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Object Desktop Tips- by Alexander Antoniades

WarpCenter: Just Say No

Reviewing the entries to the Object Desktop screen shot contest, we were amazed by how many people were still using WarpCenter even though they had Object Desktop. While WarpCenter is appealing to many since it comes with OS/2 Warp 4.0 and it is one of the first new features that most people see, we'd like to recommend a different solution: use Object Desktop's Control Center instead.

Control Center, unlike WarpCenter, is a collection of Workplace Shell classes that has been tested on every version of OS/2 since 2.11 and works fine on all of them. The early WarpCenter had some stability issues that I understand have been fixed by FixPak 1 for Warp 4, but there are still problems due to the way it was implemented. Therefore, our developers have always recommended removing and using Control Center instead. The raw functionality of the WarpCenter can be duplicated by a modified Control Center, so replacing it should be relatively painless. Additionally you'll have Stardock there to help you out.

Favorite overlooked components in Object Desktop:
#1 The Keyboard LaunchPad

Due to its invisible functioning and the fact that screen shots never showcase it, people often overlook what is probably the most versatile of Object Desktop's program launch facilities. The Keyboard LaunchPad allows you to associate one (or more) objects with any unmapped key combination.

Using this utility you can make CTRL-ALT-M launch your favorite e-mail program or make CTRL-ALT-H go to hobbes to get the latest files. Many Stardockers have cleaned up their Desktop to the extreme by using this approach, to the exclusion of all other file launching methods.

The only downside to this is that there aren't any easily accessible drop points for keyboard-only launched objects such as drives or folders, so you still might want to keep shadows of them on your Desktop for that purpose.

RAR and TAR support for Object Desktop

Towards the end of last year Stardock released the Object Archive Compression Plug-in Pak v1.0 to thank all of the Object Desktop customers for making 1996 a great year for Stardock. This patch for Object Desktop extended the power of Object Archives to include RAR compression and archive format, TAR Unix archive format, GZIP-ed TAR files (compressed), Compressed TAR files, and Z Compressed TAR files.

This extension is a free upgrade for users of Object Desktop 1.5 (both regular and Professional). To get it all you have to do is fill out a web page questionnaire located at http://www.stardock.com/signup/.

Note: You will need to get some freeware executables in order to run this, but there are links to get these files on the page that you download the patch from.

That's all for this month. Until next time, don't forget to send in any unique or interesting ideas for using Object Desktop to make your system work better.

Alexander Antoniades is the former Associate Editor of OS/2 Magazine and the current Vice President of Marketing at Stardock Systems.

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