet FastFind  Linda Rosenbaum
                                      Making a Museum  Peter Neuendorffer
               Gateway Has Egg on Their Face - Again!  John M. Campbell
                     Sandwich Meat and Unwanted Email  Daniel Christle
 Muddies for Tea! Windows95 for You! A '95 Conversion  Vlad Balak
   Successful Modem Sharing: IShare v.1 from Artisoft  Lois Laulicht
                         Computer Created Art Gallery  Herb Chong
                                        The Last Word  Ben M. Schorr


  page 3
  WindoWatch              The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet
   Volume 2  No. 9                                         November 1996
  


                         The Editor's Soapbox!
                      Searching for a Free Lunch!


The search engines are a bonanza! If your objective is to quickly retrieve
targeted information, they can't be beaten! Search engines, while giving
the Internet utility, may have reduced its potential for making a buck.
When I search for motherboards using the Symantec FastFind, (see Linda
Rosenbaum's product review this issue) the software returns references
to pages and manufacturers concerned with motherboards. It's not the
bannered links to hardware distributors that are sent back but rather
manufacturers and model numbers. What FastFind, or the others like it,
can't do is send back the flavor and individuality of the pages it has
scanned. That which made the page(s) a commodity has been finessed away.
Like most things in life we win and lose simultaneously!

Another case in point: The Internet is slowly becoming a more diverse
place in spite of the many road blocks to make it more American or
Global, or International or none of the above! The ideologies of the few
are being replaced with the needs of the many, albeit very slowly. The
Internet has always been a study in contradictions. The installed mores
of those who came first are slowly being compromised by differing and
conflicting value systems. So, let's spit it out! The Fed will win their
fight and an encryption scheme is coming to protect the many from the
few. Those who don't like it, will screech, stomp and holler. I can
imagine that this is not a first. I'll betcha' there was a hue and cry
when we as a nation gave up vigilante justice with accountable law
enforcement.

On the one hand we shout "we don't want governmental interference,"
while on the other we expect federal services. We do want a free lunch
and try to convince others that our menu is the only menu. Just as a
society matures with an ever changing mix so must this sub-society. Like
it or hate it, we are being hauled yelling and screaming into the main
stream. The options are limited to a closed Internet Old Timers Society
or adapting to the real world of an Internet being co-opted by those
wanting in. This is not an immigration debate! The visionaries among us
who have touted the Net PC will be likened to the railroaders of an
earlier era. The land rush will leave us breathless. I for one hope that
as taxes are imposed for expected services, the online community does
not scapegoat the InterNIC making it the butt for the dissatisfied as
has been the IRS.

Free wheeling is a great concept. Anarchy is for the young and
simplistic not for those with responsibilities. Just as the culture of
the cold war was forced to change, the demonization of governmental
interference is going to diminish by what we as Netizens need, want, and
would like. The Internet can only function in a vacuum if that vacuum
pays its own way AND carries with it guarantees of safety at many
levels. Since that guarantee can neither be made in good faith or
executed with even minor success it's time for the "We will not be
moved" people to give it up as an option. If government regulation is
not an option, then privatization will fill the vacuum and ultimately
rule the day with debatable results. It's the real world folks! There
really is no free lunch...



   ww page 4
   Lean and Mean
  


                     Producing Graphics for the Web
                      Copyright 1996 by Herb Chong


Lately, I've been very busy doing things on the Web producing and
managing Web sites, and generally keeping out of trouble. As Webmaster
and chief designer for several sites where I work and my personal site
(which will be coming online to the world at large in a month or so), I
have had to spend much time working on look and feel of a site,
targeting its audience, and coding lots of HTML, and preparing lots of
graphics.

If you've looked through the computer section of a bookstore recently,
you will find plenty of books on HTML, using a browser, and even lots on
Java and CGI programming. There is a noticeable lack of books on style,
techniques, and samples of designing graphics for the Web. At the end of
this article is a bibliography of useful books on this subject. Writing
a book about the subject is harder than writing a book on HTML or
learning a new programming language. There will never be a flood of
books about designing a good looking web site. However, ultimately, the
success of a web site depends on how it looks and feels, and so you have
to learn the tricks and tips somehow. This article will get you started
in taking graphics files and making work well on the web.

Just about all the sample graphics in this article won't look quite
right by the time you get to see it. Lois has to massage the articles we
submit and make them work properly in Adobe Acrobat. That is why I have
included file name references and a ZIP file of all the images so that
you can look at them yourself. To see what is going on in the GIF files,
you need to be running at least 256 color mode. Anything less and the
effects I am trying to show will be lost. For the JPEG (.JPG) and Targa
(.TGA) images, you really need to run 24-bit color mode to see all the
effects. Running 15 or 16-bit color mode allows you to see some of the
effects, but there are enough added in by going with fewer colors that
you won't be able to tell what is an artifact of the technique and what
is an artifact of your display settings.

I did almost all of the graphics for this article using Adobe PhotoShop
3.0.5, the latest and officially supported release as of this writing.
By the time this article is in your hands, Adobe will have released
PhotoShop 4.0. I have used it for some of the images in this article.
PhotoShop is a powerful and expensive program. Unless you are serious
about digital image editing and manipulation, you don't want to pay for
it. However, it does things so much more simply than other programs that
sooner or later, if you are serious about digital image editing, you
will get PhotoShop.


  All About Size

Most people today connect to the Internet via a modem. Although the
speed varies, 14.4 and 28.8 speed modems are probably the most popular.
At these speeds, you can count on between 1.5K to 3.0K bytes/s transfer
rates only if you have a very good Internet Service Provider (ISP) or
deliberately surf the net when no one else is. Most of the time, these
transfer rates are unattainable with ordinary modem connections. The
traffic on the Internet is just too high to maintain peak rates that the
line to your house is capable of.

This fact of modern life concerns you as a designer of graphics for a
web site because it means that you have to worry about the size of a
page in terms of download time or bytes. A rough rule of thumb is that
if your pages take more than 30 seconds to load, people won't stick
around to find out why. About 1.5K bytes/s is the maximum rate your
should count on during the evening hours. That translates into 45K bytes
for your entire page, including all its HTML, graphics, and sundry Java
applets and JavaScripts. Place too many bulky graphics on your web page
and people will get tired of waiting. This article concentrates on
reducing the sizes of your images so that they don't take up too much
room and yet still look good. A rule of thumb is to keep reducing
quality until you can't stand it anymore, and then back off a bit. How
you do that depends on the type of graphics you are trying to show and
how much quality you need.


  Headings and Clipart

The kind of images that are used in headings and simple clipart such as
rules and icons do not use many colors. They are "poster-like" and when
examined closely, have sharp color transitions. GIF files will reproduce
the colors without loss because the 256 colors available are more than
enough for the image. However, most paint programs only allow you to
select either 2, 16, or 256 color palettes for your GIF files. This is
very limiting. GIF files actually allow anything between 2 and 256
colors in its palette. Using an application such as PhotoShop that
allows you to pick the number directly can significantly reduce the
sizes of your images, usually without compromising image quality. Even
with images such a photographs, careful choice of the number of colors
can reduce file size more than just picking from the three standard
choices.

To understand why fewer colors reduce file size even though the number
of pixels in the picture remains the same requires that you understand a
little about how GIF does image compression. First, GIF handles each row
of the image separately, so everything I talk about applies to one row
of the image at a time. Second, the LZW compression technique looks for
runs of pixels with the same color pattern. In the case of Run Length
Encoding (RLE) compression, which Microsoft Paint uses sometimes, the
pattern is repeated occurrences of pixels with the same color. RLE
remembers that so many pixels of so many colors go here. The amount of
space needed to remember that is usually less that the amount of space
needed to hold the pixels. LZW compression, what GIF uses, is more
sophisticated in that it looks for and can recognize more complex
patterns. When you reduce the number of colors in an image, you make it
more likely to have repeated pixel color patterns, and so you get better
compression. Better compression means smaller file sizes.

The problem with fewer colors than what you started with is that now
some of the colors are wrong. How do you handle the colors that aren't
exactly the same as one in the palette? There are two common techniques.
The simplest is nearest color. As the name implies, after you have
picked the number of colors you are going to use and the system has
picked what those colors actually are going to be, change all the colors
that don't appear in the new palette to the color that is closest by
some measure. For most low color images such as headings and icons, this
isn't a problem. There aren't many colors anyway. For photographs, this
can be a major problem depending on how many colors are in the original
image. However, nearest color mapping does produce nice long runs of
color patterns and that means good GIF compression. The other common way
of picking the new color is called error-diffusion. This takes a pixel's
color, looks at the nearby pixels surrounding it, and tries to pick a
color that causes the average of the nearby colors to come close to the
original color. What this does is smear the image slightly, but because
the eye tends to do some color averaging over small distances, you see
something more closely resembling the original color. However, the
smearing also tends to produce fewer numbers of repeated color patterns
than nearest color, and so files tend to compress less.


  Effects of Number of Colors and Dithering on Image Quality and File
  Size of "Poster-like" Images Rendered in GIF Format

Here is a copy of the heading for this article(**). The original has
5250 unique colors, mostly concentrated in the shadows. The Targa file
is 65KB using LZW compression of the 24-bit image. I have compressed it
using both nearest color and error diffusion techniques to smaller and
smaller number of colors for the GIF palette.

      Number of Colors    Nearest Color         Error Diffusion
      ----------------------------------------------------------
            256          lnm_8.gif, 17KB        lnm_8d.gif, 17KB
             16          lnm_4.gif, 8KB         lnm_4d.gif, 9KB
              8          lnm_3,gif, 6KB         lnm_3d.gif, 6KB


As you can see, there is almost no difference in perceived image quality
in these size images. In fact, error diffusion makes the 8 color image
look worse because it has mixed together some of the light and dark
gray. The file sizes are given only to the nearest KB but show the
general trend in file size with the number of colors and with color
mapping technique.

  [** Editorial Note: The image files which accompany this article
   can be viewed or downloaded from the WindoWatch home page at
   http://www.windowatch.com/art.html/. Please see page 18, (Herb's
   Computer Created Art Gallery) in this issue for more information.]


  Effect of Compression Quality on Image Quality and File Size of
  "Poster-like" Images Rendered in JPEG Format

Normally, you would never render images with a few intrinsic number of
colors in JPEG format. There are too many strange things that can happen
with the lossy image compression technique. However, this heading
started out as a high color image and as a result of how it was produced
it can be compressed reasonably well with JPEG. The quality names are
the ones that PhotoShop 3.0 uses when specifying JPEG image quality at
file save time.

      Quality                 Image
      ----------------------------------
      Maximum            lnm_x.jpg, 30Kb
      High               lnm_h.jpg, 20KB
      Medium             lnm_m.jpg, 13KB
      Low                lnm_l.jpg, 10KB


Notice that the lowest image quality is still nearly indistinguishable
from the highest quality image, but the file sizes are much different.
Note also that even the lowest quality JPEG's file size is larger than
the lowest reasonable quality GIF image.


  JPEG Artifacts in "Poster-like" Images

     Targa 24-bit Format - uses    JPEG format - using very high
     lossless compression          compression ratio
     --------------------------------------------------
     Sample Text.tga, 6KB          Sample Text.jpg, 5KB


Here is the main reason why you should not use JPEG for low color
images. These images have only 2 colors. The one on the left was
compressed using Targa LZW 24-bits. Any artifacts you see are because of
the Acrobat compression. The image on the right has been compressed with
a very high level of JPEG. Notice all the fringing around the text and
the distorted colors. The file size isn't all that much smaller either.
The GIF file is only 1K, far smaller than either, and it reproduces the
colors properly with no artifacting.


  Effects of JPEG Compression Quality on Continuous-tone (Photographic)
  Images

High or Truecolor images, ones with 16-bit or 24-bit color, are much
different in how they are handled. You should use JPEG for these
whenever possible. However, you should experiment with compression
quality to see if you can reduce file sizes as much as possible. In most
cases, choosing the lowest quality still is more than adequate for web
pages.

       Quality                     Image
       --------------------------------------------------
       Original Targa 24-bit
       LZW format - over         Tumbling Pass.tga, 200KB
       20,000 colors
           Maximum               tp_x.jpg, 26KB
           High                  tp_h.jpg, 16KB
           Medium                tp_m.jpg, 10KB
           Low                   tp_l.jpg, 8KB


Without magnifying the images, I can't tell the difference. I doubt you
if can either.


  Effects of Number of Colors and Dithering on File Size and Image
  Quality of Continuous-tone (Photographic) Files Rendered in GIF Format

Sometimes, you need to convert a high color image to a low color one for
speed. The fact of the matter is that GIF files display much faster than
JPEG files do and may not look correct on browsers that can't handle
more than 256 colors. The problem is compounded by the fact that
different web browsers and different systems handle colors differently
when an image has more than the system has. To top it off, on a slow
system, a JPEG might take twice or more as long to display even though
the file size is the same. With all this in mind, here are some samples
of reducing a Truecolor image to a GIF file with various numbers of
colors in the palette.


                Reference Image - Almost 27,000 colors.

"Daves House.tga", 183KB - Note: if you are not viewing the original
file while in 24-bit color mode, you are going to see banding on the
ceiling of the room. The color gradation from one side of the room to
the other on the ceiling is so gradual that you need plenty of colors to
show it properly. This is one reason I work exclusively in 24-bit mode
on my systems that can. Truecolor graphics just don't look right unless
carefully remapped to the capabilities of the hardware.


  Using an Optimal Palette

The color reductions were all done using Adobe PhotoShop 3.0. In each
case, PhotoShop was told to choose the best colors for the number it was
restricted to and then the remaining mapped using either nearest color
or error diffusion. I used all of the predefined palette sizes in
PhotoShop, although it allows you to manually choose any number between
2 and 256 for a palette size.

