And then there was one.
Close on the heels of the sad news to the OS/2 community of the merging of OS/2 Magazine and OS/2 Developer comes another blow: OS/2 Professional has ceased publication as of their February issue (see our announcements page for more details). Miller Freeman has purchased their subscriber list and will fulfill it with copies of their own publication, OS/2 Magazine.
It's seems it was a good thing OS/2 e-Zine! began publishing when it did or readers would have little opportunity to read news and reviews about their favourite OS. Despite their editorial habits OS/2 Professional will be missed.
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EurOS/2: European OS/2 support organisation.
Those of you in the UK and Europe who want to make direct contact with other organisations implementing OS/2 will want to look into EurOS/2. Organiser, Martin Brampton, says, "It seemed that we were all probably working on many of the same problems, and could benefit by sharing ideas. We are all just a bit besieged, too, by the Microsoft publicity machine, and sceptical managements who don't want to be left with (how many times have you heard it?) a Betamax video machine."
Enter EurOS/2, an organization that arranges meetings which encourage exchange and discussion, and supplements those with an electronic forum that is topical, quickly produced, edited (to avoid the junk that pads out open conferences) and accessible. EurOS/2 is primarily
interested in the problems that arise where 100 or more users have to be supported by hard pressed specialists.
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UK Warp price crash.
Whilst troughing round my local PCWORLD the other day still trying to find their Warp Software, I checked on their stock of Warp - and lo and behold, what did I see: Copies of Warp Red Spine, on either disk or CD, being offered for sale at only 25 pounds! This represents something like a 70% discount of regular high street prices here in the UK. So I thought a little further investigation was called for.
I asked the salesman what PCWorld's position was on supporting Warp. Apparently, PCWorld has no intention of dropping Warp from their product range, nor is this a case of clearing the decks before Merlin arrives. Perhaps a special deal has been struck, he suggested, but judging by the amount of dust and general bad state of the Warp boxes on PCWorld's shelves, I doubt this to be the answer.
Whatever the real reason behind this move, the action to take is clear: if you live in the UK and have been teetering on the edge of plunging into Warpdom, then now is the time to act.
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New computer retailer set to preload OS/2 and native software.
North Americans will soon get a real alternative for computers with OS/2 preloaded. Keeping Intelligent Systems Simple Inc. (a bit of a mouthful but the name may be changing), is set to begin retail sales of preloaded OS/2 systems in shortly over a month. All systems will come bundled with loads of native OS/2 software, OS/2 Warp Connect and all the horsepower necessary to make it hum. We'll have to wait until systems ship to find out final pricing, but it should be competitive.
Systems will be sold by mail order and through retail stores. The company is busy putting the finishing touches on its Worldwide Web site as you read this. Keep an eye on the announcement page for official news.
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SmartSuite being bundled with IBM PCs.
- from the 'net
Lotus and IBM have announced that SmartSuite will be bundled on all IBM PCs from now on. Purchasers of ThinkPad's, Aptiva's and other lines of IBM PCs will receive the suite of software which consists of the Word Pro word processor, 1-2-3 spread sheet, Freelance Graphics presentation graphics application, Approach database, Organizer personal and group scheduler and ScreenCam multimedia tool for creating audio/visual presentations.
The official press release from IBM said that, "SmartSuite will be provided on Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp operating systems."
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E-mail campaign web page.
- from the 'net
Greg Boyko has recently started an OS/2 email campaign web page. The purpose of the page is to make it easy for us as OS/2 users to let vendors know that we want native OS/2 versions of their software.
The page contains several products that I would like to see ported OS/2. Also included are the email addresses of the respective companies. Sending a request for an OS/2 version is as easy as clicking on the mail link.
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New device driver support site availabe.
- from the 'net
There is an OS/2 Device Driver Developer support site at http://www.wdi.co.uk/os2dd. This OS/2 site has a DB2 database repository containing a catalogue of all the most frequently asked device driver questions, along with answers.
The catalogue is organised in a structured manner so it "should" be possible to get answers to 95% of device driver developer questions fairly easily and quickly. If you fall into the 5% category then there is a mechanism to raise questions.
