OS/2 eZine - The Best OS/2 Reading Anywhere!

March 16, 2003

coolfm v2.0 supports USB, TV-onboard and ISA fm-tuners!

Does OS/2 have to be Ugly?

Does OS/2 have to be ugly? Of course not! A little bit of nice colour, some fresh new icons and a clean font go a long way.

[Ed. Do you have a cool desktop? Send us a screenshot and tell us how you did it.]

Font: Warpsans Bold. One of the best looking fonts still. I wish someone would make a PS font version of it so it's resizeable!

Icons: Some from PlusPak Themes. Some are "hand made" based on various screen captures. Like something you see? Let me know, I'll send them to you.

Background: If you're wondering about that nice line and shadow under the Warpcenter? A happy little accident. I was merely looking for a simple blue background and I found one from a Linux distro. Unfortunately, it had this "junk" white space on top. I broke out PMView (http://www.pmview.com) to crop it out. No planning whatsoever, but as I loaded up the new background, I saw that it fit perfectly and it made a nice little shadow. Like it? Just ask me I will e-mail you the picture.

Browser: What else? Mozilla 1.3b (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.3b/mozilla-os2-1.3b-installer.exe) with the aquaMOZ Theme (http://dmo.deskmod.com/core.mod?show=showskin&skin_id=22317) theme. I have to admit it isn't as compact and speedy as the Pinball theme, but it looks great.

Media players: are PM123 (http://sektori.com/pm123/) and WarpVision (http://os2.kiev.ua/en/wv.php), of course with consistently themed skins!

And what's that pretty little calendar program? Why it's ExCal (http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/apps/pim/excal.zip), an oldy but complete goody. The absolute model of OS/2 WPS integration. What a difference a few new icons make. It's light, fast stable and does exactly what I need it to do. Besides, what other calendar/information manager program do you have (on any platform) that allows you to keep an address book with a thumbnail icon picture of the actual person?

Isaac Leung got a degree in Engineering Physics and then Electrical Engineering after which he promptly got a job as a product engineer at a company which makes high speed datacom chips. He is old enough to have cut his computer teeth on Commodore 64's and first played with OS/2 1.3 EE while at a summer job with IBM. The first PC he ever owned came with Windows 95, but he soon slapped on OS/2 Warp 3 and has been Warping ever since. In his spare time, he plots to take over the world.

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