        Number of
         Colors      Nearest Color        Error Diffusion
         -------------------------------------------------
           256      dh_8a.gif, 39KB       dh_8ad.gif, 48KB
           128      dh_7a.gif, 32KB       dh_7ad.gif, 41KB
            64      dh_6a.gif, 25KB       dh_6ad.gif, 33KB
            32      dh_5a.gif, 20KB       dh_5ad.gif, 26KB
            16      dh_4a.gif, 15KB       dh_4ad.gif, 21KB
             8      dh_3a.gif, 9KB        dh_3ad.gif, 14KB


At larger palette sizes, the quality difference between nearest color
and error diffusion are not that different. Even the file sizes are not
hugely different. As the number of colors get reduced though, the
banding on the ceiling becomes more and more noticeably in the nearest
color mapping. However, the file sizes remain smaller for nearest color
and the ratio is more and more in its favor as the number of colors is
reduced. Depending on your needs, the 16 color error diffusion image
might be something you can use, although 32 colors will show reasonably
well what the original was like.


  Using Web Palette

      Nearest Color              Error Diffusion
      --------------------------------------------
      dh_w.gif, 17KB             dh_wd.gif, 34KB

Web browsers on the Macintosh and in Windows have a set of default
colors which are in common. If you map a high color image to that
palette, you have a reasonable chance of knowing how it will look on a
very wide variety of systems. At the very least, you won't be surprised
by what you see. That "Web" palette is a 216 color palette that is built
into many browsers.


  Effect of JPEG Compression Quality on Image Quality and File Size of
  Continuous-tone (Photographic) Files Rendered in JPEG Format

Using the same test image, I compressed them a various quality level in
PhotoShop 3.0. Without magnification, I don't think you will be able to
tell the difference.

           Quality       Image
           -------------------------
           Maximum    dh_x.jpg, 25KB
              High    dh_h.jpg, 16KB
            Medium    dh_m.jpg, 11KB
               Low    dh_l.jpg, 8KB


As you can see here, and if you go to the images in the accompanying ZIP
file, even the lowest quality image is higher in quality than most of
the GIF images. The savings in file transmission time more than
outweighs the added delay of rendering the image. For images with large
numbers of colors, JPEG is the way to go, and even very high compression
levels give good results and much smaller files than GIF does at roughly
the same quality.


  Annotated Bibliography

The PhotoShop 3 Wow Book - Windows Edition, Linnea Dayton and Jack Davis,
   Peachpit Press, 1996, ISBN 0-201-88370-8. Even if you don't use Adobe
   PhotoShop, you need to know what is in this book for editing and
   manipulating images digitally. However, if you are serious about
   digital image editing or web graphics design, sooner or later, you
   will get PhotoShop.

Creating Killer Web Sites - The Art of Third Generation Site Design,
   David Siegel, Hayden Books, 1996, ISBN 1-56830-289-4. Just as good
   advertising doesn't look like a technical manual, a good web site
   shouldn't look like a resume or a prospectus. The graphics artists of
   more traditional media have much to show web designers about good
   design, metaphor, and imagery.

Designing Web Graphics - How to Prepare Images and Media for the Web,
   Lynda Weinman, New Riders Publishing, 1996, ISBN 1-56205-532-1.
   Although Siegel's book does spend a fair amount of time on creating
   graphics especially for web pages, this book goes into even more
   detail and goes somewhat into movies and animation on web pages.

Multimedia Publishing for Netscape, Gary David Bouton, Netscape Press,
   1996, ISBN 1-56604-381-6. Although this book is aimed at users of
   Netscape Navigator, it really is a more general book on building and
   composing graphics and multimedia for web pages.

Graphics and Web Page Design, Laura Lemay, Jon M. Duff, and James L.
   Mohler, Sams Net, 1996, ISBN 1-57521-125-4. This is a new book that I
   haven't had much chance to go through yet. It is a task-oriented book
   that takes you through the process of designing a site and then
   filling it with material to make it look unified, communicate well,
   and look smashing.

Looking Good Online, Steve Bain with Daniel Gray, Ventana Communications,
   1996, ISBN 1-56604-469-3. What distinguishes these books from most
   other books on HTML and web authoring is that they are written by
   graphics artists and typographers. David Siegel designed ITC Stone
   and Tekton, two well known typefaces. Daniel Gray is a well known
   typographer who has worked with Bitstream on their typeface designs.
   Good web site design is an artistic endeavor combined with communi-
   cations and common sense. Just as the introduction of desktop
   publishing software to the personal computer world immediately led
   to a blitz of terrible looking do-it-yourself publications, the web
   has let loose a horde of terrible web pages. Don't let yours be one
   of them.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Herb has outdone himself again. For the last two years Herb Chong has
functioned as Contributing Editor of WindoWatch. During that same period
he has introduced to those of us who are completely uninitiated the
world of digitized art. Some of his original works are simply lovely!



   ww page 5
   Merlin: The Beta
  

                     A Windows User Looks At Merlin
                    Copyright 1996 by John Campbell


Some Comparisons between Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp 4.0 (beta)

Let me begin by saying that it really isn't fair to compare IBM's OS/2
Operating System with Microsoft's Windows 95. The two OSs are rather
different in construction, and are aimed at different users. OS/2 is
closer in concept to Windows NT, because it is optimized for 32-bit
applications, and is capable of running all applications, including DOS
apps, in their own protected address space. This greatly lessens the
prospect of a single ill-behaved application crashing the entire system.
Windows 95 is an OS for the average user. OS/2 and Windows NT are
designed for high-end power users and mission-critical applications.
However, these obvious differences have not prevented comparisons
between Win 95 and OS/2 Warp in the press, and endless online arguments
between proponents of the two systems. So, the editor asked me to add to
the fray by comparing some of the features of Win 95 and OS/2 Warp.

Note. This is not an exhaustive review of OS/2. Doing that would require
a dozen full issues of WindoWatch, and I lack the expertise to tackle
such a project. So this will be a rather cursory look at some of the
systems features from a Windows users prospective.

Unfortunately, IBM declined to furnish an evaluation copy of the release
version of Warp 4.0, which began shipping in September, 1996. This means
my comments are, of necessity, based on the beta version, codename
Merlin, which like most betas, was not optimized for speed or stability.

I have decided to limit this installment to an overview of installation,
interface, and connectivity, stressing Internet-related features.
VoiceType - IBM's speech navigation and dictation technology is also new
to this release. I plan to cover voice assist and dictation in a future
installment. OS/2 Warp 3.0 was the first desktop OS to offer built-in
Internet connection tools, and Warp 4.0 is the first major Intel-based
OS to integrate voice commands.

First, a few words about my system and the preparation for Merlin. I
installed the beta on a Gateway Pentium 166 computer having 48meg RAM, a
2.5 gig HD, a Toshiba 8x CD-ROM drive, a Gateway OEM-version Matrox MGA
Millennium video card with 4 meg ram, and a SoundBlaster 32PnP sound
card. I first prepared a small (2 meg) empty partition for the OS/2 Boot
Manager. Without Boot Manager, OS/2 installs on Drive C - there is no
other choice. Then, I created a new 700 meg partition H at the end of my
HD for the new OS. This made it easy to uninstall/reinstall the beta
whenever necessary, simply by reformatting that partition. An
installation on C would litter it's root directory with OS/2 files that
are difficult to delete. By the way, I strongly recommend PowerQuest's
Partition Magic to anyone attempting this sort of installation.
Partition Magic makes it possible to create, move and resize partitions
without losing any data in existing partitions, a trick beyond the
capabilities of FDISK. I chose to use the FAT file system, rather than
the OS/2 High Performance File system, which would have offered long
filename support and better utilization of disk space, but would have
made everything in the HPFS partition inaccessible to DOS and Windows.

The installation went smoothly enough - I had prior experience using
Warp 3.0 - but setup failed to recognize either my sound or video cards.
I settled for plain VGA video until I could find the proper Matrox
drivers, which were on the company's Web site. Unfortunately, I was
never able to utilize all the features of the SoundBlaster 32PnP. I had
to settle for a 16-bit installation using the supplied Merlin drivers,
which proved adequate. The 32-bit drivers I was able to locate either
disabled the comm port, or refused to load, depending where they were
placed in CONFIG.SYS. I suppose I could have played around with driver
load order, interrupts and I/O addresses and maybe found a workable
combination, but it wasn't worth the hassle. The TCP/IP setup was a bit
confusing, but more on that later. The entire process took about forty
minutes, and a cold-boot into Warp required a minute and 20 sec., 15 sec
longer than Win95.

I wanted to avoid using programs that were not included with Merlin
itself, but decided to add an XTreeGold clone for OS/2 - ZTreeBold, the
OS/2 beta version of Netscape Navigator, and a screen-capture utility,
PMView for the illustrations in the Acrobat version of this article.

The first OS/2 screen that appears is the Workplace Shell, similar to
the Windows Desktop. A number of folders and applications can be seen.
However, IBM has a different name for these items. In IBM parlance,
folders, applications and documents - everything visible, in fact - are
Objects. So, I will use that term from time to time.


First, the interface:

The default desktop which IBM calls the Workplace Shell, is similar to
the Windows 95 Desktop in functionality. Here, we find an assortment of
folders and applications. A bar that serves various functions appears
across the top of the screen. By the way, IBM doesn't use the terms
applications and folders. Everything that can be represented as an icon
is called an Object. This terminology is a bit confusing to Windows
users at first. But it makes sense when you consider that OS/2 is an
object-oriented system.

I decided to change the appearance of the Workplace Shell by changing
the background color and moving things around a bit, to make it more
closely resemble the Windows 95 Desktop. I will now describe the
different elements in more detail.

The default folders are similar to what one sees on the Windows 95
Desktop, or from the Start Button. These include OS/2 System (Control
Panel), Assistance Center (Help), Shredder (Recycle Bin), and Programs
(Start Menu). There also is a Connections Object, which allows access to
drives, internet websites, network drives, and printers. As in Win 95,
shortcuts to programs can be placed in the Shell, except these are
called Shadows, and are identified by text color, instead of having a
small arrow in the lower corner. I chose to create Shadows for Norton
Navigator, ZTreeBold and the OS/2 Internet dialup utility. One item
needs explanation. There is an icon labeled John. This is a copy of my
VoiceType folder, containing the voice-assist module I trained to
recognize my voice. The bar that appears across the top of the Shell is
new to Warp version 4. IBM calls it the WarpCenter.

WarpCenter is a hybrid between the old Warp 3.0 LaunchPad and the Lotus
SmartCenter. From left to right, clicking on a bar element pulls down a
menu similar to the menu activated from the Win 95 Start button,
switches between op objects (applications), initiates Lockup (a security
feature), brings up a Find (search) dialog, initiates system shutdown,
displays certain system information, or opens something called the
"Object Tray." Often-used objects can be placed here for instant access,
and can be divided among trays. An element to the far right opens the
Assistance Center.

The information element cycles through a display of free disk space on
each drive, a dynamic graph to monitor system activity, and an indicator
of battery condition when using a notebook computer.

The menus can be nested, as in `95. Folder appear first, followed by
programs and shortcuts. Note that the folders are more colorful than
their Win95 counterparts. Double-clicking a folder object opens the
corresponding folder, to reveal it's contents. Although I didn't
experiment with this feature, folder colors can be changed from the
default Yellow, something not possible in Win95.

Right-clicking on an application displays the Property Sheet for that
program. This dialog serves the same purpose as in Win95, but is much
more flexible. The tabbed boxes control not only an OS/2 object's name,
path, etc., but colors, icon selection and window behavior, among other
things The latter dialog determines the placement of minimized objects.
The default is to remove the object's icon completely from the Shell,
forcing the user to open a minimized applications box to reopen that
program. I found that it is wise to configure programs to minimize to
the Shell, as in the Desktop in Windows. But that still produces
clutter. It would be better if IBM devised something similar to the
Windows taskbar, where minimized objects could be out of the way, but
still be readily accessible.

So much for a look at the Workplace Shell and Property Sheets. Now,
let's examine a few of Warp 4.0's other features.


CONNECTIVITY TOOLS

IBM's new system comes equipped with a full compliment of Network
Adapters and Protocol Services, a File and Print Services Client,
NetWare support, and TCP/IP. There is an AS/400 - 3270 emulator, a basic
Usenet newsreader, and applets for FTP, Telnet and Gopher. Some of these
utilities are configured for both modem and LAN usage. Internet
connections can be made using either SLIP or PPP, and Warp 4.0 includes
an OS/2 version of Hilgraeve's HyperACCESS Lite, and the IBM Web
Explorer Browser.

Configuring the Warp dialer for a local ISP is no harder, and no easier,
than it's Win95 counterpart. Both can be frustrating, since one has to
wade through network setups, regardless of whether a network is
installed. One dialog calls for the type of network one is using. None
is a possible choice, and the logical one. But Warp complains if none is
chosen, and throws the user back to a previous screen, where, as I
recall, IBM PPP has to be selected from a list, before installation can
proceed. However, once past this hurdle, configuring the dialer for a
local provider is no more difficult than in Win95.

Warp, inexplicably, fails to provide a terminal window for manual login.
This means that some sort of script has to be developed to feed in the
necessary responses. The Help system is very good at explaining the
scripting, but, in many cases, the ISP will have to be depended upon to
furnish a login script. This is because, except for logins that can be
handled by a simple send-receive verb sequence, the script language is
just too cryptic for non-programmers. Multiple ISP's can be added, and
appear in the dialup window in list form. To connect, one only has to
highlight the desired connection, then click on Dial.