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Blue Ribbon Campaign launched by the EFF and ACLU.
- from the 'net
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have launched a suit in the Supreme Court of the US to challenge the constitutionality of a law passed recently by the US government. They have also launced a corresponding Blue Ribbon Campaign to promote awareness on the Internet of how individuals' rights to freedom of expression are, or may be violated by the new law.
The law may inflict the same kind of censorship on the Internet as exists on television and radio using the logic that the Internet is a similar broadcast medium. This is, of course, not the case, as there is no visible shortage of bandwidth on the Internet while there is on the airwaves. Many WWW pages will be displaying black backgrounds or the Blue Ribbon Campaign graphic for as long as it takes to stop this violation of American's right to free speech.
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New OS/2 game under development.
- from the 'net
Due to, "unbelievably high," response from the OS/2 community, Neural Override, Inc. has officially announced that they will develop an OS/2 Warp version of their new title, LightRider(tm). Neural Override plans to shift its lead LightRider(tm) programming team onto the OS/2 version.
Light Rider will be a fully 3D high speed, graphically intense shooting/driving game that pits you in one of 4 high tech vehicles on a texture mapped terrain racing through enemy lines to save the universe. A playable demo is planned for release before the game, however the final release will be CD-ROM only. Neural Override is also planning an all out media blitz to launch their new game which will be out near the end of the year, including Internet and print media based advertising.
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OS/2 gets its first edutainment software.
- Bruce Byfield
It's rumoured that later this month, Second Story Productions will release its first
software product, The Alphabet Zoo. This is believed to be the first edutainment CD written for OS/2. The CD will include five applications, as well as Windows versions of the software (the OS/2 version came first).
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New version of Clearlook coming soon.
- Bruce Byfield
According to Helmut Gassner, the developer of Clearlook, a new version of the product will be released before the end of February. It will include faxmerge and a functional data base, as well many new features (no details yet on what they are).
The version has apparently been tested by a limited number of users for several months, so it should be generally bug-free. In short, for everyone whose's been wondering for the last couple of months: Clearlook sounds like it's still very much a going concern.
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SimCity news on the 'net.
- Kevin Linfield, VP Toronto OS/2 User's Group
Jim Thomas of WinWare software (programmers of the OS/2 versions of Sim City Classic, Sim City 2000, and Doom/2) has come out of hiding and given OS/2 gamers information on the Internet. Jim explained why Sim City Classic was so slow and why Sim City 2000 is so fast!
Also, Maxis has again stated that SimTown and Widget Workshop are coming out for OS/2. They have also released patches for some of their programs at http://www.maxis.com.
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Hot News--Hot Java - January 28, 1995
- Bernhard Rohrer
On the 27th of January the first hints appeared that there was a version of Java for OS/2 available on Hobbes. It quickly became clear that this was not the long awaited beta, but a leaked alpha. Shortly after that, It was announced that it was possible to register for the official beta from IBM's Java HomePage. Unfortunately, the page was down for the weekend. But it's back up and running now.
Not wanting to wait for IBM's site to come back up, I grabbed the alpha release from hobbes. It includes a port of HotJava 1.0 alpha2 and a port of the alpha compiler. I couldn't test the compiler as I haven't a clue about writing in C, C++, Java or anything more complex than BASIC (and then I prefer something like HyperCard or VisualBasic).
HotJava for OS/2 is alpha and looks and feels it. It is dead slow and will only run some applets. There is one on the applet home page at SUN that stops it cold with a SYS3175 error. Another on Gamelan did run, but another one again produced a SYS3175. I didn't do any more testing with other pages but obviously, this version was not official code.
The browser is multithreaded, so you can choose a different URL as soon as you can see it. This is so nice that as soon as Java code is in beta and somewhat stable, I just might say, "good bye," to WebEx. A beta release of SUN's code by IBM seems to be due sometime towards the end of the quarter if not sooner.
Altogether I would think twice about getting this alpha--it's one hell of a download for a buggy browser (4.9 MB) and if you want the compiler you're probably better off, getting it from IBM. It does give you a fist glimps at an invention people are talking about as being of the same order of magnitude as the transistor or the microprocessor.
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