OS/2: Making your work easier (really!)

You may have heard that OS/2's Workplace Shell (WPS) is the latest thing in Graphical User Interfaces (GUI's), even offering users greater facility than the Macintosh interface. But beyond all the technical hurrahs, what good is the WPS to you in your everyday work? Well, the WPS was designed to make your life easier by allowing you to talk to your computer in a more natural manner and by providing features that facilitate that conversation.

Like other GUI's the WPS displays a desktop with icons representing things that you use; you manipulate the icons using your mouse. This article has to do with a couple of really neat things you can do with the icon on the desktop that looks like a manila folder. It assumes that you know how to use a GUI.

The folder icon is a kind of container where you can store other things such as data files, programs and other folders (in the WPS you can put folders inside folders inside folders inside ...). Two of the simplest and most useful features of this icon are its work area and template attributes. Both of these features are possible due to the fact that every folder in the WPS is an object (as is every other kind of icon). What does this mean? It means that, when you create a new folder by double clicking on the Templates folder to open it and doing a right-mouse-button (rmb) click-drag on the icon in this folder that says FOLDER, you create an object. An object is composed of a bunch of attributes (data) and has specific things it will do (behavior). You can change the data and behavior of an object by doing a rmb click on the object, opening the object's Settings Notebook. The Settings Notebook is just what it sounds like: a spiral-bound notebook with tabbed pages indicating the topic of that page. Every object has its own Settings Notebook and the number and titles of the pages are automatically set to fit the data and behavior that's appropriate to that kind of object.

The two behaviors of interest here are found in the FILE and GENERAL pages of a folder's Settings Notebook. Clicking on the FILE tab displays a page on which appears a small box with the text "Work area" next to it. Selecting that feature changes the behavior of this particular object in a very useful way.

You normally use folders to contain stuff. You have a bunch of stuff on your desk that you're working on. When you want to do something else, you gather up all the stuff and put it into a folder, only to have to take it all out again when you want to resume work. If you have a bunch of different projects your working on or if the project you're working on has a bunch of different parts, you have a bunch of folders all somewhat related to one another. By turning on a folder's work area behavior, it will put away all of the stuff that's in that folder for you when you close it and when you re-open it it will put all the stuff it contains just as it was when you closed the folder. This could be a lot of stuff. For program development, I typically have two folders open with 8 to 10 other folders or documents or programs in each folders. Having the arrangement I use cleaned up automatically is a big time-saver. Being able to reproduce what I was working on with a double-click on a single folder is even more of a time-saver. A particularly bad consequence of this feature is that it starts you paging through computer catalogues in hope of finding someone who's selling 26 inch monitors with super-super-super-super VGA resolution so you can put everything you're doing on-screen at the same time.

The template attribute is different. If you were working as a business person 20 years ago, every time someone came in to buy something you would reach for a pad of paper printed with blank invoices, tear one off, and start filling it in. The template attribute (found on the GENERAL page of a folder's Settings Notebook) turns a folder, any folder, into a pad of folders, all with the same contents and same behaviors. If you want a new one, you just rmb click-drag and you've got a new one. This is particularly handy for document objects (e.g. invoices or form letters) but the example of a folder shows that this feature applies to complex objects.

For example, say you were a producer for a theater group. All the paperwork involved in putting together a complex production like a stage play might involve a folder of documents for the rental agreement, a folder of documents for actor contractual agreements, a folder of documents for insurance, a folder containing folders of documents for each of the suppliers of costumes, stage props, etc. You could create forms for each of the documents you needed on your desktop, organize them into folders and groups of folders, and put everything you needed to stage a production into a single folder. If you knew that you put on 4 productions a season you could turn that folder into a template: tearing off a new folder from the template would give you a complete copy of all the paperwork you would need to produce an entire production in one fell swoop, pre-organized into the appropriate folders.

The two features I've described are part of off-the-shelf, plain-vanilla OS/2. There's a lot more in this operating system that the average user can take advantage of on a pretty ordinary PC with a little reading (OS/2 contains a lot of on-line documentation) and a bit of patience. From a technical viewpoint, it makes me appreciate that IBM's the only computer company I know of that has several Nobel prize-winning scientists on its payroll.