The connection progress is reported in a small window below the one
identifying the connections, and is rather cryptic. In the case of a PPP
connection, the only indication of success is the appearance of "[PPP]"
on the last line. As with Win95, one has to minimize the window to get
it out of the way. Aside from the Browser, there isn't a whole lot to
say about most of the included applets. They are similar in
functionality to their Win95 cousins. They get the job done, but many
users will seek out more powerful substitutes. The FTP utility deserves
a closer look - it displays both the local and remote Host sides of the
connection. Too many Windows FTP programs fail to show the local
computer's file/directory structure, requiring that this information be
keyed in. But here, one only need highlight the desired files to
transfer to or from the remote host. Multiple connections can be
maintained, and files can be transferred among remote hosts. On the
downside, there is no list of popular FTP sites to choose from.

The heart of the modern Internet is the World Wide Web Browser. The Web
Explorer browser IBM provides is certainly not up to modern standards.
It claims to support HTML 2.0 specifications, but it doesn't support
Frames, and doesn't support many graphics and sound formats without
resorting to helper applications.

Rather than devoting any more space to IBM's software, I will describe
the Netscape Navigator beta that was available at the time Warp 4.0 was
released. Many OS/2 devotees were eagerly awaiting Netscape's first
offering for their OS, and with good reason.

Although based on version 2.1 of the Netscape Windows browser, it offers
considerably more than IBM chose to deliver with Web Explorer. The
interface should look very familiar.

The beta offers image support for BMP, XBM, TIFF, JPG and GIF formats,
AVS, AVI and MPG video, and WAV, AIF, AU and SND audio. No, there are no
Shockwave or ReadAudio plug ins, but remember that this is a first
effort. Perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on the initial beta release, but
common MPG files I found on several sites refused to play. The format
was not recognized as valid. Also, I couldn't save a JPG image displayed
on a page - the browser crashed with an error message every time.
Finally, some text appeared a bit fuzzy compared to the Windows version.
On the positive side, JAVA animations and morphs came through fine. I
have seen a lot of people claim that this or that browser is faster than
the competition, but I refrain from commenting on speed. Its a difficult
judgment, considering that the connecting path through the Internet
changes from one session to another, causing relative speed calculations
to be somewhat suspect. Suffice it to say, the OS/2 Netscape Navigator
beta I used doesn't seem slow.

This concludes my admittedly cursory look at some of the features of the
OS/2 Warp 4.0 beta. There is much more that deserves a report, such as
DOS and Windows support, and the power of the included IBM Works
application suite, which is comparable to the likes of Microsoft Office.
And I haven't talked about speed or stability issues. Perhaps later. I
promised the Editor a report on the voice assist and dictation features.
Hopefully, I can look at those next issue.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
John Campbell presently has four operating systems on his new Gateway.
He is being urged to give NT 4 Workstation a whirl not to create new
records in this regard, but rather bring his considerable talent to the
NT arena. Perhaps when Merlin has been fully explored he can be
persuaded. In any case, John continues climbing the Merlin mountain to
report it to the rest of us. Campbell is a regular WindoWatch contributing
writer.



   ww page 6
   The NT-Unix Connection !
  


                              NT and UNIX
                      Copyright 1996 by Jim Plumb


The wrangling over which operating system offers more has been a touchy
topic for some users for many years and will continue to be a subject of
debate for more years to come. Arguments continue over which is better,
has more useful features, more robust, easier to use, and on and on. I
think there is room for both operating system given that both have their
strong and weak points for almost any organization. In any case, I'm not
going to get into that, since this article is more concerned with the
two systems getting along in peaceful coexistence and harmony. Can you
hear them violins a-strummin' yet?

Unix has its operating and file system(s) as does NT. They are similar
but not compatible. Many organizations have both, usually Suns, DECs,
HPs, or IBMs running their respective flavors of Unix as servers of some
sort, with PC workstations running, for the sake of this article, NT
workstation. One thing they can agree upon is a network protocol as they
both do TCP/IP. Unix, however, uses the NFS (Network File System) to
share files. How do you access the files on Unix servers from PCs when
NT knows naught about NFS. Of course NT can ftp to Unix and we could
transfer files that way but we want a permanent connection. Looking at
it this another way, Unix can't see the built-in networking MS uses
enabling NT and WFW machines to connect to each other. It used to be
called SMB Protocol and now is called the Microsoft Networking protocol.

By using these quite divergent system perspectives, a compatible
solution is created. You can add something to either end of the path and
achieve connectivity!


NFS

I've written about NFS before and it's still remain a weakness in any MS
Windows environment. NFS for NT is a third-party proposition with
several vendors producing better than adequate products. The traditional
way to connect a PC to a Unix box is some form of a PC-NFS client. In
the early days, the NFS client had its own TCP/IP stack and you
shoehorned the package in the Windows environment with DOS drivers.
Eventually MS saw the light and supplied its own TCP/IP starting with
WFW so the NFS vendor needed only to supply the windows client. However,
then we were a 16-bit system networking within the 32-bit world of
Unix.

In a 32-bit environment, NFS networking is seamless. With NT 3.51 we are
slightly constrained in our network connections by the English alphabet,
meaning we can only have 26 drives, 3-6 of which may already be spoken
for. Why anyone would want to have that many I don't know, but now a
combination of NT 4 and some NFS clients, there exists the ability to
browse all over Network Neighborhood into the NFS world on the other
side without the need for drive letters. I have to qualify that because
16-bit programs cannot do this.

I can open a Word file by browsing through the Network Neighborhood, and
looking through the NFS Servers section into my Sun server and then
traversing its path to the directory I need to get my file. With all
that, I can still map drive letters to those directories if I want to. A
sampling of acceptable NFS clients are offerings from: Hummingbird
Software (Maestro Suite), Intergraph (PC-NFS originally a joint venture
with Sun and now have their own product Disk Access), FTP with OnNet32
and Sun who will be taking over PC-NFS from Intergraph. As long as you
know your TCP/IP, these things install very easily and have various
tweakings that can be made depending upon your network configuration.

A variation of this theme is making your NT machine an NFS server,
enabling the Unix users to see your NT machine as if it were just
another Unix box. This approach also requires third party software, and
is something I've never tried or have had the need for.

These NFS clients cost money, to the tune of several hundred dollars a
whack for the luxury. What's the alternative? This is where the other
view comes in. What if we looked at the problem from the Unix side.


SAMBA

It's FREE! Now there's really no excuse. In a nutshell, Samba lives on
the Unix side and for all practical purposes gives the Unix machine the
ability to be cloaked as a PC when looking at a list of possible connect
points when browsing the network. Samba comes from the original MS
Networking term SMB and was a project of an enterprising Australian.

Once Samba is installed on your Unix system (and it can be installed on
practically anything running Unix), your Unix machine will appear to be
just another PC on the network. Samba emulates and broadcasts itself to
be running on MS network.

Samba is installed depending on the installation conventions of the Unix
system it's intended to live on. The fun part is configuration. There is
some manual labor involved getting all the possible shares configured.
This means file systems and printers. In Unix one must have the various
permission permutations which must be specified. You'd be smart, when
beginning, to start with one thing at a time until you have some grasp
of what you're doing. Once installed however, it's great. The following
is a sampling from Samba's config file.

[SoftArch]
comment = Software Archives
path = /archives/software
read only = no
public = yes
locking = no
[SambaHome]
comment = Where Samba lives
path = /export/local/samba
read only = no
public = yes
hide dot files = no
[PCWIP]
comment = PC WIP
path = /wip/comp/PC
read only = no
public = yes
create mask = 777
locking = no
[MacWIP]
comment = Mac WIP
path = /wip/comp/mac
read only = no
public = yes
locking = no
hide dot files = yes

Each label holds configuration info, some of which you can see displayed
in the Map Network Drive window below. Note that I am browsing in the
Microsoft Windows Network and I am looking under COMP1, which is a Sun
machine. Displayed below COMP1 are the shares, some of which you see in
the config info above. Some of these shares are not local to COMP1, but
are network mounts to other servers in the network.

I did some benchmarks comparing file access times using NFS and Samba.
My conclusion was that NFS was slightly faster than Samba, but other
people show the reverse. It really depends upon your system.

Be forewarned, Samba is only for the adventurous. It is a free product
with no technical support. However there is quite a network of Samba
users available who are willing to help get you going.

Samba is available free of charge from
http://lake.canberra.edu.au/pub/samba in source-code form. This site
also supplies documentation and pointers to binaries (executables) to be
found elsewhere on the Internet. The Internet newsgroup for Samba is
comp.protocols.smb.


SUMMARY

Two workable solutions are presented here to handle your NT-Unix
connectivity situation: one traditional the other a new and clever
approach.

Good luck with them.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Jim Plumb is the System Administrator for a large New England printing
establishment. His daily hands-on experience with multiple operating
systems make his perspective an unique one. Jim has been a contributing
writer for WindoWatch from the very beginning and was the original
WindoWatch WebMaster.



   ww page 7
    Another Alice Adventure
  


                           A Matter of Taste
                  Copyright 1996 by Peter Neuendorffer


Alice, my friend the Ice Cream Manager just dropped by. She has decided
that ice cream must be mixed like paint, and has a database with 32000
flavors. Her software brings up a picture of what the flavor will look
like, in cup or cone. A special taste electrode is included to present
the taste to the customer. She says the nice thing about this is that
she can mix the final flavor from her primary flavor pool of just
fifteen basic flavors.

She says this technique can be adapted for frozen yogurt, including a
computer assisted manufacturing process from specifications direct to
final yogurt cup, all automated!

She is working on tomato sauce, cheese sauce, and chowder databases
which offer a variety of mixtures of flavor and texture. She hopes to
network the various databases together, thus having pasta-yogurt, or
chowder-cheese sauce dishes.

She has adapted a studio mixer with patch cords and slide bars to
uniformly mix the flavors of her products. Her color printer prints out
mouthwatering pictures to put in her window, and a state-of-the-art
dishwasher fumigates those dishes that have an unfortunate odor.

Alice says she can set up an Ice Cream Shoppe for you along these lines,
even if you only have a 286. Her software is basic, and adaptable across
platforms.

For example, these techniques of gradual mixing can be applied to office
stationary.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Peter Neuendorffer is the creator of my friend, Alice, and her many
adventures and pronouncements. He is also a Windows programmer and a
regular WindoWatch contributor. His homepage can be seen at
http://www.users.channel1.com/petern


                 ww 

Parables:

  You can't tell which way the train went by looking at the track.
  Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
  The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.
  Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for.
  If you think there's good in everybody, you've not met everybody.
  All things being equal, fat people use more soap.
  If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.
  Every time you make ends meet, they move the ends.
  The trouble with life is, you're halfway through it before you realize
      it's a do-it-yourself thing.



   ww page 8
   <html><html>                                                  Part II
  


                      Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks
                     Copyright 1996 by Gregg Hommel


Before we get into frames, and all that stuff, maybe we had best cover
the basics, for those reading this who have yet to write a single HTML
page, but are interested in learning how. I will caution those of you
who know a little or more HTML this is going to be very basic, so if you
become bored easily, skip down a few paragraphs, or perhaps you should
wait for the next column.

When you log onto the World Wide Web, using a browser to go Web surfing,
you see Web pages, representing a remarkable collection of information.
This is displayed in mostly graphical form, assuming you are using a
graphical Web browser, and range from very plain text to rather esoteric
visuals.

Web pages can be static, or they can be dynamic when using animations,
sound or video clips. They can be extensively graphical in nature, or
virtually plain text, or anything in between. They can be colourful, or
plain Jane.

No matter what display your browser supports, each and every one of
those pages starts life as a collection of HTML (Hypertext Markup
Language) code, known as tags. These tags tells your browser what and
how to display various components keeping in mind that this collection
of HTML tags is a plain and simple ASCII type text file.

"Fine", you say, "but how does a plain and simple ASCII text file get
displayed as a Web page?" Well, that isn't quite that plain, or even
that simple. The first thing to note is that an HTML file is
interpreted, generally by the browser each person is using to display
the pages. However, the browser has to know that the text file it is
going to display is an HTML file. That is done simply enough, by placing
a tag at the very beginning of the file, as in <HTML>. You will note
that an HTML tag is indicated in that plain, simple, ASCII text file by
the angular brackets, as shown in the above <HTML> tag.

But even that is not quite enough. HTML tags are basically, and most
commonly, a toggle, i.e. they turn something on, like a switch. This
also means that, like a switch, they have to generally be turned off. To
do so in HTML, you use the exact same tag, but precede the tag proper
with a slash, as in </HTML>. So there you have it... our first HTML
file, like so...

<HTML>...</HTML>


Mind you, this one does absolutely nothing, and would be very boring to
look at, because nothing whatsoever would display. All we have done so
far is told the browser that this is an HTML file. But we haven't told
it to do anything with the file yet. Nor is the above all there is to
simple, basic HTML files. We need at least two more items, - a header
section, and a body section.

The header section tells the browser various bits of information about
the file. Indeed, most of the commands which might be put in the header
section are quite esoteric, and are set to pre-defined defaults, so we
needn't worry about them, - at least now! The body section is what it
appears to be, simply a body of text or items to be displayed by the
browser in it's view window.

The tags for these sections are just as simple. <HEAD> and </HEAD> for
the header, and <BODY> and </BODY> for the body of the file, which get
inserted in between the HTML toggle, with the header data, logically,
first. So now we have...

<HTML>
<HEAD></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY>
</HTML>


But we still have nothing displayed, do we? Don't worry, it gets better
from here on!

Remember the last time you visited a Web page? Do you recall that, when
you did so, the title bar of your browser changed, and displayed a name
for the page you were visiting, along with the usual application title?
The reason it did that is because the author of that page placed a title
to be displayed for the page in the header section of the HTML file. He
did this using the logical enough text construct or <TITLE>...</TITLE>.
And we are going to do the same thing.

For the purposes of this exercise, let's call our page The WindoWatch
Tutorial Practice Page . To do that, and have it displayed in the title
bar of the browser being used to view our page, we simply put it inside
the <TITLE></TITLE> tags, as so....

