Admiral - V1N2





'''Can I make a program object ask me for parameters when I launch it? For example, if I want the OS/2 System Editor object to prompt me for a file name to edit.''' Add [prompt] to the Parameters field on the Program tab of the object's settings notebook. Alternatively you can place just the brackets with a space in between them and leave out the word "prompt".

There are several other special characters you can place in the Parameters field: % will keep the program from receiving any parameters at all %* inserts the file name of an object dropped onto this object here, rather than at the end as is the default You can also modify the format of filename of the dropped object: %**N inserts the filename without the extension %**E inserts just the extension (without the leading ".") %**P inserts the drive and path information (without the trailing "\") %**D inserts just the drive letter and ":", or a UNC drive name, if applicable.

Can I toggle an text OS/2 window between full-screen and windowed? No, although you can do this for a DOS window by pressing Alt and Home. Windowed text-based OS/2 command prompts or programs directly access the video subsystem for compatibility and performance reasons, and therefore cannot be switched on-the-fly to full-screen applications.

Now that I have installed the DAPIE extensions to Warp, can I run Windows 95 programs? No. DAPIE stands for Developer's Application Programming Interface Extensions, which is a system created by IBM to allow programmers of Windows 95 applications that use the Win32 API to easily port their applications over to OS/2. A developer can use the same source code used to write a Windows 95 application, largely unmodified, and compile it for OS/2, creating an identical OS/2 application. The first two good examples of this type of program are the new Lotus WordPro '96 for OS/2, and Adobe Acrobat Reader for OS/2 - both originally Win32 applications that are now compiled into OS/2. You cannot run Windows 95 applications directly under Warp using DAPIE.

However, a vast majority of the programs that say they are "Windows 95" programs are really written to a standard called Win32s, a patch to Windows 3.X that allowed 32 bit applications to be run under Windows 95 or Windows 3.X. A good example of this is the new Quicken Version 5. A tell-tale indication that this code is Win32s is if the same program says that it will run under either Windows 95 or Windows 3.X. The great majority of these programs will work under OS/2. For some you may need to update the Win32s support to a higher level - currently OS/2 supports Win32s version 1.25. The updated Win32s support can be found on most OS/2 BBS and FTP sites, and the Win32s patches to Windows or Win-OS/2 can be obtained at the same places or from Microsoft.