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>The WindoWatch Tutorial Practice
Page</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY>
</HTML>


Finally, we're getting somewhere! At least we now have a title that will
display in the title bar of the browser used to view our page, even if
the page itself will display nothing. But before we go on to get
something displayed on the page proper, we should note a couple of
things.

In general, the case which is used for tags is unimportant. Basically,
to an HTML interpreter, <head> and <HEAD> are the same thing. There are
some exceptions to this rule, but none that will concern us just yet.
However, for simplicity in reading our exercises, and/or an HTML file,
the common convention is to put all tags in all caps, which tends to set
them apart, to some extent, from the rest of the contents of the file,
which generally are the contents of the page. And that is the convention
which we will follow in these lessons as well.

In addition, you will note that, in the above example, I put two sets of
tags, and some display text all in one line. HTML interpreters do not
generally care about line lengths, or spacing, or whether more than one
tag is on one line. The code is interpreted logically, not virtually, so
the niceties of arrangement are not that important. However, again for
the sake of readability, we will use the more or less conventional 75
character line length for our code with lines wrapping to the next line
down. Indeed, through out these columns, there will be many items
written in code to make the junk more legible and easier to read,
although not required by HTML interpreters.

I'll try not to mention this too often, unless I feel it necessary to
what we are working on. But without these conventions, HTML would be
just as happy with everything all jumbled together. To do so would make
it nigh on impossible for us to read what we are writing, so we won't.

Now that's out of the way and we are going to here put something in the
body of the page. Nothing fancy for now, just This is our very first
practice page for this HTML tutorial. This is done quite simply, by
putting the text above within the confines of the <BODY></BODY>
construct, as in....

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>The WindoWatch Tutorial Practice Page</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>This is our very first practice page for this HTML tutorial.
</BODY>
</HTML>


Well, that isn't much! Just a title in the title bar of the browser, and
a single line of text in the body view of the page, but it's a start.
There is yet another item we will touch upon in this column: paragraphs!

As noted above, HTML is a logical display as opposed to a virtual
display. You can write your text in the HTML file as nicely formatted as
you wish, that is set out in paragraphs nice and neat! This will not
make any difference to the HTML interpreter. It will ignore your
paragraphs, and display all that text as one big paragraph unless you
specifically tell the HTML interpreter where to break for a paragraph.

This you do with the <P></P> tag set. It is here, that we run into the
first exception to our general rule that HTML tags are toggles that
require a tag to turn on and another to turn off. Technically, this is,
the case for the <P> paragraph tag, even tho' in reality, current
browsers do not require the </P> ending tag to be placed at the end of a
paragraph. When the <P> paragraph tag is seen, they begin a new
paragraph, and assume that the next <P> tag, in effect, turns off the
old paragraph and turns on a new one. This may not always be the case,
but for now, you can safely use <P> without an off-switch </P> tag.

We will endeavour to use both the <P> and the </P> tags in the code we
present here, since it is the correct way to do it, but if I forget,
please don't jump on me and flood me with email. Old habits die hard,
and although this is not a good habit to have, it is one that I am
afraid I have fallen in to.

In any case, we will add now, a new paragraph of text to our file, and
tell the browser this.

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>The WindoWatch Tutorial Practice Page</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>This is our very first practice page for this HTML tutorial.
<P>I know that this isn't much to read, but it is our first page, and
we needed some practice at writing the text for the body of our page.</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

which would display something like this....

This is our very first practice page for this HTML tutorial.

I know that this isn't much to read, but it is our first page, and we
needed some practice at writing the text for the body of our page.


Next time, we will add some pizzazz to the body of our page, with
graphics, and some formatting, and we will begin adding links to other
pages, into the body.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Gregg Hommel is well known for his work as an Aspect script programmer
and the Aspect tutorial series he developed for WindoWatch. He brings
his considerable talent to the world of HTML and begins to fill in gaps
in our understanding of HTML code. Gregg has been active on the nets
hosting conferences and serves on the editorial board of WindoWatch.



   ww page 9
   Maximizing Word 7 for Windows 95
  


                        Part Four: Toolbar Time
                   Copyright 1996 by Jack Passarella


Introduction

One of the first things that impressed me about the move from the DOS
world of word processors , namely WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS to WordPerfect
5.1 for Windows, and later Word 6 for Windows, was the graphical
strength of Windows. No longer was it necessary to remember the arcane
keystroke combinations necessary to perform simple formatting tasks in
WP-DOS or to have hands nimble enough to engage in the finger gymnastics
WP-DOS demanded on a daily -- nay, routine -- basis. In a previous
article in this Word 7 for Windows 95 series I talked about my
requirement that keyboard shortcuts have a mnemonic consistency. As a
long-time proponent of WordPerfect DOS, it's hard for me to admit today
that there was absolutely nothing mnemonic about CTRL+F8 or SHIFT+F1 or
ALT+F10. As proof, I barely remember any of the thirty-odd combinations
anymore, though I think CTRL+F8 might have something to do with
formatting.

I do still use keyboard shortcuts in Word for Windows, but I restrict
their use to those combinations that make the most sense, save the most
time, and are the easiest to remember. The reason I be choosy is that
Windows gave us a WYSIWYG world, drop down menus and, best of all,
toolbars. Toolbars! What a concept! A natural evolution of the simple
yet handy macro previously launched with a keyboard combination like
ALT+P, to print, and now, most often with a tiny button whose image, if
the designer has done a good job, bears a reasonable representation of
the function. Yet toolbar buttons go beyond the multi-step macro idea to
encompass common functions or menu choices.

Pavlovians -- if there are such observers -- would probably say we were
probably trained for these icons from the first time we traveled down
the highway and saw those warnings about deer and railroad crossings,
hotel notices symbolized by the round-headed silhouette lying snug in
bed, and the fork, spoon and knife combo representing a restaurant dead
ahead. By now, everyone who's used Windows for any amount of time is
completely familiar with the toolbar buttons for File New, File Open,
File Save and File Print. The Edit Cut, Edit Copy and Edit Paste buttons
aren't far behind. Even better, in the last generation of computing
changes, we received the perfect gift to spruce up those less than
obvious toolbar button images: ToolTips! So now, if you're unsure of
what a button does, poise your mouse cursor over it, wait a second and a
little yellow description box pops up to reward your patience, removing
all doubt about the button's function.

Since these things called toolbars are so useful, so functional, so
helpful, I'm often astounded by the number of Word for Windows users I
come across who have been using Word for quite a while and yet haven't
made one attempt to alter their toolbar. The same people who carefully
adjust seat position and mirror angles in their car, who spend an hour
to make sure the latest model in the athletic shoe wars provides that
perfect fit or spend days looking for the perfect daily planner will
undoubtedly leave the Word for Windows toolbars exactly as they found
it.

That's all about to change. Right now!


The Firing Line

If Word for Windows has a strength, and it has many, it would be user
customization. While I tend to leave the customizable menu system alone,
the toolbars are there for quick, easy access to what I do the most and
as such, they're fair game for an overhaul. Rumor has it that the
Standard toolbar was designed to highlight the gee-whiz features of
Word, so that Mr. Gates and his sales force presenters could demo the
latest bell or newest whistle to the eager throngs in attendance with a
click of a button. Unfortunately, that gee-whiz feature might be
something that you do once every three months, if at all.

Let's take an example. As a Word user, you may never need to insert a
Microsoft Excel spreadsheet into a document -- heck, as a Word user, you
may not even own Excel! Even so, there is the button on your Standard
toolbar. And something that you do a dozen times a day, File Close,
can't be found anywhere on Standard Row. If you've never used that
Insert Excel spreadsheet button and it's still sitting on Standard row,
mocking your OLE shortcomings, here's a toolbar shortcut you'll love.
Hold down the ALT key, then click and drag that button from the toolbar
down into the document area.

BOOM! It's gone. The most fun you've had since Space Invaders(tm). Go
ahead, zap a few more buttons. Get rid of anything you haven't used or
never plan to use. I like to call this method The Hook, after the
vaudeville and, more recently, Gong Show device to physically and
unceremoniously yank a bad act off stage. Depending on how long you've
been using Word, you may have the sudden realization that there are a
lot of dead-weight buttons taking up screen real estate on your Standard
or Formatting toolbar. Good candidates: Drawing, Columns (unless you're
editor of the company newsletter), Tables (Table, Insert Table is the
better way to go), and Format Painter (you are using Styles aren't you?)


New Additions

After you dispose of the dead weight and have some elbow room up on
Standard Row, you need to consider how you work. Remember you can modify
all your toolbars. Last issue, Volume 2 Number 8, I talked about
creating a Bold-Italic formatting macro that ended up on the Formatting
toolbar. What's missing? What do you do on a regular basis that could be
best added as a button? For starters, you should add File Close right
next to the New, Open and Save buttons. Then you might want to add Edit
Find, Shrink to Fit , (to save paper), etc. I added the Small Capitals
formatting button to my Formatting toolbar, as I used those to denote
menu choices in this article.

As you'll see, you're not limited to adding menu choices as buttons. You
can add any Word command (from a list that pops up when you select All
Commands), fonts, macros, AutoText, even styles. To get to the toolbar
customization mode of Word, you can either select Tools, Customize, then
the Toolbar Tab, or right-click in any toolbar area and select Customize
from the context menu that pops up.

Adding buttons, it turns out, is not quite as easy as the ALT+yank
method for removing them. But nearly so. With File selected under
Categories: you'll see a group of file operation related toolbar
buttons. Note: some of these aren't even listed under the File menu.
Bonanza!

Notice that when you select the File Close button, a description pops up
in the Description: area below. These descriptions are like ToolTips on
steroids, but perfectly legal. To add this button to your Standard
toolbar click and drag it up to the toolbar right where you want it. To
avoid having a little divider between the button and the others, let the
outlined image overlap the button to the left just a little bit. It will
link up with that File grouping nicely. If that was the only change you
wanted to make, click Close on the customize dialog box and you're done.
Note: you could also remove buttons in this customize mode by clicking
and dragging them from the toolbar zone into the document area.

The best thing about this customization is how easy it is. You might be
working on a special project that requires a function you don't normally
use. Pop a button up there! When the project's over, give it The Hook.

As I mentioned previously, menu choices aren't the only types of buttons
you can add. Word 7 also has a list of commands you can select from,
macros (in NORMAL.DOT or any attached template), fonts, AutoText and
styles. Unfortunately, if you find and select an item from any of these
categories, you are presented with a fairly meager selection of general
toolbar buttons.

Or you can add the button as text. Take it from me: if you use text for
these types of buttons, you will run out of screen real estate real
fast. If you want to use text, click on the Text Button, then enter the
text to appear on your button in the text box below, click Assign (after
you've dragged the function/macro/style/font/command to the toolbar
position, this Custom Button dialog box pops up), then close the
Customize dialog box and you're done. If you want to use one of the
thirty-seven prefab buttons, just click it, then Assign, then Close the
Customize dialog box.

What if neither of these options is acceptable? Get creative. If you
have any artistic flair at all, you can click Cancel at this point, then
right-click the blank button to see the context menu with the following
choices: Copy, Paste, Reset, Choose or Edit Button Image. The one you
want is Edit. Welcome to the 16 by 16 pixel, 16 color palette of the
toolbar button artist. On the plus side, that's 256 pixels for you to
color in; on the negative, you're picture is going to occupy only about
a quarter-inch square of screen real estate when your done. Make it look
good! Hint: use of grays can give you that elusive 3D image you're
looking for.

More often than not, you might find another toolbar button that you can
take as a starting point. In the Customize mode, you can Copy a button
image after you right-click on it, then paste it onto the button you're
working on by right-clicking on that button and selecting Paste Button
Image. From that starting point, you can right-click and Edit the pasted
image. Last issue, after I described the Bold-Italic macro, I took a
copy of the Italics " I " button from the Formatting toolbar, gave it
some depth and placed a faint B and I to opposite corners to remind me
what the button does when a Tool Tip isn't displayed.

Once you've painted a new image or modified an existing one, click OK
from the Button Editor, then Close to get out of Customize mode. If you
modify one of the existing buttons and realize you've made a horrible
mess of it, you can choose Reset Button Image from the button context
menu to repair things.


Toolbar Trivia

If you haven't experimented with toolbars that much you may not realize
that they can be dragged and docked to the sides or bottom of your
screen, or they can be left floating somewhere in the middle. The trick
is to click on a space between buttons not on a button, otherwise Word
assumes, and rightly so, that you were trying to execute the button
function itself. The button will depress and release, but the toolbar
won't budge.

If you aren't seeing ToolTips when you wait patiently with your cursor
over a button, then you may have this function turned off. Right-click
on any toolbar and select the Toolbars option from the context menu.
Here you can check-box other toolbars that you want to make visible,
turn ToolTips off or on, have Word display color or large buttons, reset
a toolbar or begin the creation of a brand new toolbar. Notice also,
that you can get to the Customize dialog box from here.


A Standard By Any Other Name

If for some reason you want to leave the Standard toolbar as is, you
could create a new toolbar to use as your own personal standard with the
Toolbars dialog box's New command. Give it a name, e.g., MyStandard or
something similar. You'll be rewarded with a lone square of toolbar real
estate. If you want 80% of the Standard toolbar buttons just the way
they are, you can quickly (with the Customize dialog box open) clone
them from the old Standard to your standard. Just click and drag the
buttons to your new toolbar and watch it grow. Then add any additions
you please and put MyStandard in the old Standard's throne.


Conclusion

Keep in mind that toolbars are stored in templates. (As are macros,
AutoText and styles; all of Word's default toolbars are stored in
NORMAL.DOT) Every time that Customize dialog box came up, in the bottom
right hand corner was the information: Save Changes In: Normal.dot. Of
course, you'll want a revamped Standard or Formatting Toolbar to reside
in your default, NORMAL.DOT template.

However, when you create a template and want a new toolbar available to
users of that DOT file, make sure that you select the template name from
the Make Toolbar Available To: drop down list from the New Toolbar
dialog box. Once you do this, make sure any subsequent customization
changes are being saved in your template. That way, when you distribute
the template file, e.g., MYTEMP.DOT, the toolbar will be available,
along with any macros, AutoText or styles you've created especially for
it. Now that you know how to use the tools of the toolbar, it's time to
tinker.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Jack Passarella continue to wow our readers with these wonderful how-to
Word articles. He is a systems man for a large printing establishment...
among other things! He is the Host of the Ilink Word conference and a
regular contributor to WindoWatch. He is a software author and maintains
his own homepage at http://members.aol.com/jackwpass/



   ww page 10
   On Multitasking!
  


                      Reflections of a ModemJunkie
                   Copyright 1996 by Leonard Grossman


A few years ago I thought multitasking was rubbing your stomach while
patting your head, but Gerald Ford was defeated and since then we have
all had to learn to do more than one thing at a time.

The other night I walked into my study to find my daughter sitting at my
desk, telephone pressed between her shoulder and her cocked head. The
keyboard was clattering as she chatted with strangers by telnetting over
the Internet... and the radio was on! I think she was listening, but I'm
not sure. She was also chewing gum. What an example of multimedia
interactive multitasking. These three words have become the watchwords
of the web: multimedia, interactive, multitasking.

I confess, the addition of 16 meg of RAM has made it possible for me to
keep a number of applications open which makes editing my web pages much
easier. I can keep open the HTML editor, Netscape and my FTP client. I
can also keep Eudora running in the background. So I have been dragged,
at last, into the era of multitasking. Additionally, I no longer
question the utility of being able to do all of these things at once!

I also recognize the joy of hearing chimes on the hour or downloading a
few bars of a new piece of music. Indeed, listening to the sound track
on the Myst CD is a wonderful way to relax, so much so, that I've never
managed to play it for more than 15 or 20 minutes without falling
asleep.

I guess my computer qualifies as multimedia, although there are those
who would snub their noses at the garage sale boom box connected to my
sound card. The quality is greater than that on most speakers designed
for use with computers... and for $15, how could I resist?

It's the term interactive to which I draw my attention today. It seems
to me that the more interactive our media become the more passive we
really are. For the interactivity hyped by the media is not true
engagement but involves primarily choices among entertainments --
soporifics to lull us.

Learning is interactive. A good argument is interactive. Watching
television is passive. With all the emphasis upon interactivity, the
real effect is to convert the interactivity that used to exist between
the hacker and the computer into passivity of the couch potato.

As web pages become filled with animation and scripted activity, the
creative energy that used to be associated with the online experience
becomes just one more form of passive entertainment. Yes, we may be able
to give input and interact with the screens but to what end?

I lean back and click on link after link. My mouse scrolls around the
pad as I bounce from site to site. What a pain if there is a field to
fill in. I have to sit up at the keyboard...maybe even find my glasses.
I might even have to think.

No, better the clicking interactivity. Pop up an *.avi file or watch an
animated banner. Listen to the opening bars of Beethoven or the Grateful
Dead. Watch a slide show. It becomes lulling and deadening.

As developments in flat screen technology increase I visualize families
sitting in the living room, gazing dully at the large screen before
them. Who will control the infrared mouse? Who will get up and get
another bowl of popcorn. Sega and Atari write large. These screens will
be interactive. But will they stimulate or merely sedate.

I don't doubt that interactive computing can be more than that. But the
web is becoming commercialized, if for no other reason than to pay for
the massive increases in infrastructure that will be necessary to
provide the bandwidth to handle the transfer of multimedia
entertainments to hundreds of millions of homes impatient with server
delays and pipeline bottlenecks. Mae West doesn't just want us to come
up and see her some time, she wants a new structure to handle the load.
And with commercialization comes the need to reach larger and larger
audiences.

I am thrilled my home page has had some 10,000 hits but that only
happened because it became known as a source to download a free HTML
editor. It is great that my community resource pages may have four or
five hits a day or a week. But if I had to rely upon advertising, who
would sponsor an in depth treatment of a set of stained glass windows?
Who would pay to list the activities of a community interfaith counsel
or a combined adult studies program? I could place banner advertising on
the page, but could they hold their own in the marketplace.

Just as the Oprahs and Renaldos and sitcoms have driven out drama and
real news, will the common denominator drive out the creative,
informative uses of the web? In mid October I heard for the first time
serious discussion of the creation of an alternative high speed Internet
for serious scientific purposes.

How many nets will be necessary? Will there be gateways between them?
Will there be second class users? Will we have to pay for access to the
basic informational sites that dominated the web only two years ago.

I try to keep my web pages as simple as possible, so that they load
quickly and are accessible by the widest possible audience. But as my
equipment improves, slowly and imperceptibly I improve my pages with
features I no longer realize won't play on older equipment.

Slowly, I was tempted into adding colored backgrounds to some of my
pages and, horrors, a tiled background on another. They look great on my
machine. While I am careful to use ALT= statements for all of my images
(I have a friend who can only view my pages through a text browser.)

It never dawned on me that there are thousands of users who don't have
the latest video cards and who can't really appreciate my pages. Indeed,
the other day I tried to look at my pages on a machine in a government
office. Although these machines are Pentiums, with 16 meg of RAM, they
have cheap monitors and video cards. My pages were almost illegible. The
backgrounds obscured the text. My magnificent images were reduced to
little more than monochrome. I care. But do I want to go back? Probably
not.

Heck, government workers shouldn't be spending work time looking at my
pages any way!

My point is that I, too, have been seduced into increasing the
non-informational content of my pages. One more drop in the flood
filling that pipeline to overflowing. But I digress.

I don't really object to true interactivity, - to interaction which
stimulates the mind. My objection is to pseudo-interactivity -- the
interactivity which says "Click here and let me entertain you." The
feelies of the nineties. I listen to AOL say Hello and Good Bye, to my
daughter (I may get rid of the boom box , after all. My mother's car
says "A door is ajar." I can never resist responding, "No a door is a
door, a jar is a jar." But no one laughs any more.)

My favorite interactive tool has become the search engine. There my
input results in something new -- not someone's pre-scripted response
to my stimulus. HotBot <www.hotbot.com> leads me to new sites and new
discoveries. Or answers my daughter's homework questions or leads me to
discover the geniuses who have linked my pages.

But real interactivity is quieter. It is pen on paper. - or fingers to
keyboard! The creation of something new. I have mentioned before that I
have taken to staring at my navel - that is looking at my own web pages.
At first it was just to see how many hits I have had. But then I dropped
the counters and substituted htmlZine a sophisticated logging tool which
lets me know where my viewers are coming from and how they got there.
But eventually I wanted more.

Eventually, I wanted to improve my pages. Not make them glitzier, but
make them more useful. My original home page doesn't get much attention.
It is the pages I have done for a local community organization which
give me the most pleasure. For there the interactivity is real.

There are people out there who benefit from those pages or at least are
affected thereby. Some leave notes of appreciation in my guest books.
Some leave complaints. Some ask stimulating questions about what I have
done or about something on my page that made them think. I have also
heard from strangers who were once part of our community and from the
grandsons of people whose work is featured on my pages. Linking the
generations. Closing the circle. That is a meaningful form of
interactivity.

Pass the mouse please.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Another thoughtful and original piece of work from Leonard Grossman, who
is an attorney working for the government. He is a WindoWatch regular
and has been contributing "Reflections" for some time. Leonard's home
page was chosen as a "Best o' comp.infosystems.www.announce" site during
April 1996. He is also president of his local user group. Comments can
be sent to grossman@mcs.com.



   ww page 11
   Corel's WordPerfect Suite                                    Part II
  


                       Looking at Quattro Pro V7
                    Copyright 1996 by Frank McGowan


Before I launch the real article, I need to do a little venting. Where
in the world do they come up with names for these software programs?

Not just Quattro Pro, but Lotus and Excel, all of which have little
obvious connection with the nature of the program. Sure, if we know
they're spreadsheets, but if you asked someone not already familiar with
them, could anyone guess what these applications were supposed to do? I
mean, what does Quattro, four in Italian, have to do with anything? Once
upon a time, using a number in a product name implied something. IBM's
OS 360 was called that because it was, or purported to be, all
inclusive, in the sense that a circle contains 360 degrees. Of course
nowadays product numbers are assigned for reasons that defy any logic
but that of the marketing people. Thus we can move from version 2 to
version 6, blithely skipping past the intervening digits like a
numerical Humpty Dumpty. Sigh!

Okay, enough of the unsolicited editorial comments. Let's get to the
review of Quattro Pro.


Evaluation

First the short version: I liked it, quite a lot. If you need a few more
details, including a few negative points, read on.


Documentation

You can take the boy out of technical writing, but you can't... well,
you can fill in the rest. The user manual, entitled Corel WordPerfect
Suite 7 Quick Results (phew!), thankfully is a lot more concise inside
than on its front cover. Each major feature of the program is
summarized, usually on a single page. This is no small accomplishment,
especially considering that ample illustrations are included providing
good balance between text and graphics. In some cases, the text is a bit
too concise: I could have used a little more verbiage on page 203
entitled Finding the Question When You Have the Answer but more on this
further on. Suffice to say you won't get bogged down in a lot of
irrelevant details. This manual is truly aimed at the person who just
wants to get something done rather than at the techno-wonk who wants to
know how did they do that? Overall, an A-minus for the book.


User Interface

Quattro Pro's on-screen look is clean and inviting. I was especially
impressed with the intuitive nature of the formatting tools on the Power
Bar which still makes me think of a high-energy snack food.

Even though I'm steeped in the Excel culture, with its little windows
showing you the font name and size, Quattro Pro's choice of buttons that
reveal dropdown lists of formatting options is just as obvious, and
provides a greater range of choices. It is useful to be able to choose
from two or more currency or comma styles, for example, rather than
having to use the menu to get to the appropriate dialog box.

Quattro Pro also affords more ready-made choices when it comes to Zoom
magnification, so you can reduce the size of your onscreen data to fit
more on without inducing eyestrain. It's handy to have 90% magnification
already defined, for instance.

I was also pleased to see that a keyboard shortcut is available for
closing a file (Ctrl+W). It can be a bit of a drag to have to open the
File menu to do this, short of creating a macro of your own. A little
thing, to be sure, but indicative of Quattro Pro's appreciation of what
makes a program a pleasure to use.


Features

As with its competitors, Quattro Pro provides a tool, Speed Format so
you can apply formatting to cells. In Excel, this is called Autoformat.
However, in Quattro Pro, Speed Format is available via a button on the
Power Bar, so you can again avoid the delay of opening a menu to use it.

Quattro Pro is also equipped to make on-the-fly corrections to your
typo's or spello's, by means of Quick Correct. Quattro Pro goes well
beyond the Autocorrect feature on Excel by providing a much greater
selection of canned misspellings to correct, notably "potatoe" and (!)
"tomatoe." I guess that pretty much ensures that the memory of Dan
Quayle will endure into the next millennium. I wonder at some of the
choices, however. How often do you imagine the word "repentance",
rendered as "repentence" in the to-be-corrected list, will be used in a
spreadsheet? Nor do I see a lot of utility in including "iresistible"
when the much more common error of "irresistable" is more likely to
occur. There are several instances where the "ible/able" confusion was
ignored.

Apart from these minor quibbles (or is it "quabbles"?), I was pleased at
the range of choices. Of special note is "heigth," which is so tempting
when teamed with "width" and "depth." That one's starting to grate
almost as much as "eck-setera" and "hone," as in "he honed in". Does
that mean that those birds who find their way back to their roosts from
great distances should be called "honing pigeons"?

You can reverse your actions via the Edit, Undo feature. Like its
competitors, Quattro Pro provides just one level of undo (you can only
undo the most recent action, not any earlier). Still, that's better than
none.

Quattro Pro lets you analyze data through devices such as scenario
managers, "what-if" facilities, and what I call "bass-ackward" analysis,
known in Excel as "goal seek". Unlike Jeopardy, if you know the answer,
what's the question?, Quattro Pro changes one of its other answers to
achieve your desired outcome. If you can afford a monthly payment of up
to $300, you use Solve For, one of the Tools| Numeric Tools choices to
figure out how much you can borrow; how low the interest must be; or how
many payments are needed to keep the monthly "nut" at the desired
number. So, if you have to borrow 10 large ($10,000) and can't get an
interest rate below 7.5%, you can solve for your $300 payment by letting
Quattro Pro figure out how many payments you'll have to make at that
rate. This is certainly one of the best features included in any
spreadsheet for someone who's in the housing market. It lets you set an
upper limit on your mortgage payments, and then figures out how big a
mortgage you can carry. I found Quattro Pro's version as simple to use
as Excel's, though I could have used a little more text in the manual's
description of the process. I was tripped up, and got some fantastic
numbers because I assumed I had to divide the interest rate by 12, as in
Excel - my suspicions were aroused when I found I could borrow enough
money to pay off the national debt! Once I got past that, it was child's
play.

If you decide to display more toolbars on the window, Quattro Pro puts
the toolbar up as soon as you click it in the View, Toolbars list; that
way, if it's not what you want, you can deselect it right then and
there. No need to reopen the View menu.

Quattro Pro lets you rotate text in a cell from horizontal to vertical
very quickly by using the Block Properties option. To get this effect in
Excel you have to jump through a number of not-very-obvious hoops. How
often you'd do this is another matter, but it did come up in an Excel
course I recently delivered, so I guess someone cares.

Another nice touch is how easy it is to add graphics to a worksheet.
Right-click the mouse, choose the Drawing toolbar, and away you go,
inserting arrows and text boxes to your heart's delight.

I must also give Quattro Pro's designers credit for choosing
Locked/Clear rather than Freeze/Unfreeze in the menu for immobilizing
columns and rows on screen. Silly me - I've always thought the opposite
of freeze was thaw. So, even though clear ought to have been unlock, at
least it's a small improvement over unfreeze.

Kudos are also in order for making it easier to specify which rows are
to be repeated at the top of printed pages. Opening| Group Name,
followed by View| Group Mode seems to me more straightforward than
opening File| Page Setup| Sheet and then typing in a range of cells.

Quattro Pro provides seamless compatibility with competitive products.
It had no problem dealing with the Excel files I brought in for purposes
of trying out the various facilities. Everything worked smoothly, as
though the file had been one of Quattro Pro's from the outset.


Nit Picks

The formula window shows the cell address as not just row & column, but
also the sheet number. While that's probably useful in a multi-sheet
workbook, it creates a cluttered look. Maybe in this case, less is more?

Try as I would, I could find no fill handle in a selected cell. The fill
handle is one of the more useful features in Excel. If it's there, and I
just missed it, I apologize; but if it's not there, I think it should
be. The quickest way to accomplish the fill in Quattro Pro is to select
the cell that contains the data, and the other cells you want to fill,
then right-click the mouse and choose Quick Fill. A simple click and
drag seems faster and more convenient to me.

Summary

Quattro Pro is powerful and flexible, but still comparatively easy to
use, especially when teamed with its excellent user documentation. I
think even a novice user would be up to speed with just a little effort
and some attention to the book.

If you're deciding which software suite to purchase, or weighing a
specific spreadsheet application, Quattro Pro deserves your serious
consideration.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Frank McGowan has done it again and presented what could be the dullest
of the dull in an engaging and informative style. He has been a science
writer and independent computer consultant. He now teaches - guess what -
computer science! Frank has written many articles for WindoWatch on the
Suites and is a contributing writer for WindoWatch.



   ww page 12
   Searching the Internet the Symantec Way!             A Product Review
  


                      SYMANTEC'S INTERNET FASTFIND
                  Copyright 1996 By Linda L. Rosenbaum


In September 1996, Symantec released a new product called Internet
FastFind. FastFind is a collection of programs to help the user quickly
locate and access specified information on the Internet. From a single
console on the desktop, tools can be launched that conveniently search,
monitor and download files from the World Wide Web and FTP (File
Transfer Protocol) sites.

The system requirements for Internet FastFind are as follows:

  486 minimum, Pentium recommended
  8MB RAM minimum, 12MB or higher recommended
  3MB free hard disk space or higher
  Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0
  Internet access

The estimated street price for Internet FastFind is $49.95 but I have
already seen it for less at my local CompUSA for around $43. As you will
see after reading this review, I highly recommend this product. It works
beautifully on my system with NT 4.0 and is a great enhancement for
anyone using the Internet for more than just an infrequent visit.

The install itself was quite uneventful. I put the CD into my CDROM
drive and autoplay kicked in to start the installation program. I did
have to restart NT after the installation was finished, but again no
problems were noted. The program put two new shortcuts onto my desktop,
Internet FastFind and EasyFTP, and also put two new items on my taskbar,
Notify and WebLauncher. In addition the installation created an Internet
FastFind program group. One minor problem I did note during the
installation was that page 20 of the hard copy refers to an online
manual. I could not find the .pdf file referred to so was unable to
install it and check it out.

The Internet FastFind console, accessed by double clicking on the
Internet FastFind shortcut on the desktop or by double clicking on the
shortcut in the Internet FastFind program group, is the best way to see
the various options available and to become familiar with the various
components. There are also alternative ways to start some of the
programs within Internet FastFind.

The first thing I looked at was the Options menu. Here you can select
which items are to appear on the taskbar as well as which items are to
be added to the start menu, the desktop, Explorer and your browser. This
works specifically with Netscape Navigator and the MS Internet Explorer.
It was here that I chose to not have Notify added to my taskbar but did
leave WebLauncher added to the taskbar. I have left all the other items
using the installed default.

LiveUpdate is used to get updates from online for Internet FastFind. I
did launch LiveUpdate from the console when I first installed the
program. I cannot recall exactly but believe there was one new file
related to PatchConnect, which I did go ahead and download. I like the
promise of LiveUpdate and wish I had it for many other programs.

The concept behind PatchConnect is to provide an easy way to get to the
appropriate Web site and/or FTP site of manufacturers of your installed
hardware and software. The first time PatchConnect is launched it does a
scanning of your system to determine what hardware and software is
present. Although it did not detect nearly all of my software, I was
still impressed with how much it did find.

PatchConnect can later rescan your system if hardware and/or software
has been changed. After the scanning process has taken place, a listing
of hardware and software appears on the left hand side. When
highlighted, it will show the Web site and FTP site, if available. You
then click on the Web site or FTP site button and PatchConnect takes you
there directly. I experimented doing this for a number of my specific
hardware and software listings within PatchConnect. I found that
sometimes the URL in PatchConnect worked just fine while sometimes it
appeared to be an older URL that was no longer available. However, even
for the unavailable ones I was able to figure out the appropriate home
page and then determine if patches or updates might be available.

A few weeks later I rescanned with PatchConnect because I had upgraded
some hardware and found the new hardware was properly detected. While
this part of Internet FastFind may not be used daily, I found myself
more impressed with it than I had originally expected.

WebLaunch works off of the bookmarks in your browser i.e. Netscape
Navigator or MS Internet Explorer. It is added to the taskbar, and when
right button clicked on, it gives you the choice of displaying Netscape
bookmarks or Internet Explorer bookmarks. When the left button was
clicked on, it shows the various bookmarks for the selected browser, -
in my case, all of my Netscape bookmarks. When testing it seems that it
rereads the bookmark file for Netscape each time WebLaunch is invoked,
which means that changes made to the Netscape bookmarks were instantly
available in WebLaunch. Once again I was impressed! If Netscape is not
open and a site is selected from Web-Launch, Netscape is opened up and
taken to the appropriate site. Even if Netscape is already open and at a
different site, selecting via WebLauncher gets you to the new site. I
actually find that using WebLauncher is a bit easier than using the
bookmarks from within Netscape. It seems to me that this requires one or
two fewer mouse movements. In addition I have some groups in Netscape
bookmarks that are very big. Netscape itself cannot show more than a
limited number. If there is not enough room to display the one you need,
it takes you to the full bookmark listing, which then requires a few
more mouse strokes to get to the desired site.

WebLauncher is able to start another listing to the left hand side and
everything within a group are available for selection. This has turned
out to be a very convenient feature. I now tend to use WebLauncher
almost exclusively for selecting sites using the Netscape bookmarks.

EasyFTP makes downloading files from an FTP site as easy as copying from
one system in a network to another system in the same network. It makes
FTP sites look and act just like local or network drives attached to
your system. Since I already have Norton File Manager from NT Tools,
which comes with what is called an FTP client, I was curious to see if
EasyFTP was truly easier. I have now concluded that it is, mostly
because I can leave Norton File Manager in the view mode I prefer, and
still have the advantages of an easy way to see and download files from
an FTP site. EasyFTP comes with a number of predefined FTP sites, which
are grouped into three categories: Entertainment, Hardware Vendors, and
Software Vendors. It is easy to add either a new group or a new site by
right clicking within an EasyFTP window and selecting new. In order to
access an FTP site, one just needs to double click on the appropriate
site name. After EasyFTP connects to that site, it will then display a
listing of all the folders contained on that site. I could navigate them
as easily as a hard drive partition on my own system! In order to
download a file to my system, I could drag and drop or choose copy to
from a right mouse click while positioned over the files to be
downloaded. I tend to do a copy to because I find I have better control
over where the files will end up.

EasyFTP can perform a Quick View on files. However it seems it uses the
Quick View which comes with NT 4.0 rather than the alternative Quick
View Plus that I have installed in NT 4.0. I am not sure if it is
possible to configure EasyFTP to utilize Quick View Plus instead of
Quick View and have found no way to set this manually. It is possible
that reinstalling Quick View Plus might make it accessible to EasyFTP
but have not wanted to mess around with what works. Quick View Plus
functions quite well from within Norton File Manager, Netscape and NT
Explorer.

After doing some file downloading and looking at my available space on
my C partition, where I have NT 4.0 loaded, I discovered an aspect of
Internet FastFind that I don't like. It seems that it creates a folder
called Temporary Internet Files under the NT 4.0 system folder. This is
used, I think, as a sort of cache for FastFind files. What I don't care
for is that all files downloaded via EasyFTP not only get copied to the
location of choice but also into one of the cache folders under the
Temporary Internet Files folder. If one does a lot of downloading, this
could chew up hard drive space quickly! I have taken to deleting the
extra copy located here once I am certain the downloads work properly. I
have been unable, thus far, to find a way to either change the location
or size of the folder called Temporary Internet Files.

NetFileFind is used to search for specific files when you know the name
of the file, or at least part of the name, but not the location of the
FTP site that has that particular file. NetFileFind uses Archie as its
search mechanism but hides the confusing technology and mechanisms of
Archie from the end user. After launching NetFileFind, one should first
go to Options, from View Menu, to setup a few items that are not done
automatically. In the general tab, one can select the number of files to
be listed by NetFileFind in a search. The default is 100. In the FTP
tab, one needs to replace unknown@unknown.com with one's own Email
address. This is used for FTP login purposes. In addition, the choice of
asking where to download files each time can be selected or a targeted
download folder can be identified. In the advanced tab on the main
screen, one can select the specific Archie server to use for the search.
I have left this as the default chosen during installation.

I have done several searches using NetFileFind. It seems fairly fast but
I'm unconvinced that I get all locations of the same files. It has
helped inform me, however, if newer versions of the software are
available. In addition, it is very easy to actually download any of the
found files via either drag and drop or via launching EasyFTP from
within NetFileFind.

WebFind is probably the part of Internet FastFind that most consider as
its main purpose. It is the search tool that uses all of the top
Internet search engines to do a simultaneous search across all of them.
WebFind is launched from within your Web browser by clicking on the
WebFind button which has been added to your browser. Once the results
have been collected from each of the search engines, an HTML page is
created within your specific browser. The results are collated with the
duplicates removed and prioritized with the most likely candidates at
the top of the list. You can access the search results with a mouse
clicked on the hot link. The search engines currently supported in
WebFind are: Alta Vista, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo, Magellan,
and Excite.

Within WebFind you can set up specifications to select the search engine
to use, how much time the search should take, and how many finds you
would like for each search engine. These choices are found in the
Options tab of WebFind. In addition you can also extend the search time
as it is in process.

By default, the links are grouped by Web site; the site with the most
links is listed first. Within each site, links are sorted according to
their scores. If you prefer to view the individual links sorted by score
regardless of site, you click on the "page" button near the top of the
HTML document which displays the search results.

WebFind stores the HTML documents in a folder called Results located in
the Internet FastFind folder. WebFind maintains the last ten documents
it creates so you can review and use the results from previous searches.
You can call up previous search results from within WebFind via File and
then select the specific results you wish to see. I found that WebFind
started a new instance of Netscape whenever I selected a previous search
result.

I have run several searches from WebFind. The searches were quite fast
and found many results. I have then used the results to link to Web
pages and so forth. I have not used any of the individual search engines
extensively in the past but having them all combined into one search is
fantastic! I cannot imagine trying to do an Internet search any other
way now.

Internet FastFind also comes with Notify. I haven't actually used this
myself since in order for it to function properly I would need to be
connected to the Internet via my ISP all the time. What Notify does is
let you specify items to track. The items it can track include World
Wide Web pages, FTP sites, and folders or files on network drives. When
any of the tracked items are changed, you are notified. You can also
chose to have Notify automatically download the changed files or HTML
page to your local system.

Internet FastFind also currently comes with EasyZip. This allows you to
zip and unzip files from within NT Explorer. To zip or unzip a file, you
just right mouse click on the file and choose the appropriate EasyZip
option. I have not used this program either because I already have
WinZip, which is an excellent 32bit zip/unzipper, and I also have Norton
File Manager for NT which comes with its own built in zip and unzipper.
Both of these products work better for me and have far more features
than EasyZip.

Overall Symantec Internet FastFind is a superb Internet tool. It has
made it easier and more fun to use the Internet. It works quite well in
NT 4.0 and should be added to any system that uses the Internet on a
regular basis.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Linda Rosenbaum lives and works in a suburb of New York City. She is an
assistant controller at the World Headquarters for a large global
manufacturing company. She has two young children and a husband whose
full time job is to take care of the kids. When not at work, Linda can
be found on a variety of online services and the Internet reading and
writing about her experiences with NT, networking, and multimedia. She
maintains a home network of four systems using a combination of NT and
Windows 95. Linda is the NT Editor for WindoWatch and can be reached via
Email at either lindar@cyburban.com or 71154.2622@compuserve.com.



   ww page 13
   Working With Delphi !
  

                            Making a Museum
                  Copyright 1996 by Peter Neuendorffer


Here's a little do-it-yourself Museum using Delphi. The idea is to
literally move to the right your artistic display while changing the
visible properties of the images and buttons. I made mine one picture at
a time which displayed each, - one picture at a time at run time. Each
time you click a button, the current picture and button disappear and
another one appears - to the right.

Make a new directory for your project. Then select File | New Project,
then Save | Project as and save it to the new directory and whatever
name you wish. I chose art.

When you add each image, all but the first image should be marked
visible to false. The same goes for the buttons. Each picture gets a
button, and when you are all done, you can add titles.

Position a new image at the bottom left, with room to add a button and a
caption below. Then position a button below the image. In the button's
code window, double click on the button at design time, you have

    button1.visible:=false;
    image1.visible:=false;
    button2.visible:=true; {this will be added later}
    image2.visible:=true;  {this will be added later}

Now go to the main menu in Delphi Tools | Image editor, and select .bmp
and 105X105 (the two-inch square picture). Draw your first picture, save
as art1.bmp. Now go to the form and double click on the first image.
Select Load, and select art1.bmp that you just drew. Then position the
image and button1 as you wish. I had my pictures go from left to right
for four images, and then I drew a much larger picture for the fifth. I
chose to make my button captions all read Next since only one will be
displayed at a time.

Next go to the Image editor and draw your second picture. This is the
picture that will appear when the user clicks on button1. Button1 and
image1 become invisible, and button2 and image2 become visible.

Continue this process for as many pictures as you wish, where the
buttonclick method code makes the current button and image visible=false
and the next button and image visible=true. The code window for
button2click would read

    button2.visible:=false;
    image2.visible:=false;
    button3.visible:=true; {this will be added later}
    image3.visible:=true;  {this will be added later}

As you add each picture, make sure the image is set to visible=false and
that the button is also invisible. Double-clicking on the visible
property in the object inspector toggles this.

Before you add a large picture, you may wish to make a special ceiling
mask. A trapezoid in black will do. Any images that you wish to overlap
this ceiling must be placed on the desktop AFTER this one. If you
highlight an image, and select Alt-E-T for cut, then Alt-E-P for paste,
the copied image will be placed in the front of the others. If you are
only showing one image at a time, you do not have to be concerned about
that.

If you set up a flag goforward to trip at the last button, you can go
backwards, but I opted to have my last picture image7-button7 restore
the first one:

button7click(sender:Object)
     begin
        image7.visible:=false;
        button7.visible:=false;
        image1.visible:=true;
        button1.visible:=true;
     end;

Once you have your pictures in place, where each button displays the
next picture, you may wish to add captions for the pictures. The rule of
thumb is that the first one is set to visible, all others are set to
visible=false and displayed one by one when the user clicks the buttons.

When you are finished, you should get an opening picture. Clicking on
the Next button below each picture causes another picture (and button)
to appear, and the first to disappear.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Peter Neuendorffer is a Windows programmer who works in Delphi. Peter is
a regular WindoWatch Contributor and the creator of AliceA.



   ww page 14
   A Hardware Report
  


                 Gateway Has Egg on Their Face - Again!
                  Copyright c 1996 by John M. Campbell


Gateway 2000, the largest PC direct-marketer in the US, has become
embroiled in yet another controversy with their customers. The first
incident occurred when the company's advertising led buyers of the
popular 10th Anniversary Edition Gateway computer to believe they were
getting the well-known Matrox MGA Millennium graphics card.

In reality, Gateway was shipping a stripped OEM version of the Matrox.
The Gatrox, as it was soon referred to by customers, had a 175Mhz RAMDAC
(vs. 200Mhz in the retail Matrox version). This change limited the
Gateway card to lower refresh rates than they expected to see. In
addition, the Gatrox lacked the hardware upgrade MPEG upgrade connector
found on the Matrox retail version.

Gateway's answer to customer complaints was to contend that there was no
"visually perceptible difference" between the refresh rates at
resolutions up to 1280x1024, and that the lower rates met VESA
standards. As for MPEG, customers could always settle for software-based
solutions. In response to intense pressure from angry users, the company
agreed to replace the OEM cards with real Matrox units - for an upgrade
fee, of course! The company also changed its advertising to remove the
impression that its Matrox cards were the same as the retail version.
Gateway still sells the stripped Gatrox units!

The new bone of contention between Gateway and its customers involves
the number of serial ports on many of the new computers the company is
shipping. I purchased a P5-166 from Gateway in early August, 1996. I was
astounded to find only a single serial connector on the case. The manual
that accompanied the machine clearly showed the expected two connectors.

When I phoned Gateway, I was told the new Intel motherboard they had
recently switched to only provided one serial port, and if I needed a
second port, I would have to buy an add-on card. I checked the Gateway
Forum on CompuServe, to see if others were commenting on this, but there
were no complaints - until recently. Beginning in the latter part of
September, a torrent of messages appeared demanding to know what was
going on at Gateway. It seems that all recent machines are shipping with
the single serial port.

Gateway first claimed that most customers didn't need a second serial
port, since their machines ship with a PS/2-style mouse, and the new USB
(Universal Serial Bus) technology would do away with the need for a
second connector. Of course, USB isn't common yet, but they were looking
to the future! (I kid you not, this ludicrous explanation was put out
with a straight face.) Then, on October 2, in the face of mounting
criticism, Gateway announced that they would make a kit available to
anyone who asked for it. This kit apparently consists of a cable having
at one end a connector to the ten pins labeled comm2 on the motherboard,
and on the other end a standard serial-port connector. At this point
Gateway was forced to back away from their earlier assertion that the
Intel board didn't provide for a second port - as too many customers had
already found the pins. It will be interesting to see how the latter
connector is to be mounted to the back of the computer's case. There are
no knockouts. Perhaps it is to just dangle? I'll know when I receive
mine. By the way, Gateway add-on sales still hasn't heard of the kit. I
had to send an email message to the company representative who handles
hardware-related questions on CIS.

I take no pleasure from reporting this latest fiasco. I like Gateway
products, and I have been (mostly) a satisfied customer for the past
five years. The company does build good machines at a good price. But it
is apparent that they are not adverse to shortchanging customers for the
sake of a few pennies. How much are they really saving by omitting the
connection to the second serial connector that is already on the
motherboard? And the company's feeble attempts at damage-control are
more befitting politicians than a respected manufacturer.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is buyer beware. It isn't safe to assume
ANYTHING when purchasing a new computer today. I doubt that Gateway is
the only manufacturer to cut corners by not always giving customers what
they assume they are getting. I suppose the time has come when the buyer
must not only demand to know, in advance, how many serial ports does a
machine have, but are there really 104 keys on the keyboard, and is an
internal speaker included? After all, not everyone really uses all those
keys, and sound cards with external speakers are standard now. I can
even visualize having to make a trip to my local hardware store to get
screws to attach the case onto my next computer - that is, if cases
aren't an extra-cost option by then.


EPILOGUE

A week or so after I wrote this, I received the port upgrade kit from
Gateway. It consisted of the components I described above. The serial
connector was a 9-pin male unit, mounted on a standard metal cover plate
- the type that covers unused expansion slots. The cable was short. The
unit had to mount in place of the cover plate on the PCI slot nearest
the motherboard. There were no instructions with the kit, so mating the
other end of the cable with the motherboard com2 pins required a trial
and error approach. Fortunately, no harm would result from a backwards
connection.

Once properly connected, the new port worked normally. I now had two com
ports available. But I am minus one available PCI slot. I'm grateful
that Gateway did make this kit available to customers who complained.
But it would have been better had the company not been so shortsighted
in their decision to omit the second port on new machines.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This article originally appeared on the WindoWatch homepage during
October 1996. John M. Campbell is a regular WindoWatch contributor.



   ww page 15
   The Email Trap!
  


                    Sandwich Meat and Unwanted Mail
                   Copyright 1996 by Daniel Christle


With the coming of technology to the Internet, there has been an
increase in marketing across this yet untested media. On the surface,
these trial balloons can provide easy access to shopping and services
benefiting the consumer. Even so, the average netizen will react with
great emotion when the great marketing vehicles target and seek him out.
Why is this? Simply put, the average Internet user likes having access
to online purchase of goods and services while still maintaining great
anonymity. When you receive an unsolicited email either directly to your
inbox or from spamming into a newsgroup, a little bit of that anonymity
is taken away. As a result, some related questions often asked are: Is
unsolicited mail legal? Are the claims made in some of these offers
legitimate? Where did they get my name? What can I do about it when I
don't want to see this information?


Is it Legal ?

In a word, yes! There is no law that says it is illegal to send
unsolicited email and if you look at existing legislation, it is
probably in the same category as ordinary junk mail. In terms of
spamming itself, cross posting across many newsgroups is simply against
Usenet rules. The issue is really one of ethics, netiquette and taste.
Is it wasted band-width to broadcast marketing information to people who
may or may not want to receive it? Many would think so given that the
Internet seems to becoming bogged down already with anticipated fears of
an increasing crunch of resources. The other side of the question is
probably best represented by Canter and Seigel who a short while ago
made Internet history. They violated Usenet guidelines when they posted
to several thousand newsgroups offering their legal services in the area
of green card (immigration) issues. After a nasty reaction from people
all over the Internet and the loss of access to several servers after
repeating this offense, - they still came out on top. Canter and Seigel,
a husband and wife legal team, formed a company called Cybersell. Their
firm specializes in teaching other companies how to market on the
Internet. They are more than happy to preach that is inevitable that the
Internet will become commercial and often refer to themselves as
pioneers. As it stands now receiving unsolicited mail will only get
worse before it gets better.


Advertising Falsehoods

With such a wide audience on the Internet, guestimated at somewhere
between 10 and 60 million users, it is only natural that business will
continue to exploit such an attractive resource. However, the Buyer
Beware caution bears repeating! When doing business on the Internet one
must be careful. Convenience must be balanced with the downside.
Notwithstanding the really great companies who conduct business
honestly, there are those that are, to be kind, are ethically
challenged. You don't have to go far to discover this. Just read some of
the junk mail that ends up in your inbox. If you're like me you have
probably received mail on how to get rich with no effort. With a mere
credit card number (loud sirens going off), offers for services that
could be disastrous to you, to mild but costly scams, to pyramid schemes
and of course legitimate offers for the sale of just about anything. If
you want to go further just search on any search engine and you will
find web sites dedicated to all sorts of outrageous products, get rich
schemes and of course general depravity. The Internet, in this case,
could be compared to a circus, a flea market, black market, access to a
fence and much worse. A lot of people are working the naive and the
pickings are easy - just ask P.T. Barnum. The sorts of things described
here are illegal with some very limited options offered for controlling
them. It seems to me however, that these kinds of cons are much less
pervasive than they are reputed to be by the Congress and the popular
media. What really compounds problems of false advertising, outrageous
claims and not so open dishonesty is that not all of these sites are
hosted in your own country. A site initiated from another country where
the laws are lax or simply different than your own with regard to
consumer protection standards, will tend to go unchallenged. Not that
there is a unified body of web cops who can investigate every site!


Where Did They Find Me?

One of the questions I get asked by people new to the Internet is how do
they know about me? Lists! Companies buy lists that can include your
email address and these lists come from all sorts of sources. Some
people even compile their own lists using software that scours
newsgroups and web pages for email addresses. Of course, every time you
fill out a form on a web page you stand a good chance of ending up on a
list. You didn't think they were collecting names, addresses and email
addresses just for fun did you? The sources are just about endless
including a more controversial source, the cookies.txt file used by your
browser. This seemingly innocuous file can be searched without your
knowledge by many web servers used today. This file can be used to store
information about the sites you visit and there is nothing to prevent
another server from reading it. Anything you put on a web page or in a
posting on a newsgroup is fair game. Remember on the Internet you are as
public as you want to be. I once had a student in an Internet class I
was instructing who ignored my advice and used her home mailing address,
phone numbers and of course email address as her signature lines in all
of her correspondence. The volume of junk mail, emails and telephone
solicitations she received from doing this were astounding. It didn't
take long for her to change her naive behavior.


What to do about it?

Some of this strategy involves simple maturity, along with large amounts
of cynicism. As far as web page content goes, you can always leave a
site and go elsewhere if you don't like what you see. Additionally, you
can also send an email to the web master of the hosting server and tell
him how offensive one of his user sites is. Just don't expect a lot of
action much less a reply. After all that site is paying to be there.
Email and spam is an entirely different matter. This is where some
action can get results. Most mailings you receive, if they are even
remotely legitimate, can be easily dealt with. Many times they will
include a return address that you can reply to. Just put the word
"REMOVE" (without the quotes) as the first line of your message. You can
also write back to the author and ask that you be removed from their
mailing list. If the sender is a legitimate business person they will
remove you from their list immediately and without an argument.

Sometimes you will get an email that is posted with a bogus return
address. Usually these are mailings that require you engage in a shady
pyramid mailing or want something from you like money or the potentially
more damaging credit card number. These emails can be a bit more tricky
to stop but not completely so. A look at the email header can reveal
where the mailing originated from. Once you have determined the source,
email a way. Most ISP's get somewhat irate when they find out a user is
posting spam or unsolicited mail from a false address. Be forewarned
that sometimes it takes a little work to determine who the real poster
is. You may have to trace the packet or do a whois lookup to get the
information you need. If you want more information on this just do a
search on the word spam at any search site leading you to countless
FAQ's on dealing with this type of mail.

There seems to be an inevitable trend towards marketing on the Internet.
It only seems natural that business will turn its attention to this new
marketing resource. You would have to be pretty much dead not to notice
that Corporate America has migrating to the Internet en masse. This is
not a bad thing, however it is up to us to help define the rules. With
some common sense you can make the most of this and probably increase
your productivity by following some of the procedures outlined above.
Remember, that the Internet is evolving and as long as people make clear
what is acceptable marketing behaviour, many companies will comply. For
the short term, at least, they have no choice if they want to sell to
you. Until they get the message, spam and unwanted email is in your
future. Just hit delete and exercise caution!


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Dan Christle is currently selling for a national online service, Link
Logistics, for the truck transportation business as well as involved in
computer sales and support. A ten year sales veteran having worked for
companies such as Pitney Bowes Lanier and small technology companies. He
also provides Internet training for a local ISP and current customers.
He is an active member of the Winnipeg PC User Group.



   ww page 16
   Muddies for Tea and Windows 95 for You!
  


                        A Windows 95 Conversion
                      Copyright 1996 by Vlad Balak


Prologue: The Deletion King!

Well, well, well! It seems I am my own worse nightmare. Having made up
my mind to completely redo my drives and, with all the KAOS I created
for myself, I inadvertively deleted the article I started to write.

But, no probs, the grey in my hair doesn't affect the grey manner in my
head, (I hope), and can reproduce it. It'll just take a bit longer,
especially since I have to keep chasing that flea bitten dingo that
keeps stealing my prawn off the barby. It's a bit worn out now, the
prawn that is, but I'm hungry, so THAT prawn is miiine!

Glad you're a patient lady, as you need patience to put up with me.
Albert Einstein I'm not. Neanderthal closely related to, what with
having to chase and catch your dinner every night. Boy I'm glad I'm
living in Australia! Life will be boring anywhere else in the world.


Chapter One

Stone the crows, after fifty installations and deletions, I have finally
been converted to Win95. The main reason for all the horsing around is
my obsession to have tidy hard drives. My final decision was to create
two drives; (c) drive, 340 megs for Win95 and all its native programmes
and (d) drive 1 gig for all my documents, files and DOS based
programmes.

This way, if the inevitable happens and my system crashes, all I'll have
to do is format and reinstall (c) drive and all my precious files are
safely tucked away on (d) drive. Therefore, to bring my system back to
normal will take me less than hour and no information will be lost.
(Editorial Note: This wins the Nifty Notion award of the month!)

This type of setup gives me more incentive to play around with new
programmes. As most of you would know, a lot of programmes leave many
residue files in your window directories, or change your ini files. The
end result is that you have a bloated windows with many useless files.
Further, I just don't trust the new uninstall programmes which are on
the market.

I have always played with files in WFW with the result that I had a very
slim Windows, which was easy to back up and with only the files I needed
to run programmes I wanted on my system. The most important lesson I've
learnt from Win95 is to leave the programme alone, it will then work
fine. Needless to say, that's why I have it set up as described above.
If too many unwanted files start piling up, I just format and reinstall.
All my programmes are either on (d) drive so reinstallation is a piece
of cake, with just a few adjustments to the cosmetics of Win95 for my
own feel.

I must admit, took a lot to move me to Win95, and before this final
result I did install WFW and boy, it was a dinosaur.

Oh, here he comes, Jackie Jackie, the wonder boy. He must have smelt the
kangaroo steaks on the barby. He's got to be the only person in
Australia who can't hit the side of a barnyard with his boomerang. When
he goes out to hunt, all the kangaroos line up and wink at him in
defiance, almost as though they're laughing at him. He's always on the
prowl during his walkabouts for that special piece of wood to make the
perfect boomerang. Who cares, he's great at barbies - got more tales and
jokes to tell than Bob Hope. Back soon, better grab a beer and steak,
before everything is gone.

Right, the old worm is fed and watered, so back to some key bashing.

O.K., I do have one problem which I still haven't rectified: facsimiles!
I hate the one that comes with Win95 and if I chew this one over, I
might help other people not to have the hassles I have had and am still
having. The first one I tried was Faxworks, which performed well in WFW.
Using Win95, Faxworks wants me to install share.exe in autoexec.bat and
since I don't run an autoexec.bat, I am reluctant to start one just for
Faxworks. The second programme I tried was Bitfax Ver2.0 and this
version gave me a paper orientation mismatch, which also happened in WFW
using ver 2.0 but not with Ver 3.0. Unfortunately I can't find a copy of
Ver 3.0 to try! I next tried Winfax Pro, but it was just too large and
complex for the amount of faxing I want to do. I am getting a copy of
Winfax Lite, so we'll see how that goes. If anyone has any suggestions
on small, Win95 native facsimile programmes, please let me know. My
e-mail address is vbalak@ecn.net.au and just start with Hi Blacka
...yipita...yipita ...yipita... and that's me folks. We might save a lot
of people including myself a few headaches.

The best thing that I inherited with Win95 is the great internet
connection. I do not get dropouts anymore and can use the latest 32 bit
programmes. On the whole the computer is certainly running everything
quicker.

That's it, I'm off now. The creek is waiting for us, time to catch a few
Muddies for tea.

That's a 250mm plus crab across the shell, with claws are big as a
blokes hand and can nip your finger off. But beautiful to eat, meat is
sweet and plenty of it. Cooking is the most fun: you dig a hole and get
a good base of very hot embers on the bottom. Place the crabs on their
backs and fill in the hole. Sink a few tinnies for twenty minutes and
then start eating. The old mouth is watering already and we haven't even
left yet.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Vlad is a certifiable original. We are proud to present his Windows 95
observations, bits of Australian lexicon, and it seems, culinary
adventures. Vlad, with his wife, live in Brisbane, Australia where he is
the regional manager of a saw milling company.



   ww page 17
   Ishare v. 1 from Artisoft                       A Public Beta Report
  


                 A Successful Modem Sharing Experience!
                   A Product Review by Lois Laulicht


Every once in a while a software house comes up with a program that is
so theoretically useful that one must immediately see if the claims
square with reality. When the promised software does in fact deliver,
then one must sing the praises of the product for everyone to hear.


The impact of Ishare

   It means that every PC running Windows on a LAN, except for NT, can
    share an analog or ISDN modem that is setup to run on a Windows 95
    box. The Windows 95 box is the computer that will function as the
    modem server.

   It means that every PC on a LAN can share an ISP using built-in dial-up
    access tools.

   It means that low-vision people working on a LAN can use their
    expensive large monitors from their own computers to access a
    shared modem .

   It means that teeny-tiny LANs such as mine can become industrial
    strength power houses at a modest cost.

   It means there are no expensive hardware or installation costs.

   It means that you can test version 1 until the end of January 1997
    at no cost to you.

   It means that there is another viable 32 bit communications developer
    writing windows software for small business and end users.

We have used this software for several days and the only bug we detected
on our system is a propensity for the software not to release the port
at the end of an online session. The developer is aware of the problem
and is working on a fix. Our short term and less than satisfactory
solution is to reboot both client and server computers at the end of an
online session.


The file can be downloaded from the Artisoft homepage at
http://www.artisoft.com. The instructions are very clear and should be
brought into one's system. There is also a very useful FAQ at the
Artisoft site.



   ww page 18
   Herb's Computer Created Art Gallery!
  


Our cup runneth over! This month Herb Chong has served us a huge array
of goodies - not just size but variety. But first his latest stand alone
piece of art that he calls Crystal, then instructions to download the
various graphics formats referred to in his Lean and Mean article in
this issue.


This image is in JPG format.

The graphic files for Lean and Mean downloads are sorted by specific
graphic format for smaller and more reliable downloads. They are
available from the WW Art Gallery section of http://www.windowatch.com/

Herbsgif.zip   435496
Herbsjpg.zip   196769
Herbstga.zip   305715
LeanMean.pdf   843694



   ww page 19
   The Last Word                                   A WindoWatch Feature
  


                   Closing the Worker Technology Gap
                    Copyright 1996 by Ben M. Schorr


Question of the month! What is the most important part of a computer
system?

A. Monitor
B. Hard Drive
C. CPU
D. Modem
E. Keyboard

The answer: None of the above. It's the USER! I know that some Internet
junkies are going to shake their heads and insist that it's the modem,
but trust me, it's the user. What is truly amazing to me, is how few
people, especially in business, seem to realize that.

When I first joined this firm, one of the principle tasks given to me
was to help guide it into more advanced technology. That is, replace the
old DOS terminals with new Windows-based machines. Upgrade the network;
Usher them into the Internet Age, they said. However, it's naive to
think that management can just toss all that wonderful technology onto a
worker's desk and expect an instant return.

What we have to do, is train users to productively use that technology.
Problem is... some of them are afraid of it. They're afraid because they
don't understand it; it makes them feel foolish. What's worse is the
barrage of manuals and tech support people who attack them with words
they don't understand. When the techies finally explain, too often in a
condescending tone, they persist in using still more jargon.

So, before we can even start ordering computers, I need to get our
people up to speed... at least get them off their knees! The first phase
of this is already under way and it consists of three parts.

1. There are certain fundamental concepts that power users and techies
   take for granted. Words like RAM, Windows, DOS, or Hard Drive do not
   have a context for the computer unschooled. The reality is that
   beginning users or people who've been stuck in vertical applications
   for a long time simply don't know those words. They may have heard
   them but don't really know what they mean. When you tell the average,
   untrained, user that you're going to upgrade their OS from DOS to
   Windows, you may get a blank stare as a response. So, I had to help
   them understand the very basics.

   I have to do this in such a way that it will be used, however. You
   can't force feed people and you must be careful not to confuse them
   even more. So what I have done, so far, was to take each topic, one
   at a time, and write about it in a simple way making it widely
   available. Each of these papers has a couple of guidelines:

      A. Each is limited to one sheet of paper. The reader should not be
      intimidated by size. I have found that if you hand them several
      pages they don't want to read it. One single page is not
      intimidating; and seems to be manageable. At a practical level, we
      don't want them to have to spend the entire day in reading. My
      goal is that they should be able to read the paper in one minute
      (60 seconds) or less.

      B. It must be written in a style that everybody can understand. I
      often have one of our least experienced people read over the paper
      before I distribute it. If she can understand it, I figure that
      any of our people will be comfortable with it.

      C. Each sheet is familiar and consistent: They all have the title
      "What is [subject]...in 60 seconds or less."

      D. At the end of each one, in LARGE print, it invites them to
      contact me or our system administrator with any questions they
      might have.

   I then print out the paper and I distribute them. I place two of them
   in our employee lounge (one on each table). I send a copy to one of
   our attorneys who is a computer novice but anxious to learn. I keep
   an eye on the copies, as people have a tendency to remove them from
   the lounge, and replace them if one gets taken away.

   I do a new topic each week, write it on Friday; distribute it on
   Monday. I've been doing this for about 6 weeks and so far the
   response has been VERY positive. Several of our novice computer
   attorneys have told me how much they enjoy reading them and some of
   the secretaries have already expressed that they are feeling much
   more comfortable with the terminology.

   Not everybody reads them, to be sure, but many of our people do and
   that makes it worth the minimal effort immediately. When we put in
   our new network early next year I intend to electronically publish
   the entire set and make them available, online, to anybody in the
   firm from their desks.

   If you'd like to see an example of one of them, visit our web site at
   http://www.hawaiilawyer.com and look under the "About the Information
   Services" section.

2. Along with that I try to encourage more computer reading and
   thinking. The ways I'm doing that are twofold. I have taken some of
   the computer periodicals; most notable "PC Novice" and made certain
   that an issue of it is always on display somewhere in the firm.
   Generally I leave that on a table in the lounge as well. "Information
   Week" is another magazine that I have set out, usually in the lobby,
   with the intention of getting people reading and thinking about
   computers more often.

   The second way I'm encouraging this is by actively chatting about
   computers with our people. I have welcomed them to ask me questions
   about their home computers; about technology companies and about the
   future of computing as I see it. By encouraging all of this talk and
   reading I hope to help them to be more comfortable with the concepts
   and terminology.

3. I've started doing lunch time classes for our people. Three weeks ago
   I put out a notice that I was going to do an "Introduction to
   Windows95" class at lunchtime in the library. 19 people signed up
   immediately. I had to break them into several classes and meet with
   them over the course of a couple of days. We spent 45 minutes looking
   at the interface, explaining the task bar, scroll bars, foreground
   vs. background, how to resize and move windows. These are subjects
   that are simple to regular Windows user but not so, to someone who
   has worked just in a DOS environment all their professional lives.

   The class was very successful; the goal was to get them comfortable
   with the Windows interface so that they wouldn't be intimidated when
   they had mouse in hand and were staring at all of the icons. We
   accomplished that! Further it showed them the little things like
   moving and resizing windows could easily be done. It was gratifying
   to see them excited about the possibility of working in the Windows
   environment helping them to begin thinking and talking about
   computers.

   The next class, starting next week, will be an introduction to the
   Internet: Basics of E-Mail, the world wide web, and what a browser
   looks like. For some it will be a review; for most it will be their
   first real look.

These three steps are the heart of phase one in our training program.
Next month I'll lay out the remaining steps and how they fit together.
If you have questions or comments, as always, I can be reached at
bms@hawaiilawyer.com

Aloha!


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Ben M. Schorr is the Director of Information Services, for now, for
Damon Key Bocken Leong Kupchak in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is surrounded and
outnumbered by a Netware LAN and Win95 workstations but expects WinNT
Server reinforcements any time now.



   ww 

EDITORIAL

Editor:                             Lois B. Laulicht
Contributing Editor:                Herb Chong
Home Page Editor:                   Paul Kinnaly
Ascii Edition Editor:               Lin Sprague

Contributing Writers:               Vlad Balak, John M. Campbell,
                                    Dan Christle, Leonard Grossman,
                                    Gregg Hommel, Jerry Laulicht,
                                    Frank McGowan, Peter Neuendorffer,
                                    Jack Passarella, Jim Plumb,
                                    Linda Rosenbaum, Ben Schorr, and
                                    Paul Williamson


EDITORIAL BOARD                     Herb Chong, Gregg Hommel, Lois Laulicht,
                                    Paul Williamson, Paul Kinnaly

SUBMISSIONS and REQUESTS

Email :                             editor@windowatch.com
                                    lois.laulicht@channel1.com
                                    Editor: WindoWatch
                                    Valley Head, WV 26294

Submissions remain the intellectual property of the author.
Manuscripts will NOT be returned if not used.

Electronic File Access:        All back issues are available from
                               the WindoWatch homepage. See Back
                               Issues or anonymous ftp site at
                               FTP://206.151.74.157
                               www.shareware.com - Search under the
                                  "All  Windows" category
                               FTP>Simtel.Net/pub/simtel.net/win95/winwatch
                               FTP>coast.net/Simtel/Vendors.html

Comments, letters, and requests can be sent to
lois.laulicht@channel1.com
editor@windowatch.com


WindoWatch (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 all rights reserved, is the property of
Lois B. Laulicht and CCC of WV Valley Head, WV 26294


  
  Vol.2 No.9 ww End

