Drag-and-drop Feature Also Handy For Applications
The Age
Monday August 30, 1993
A LOT of people really like the drag-and-drop interface that OS/2 provides, and like the way it lets you drag files to new folders, to printers or to the shredder. However, a lot of people don't realise that you can use this feature with applications, too. Simply drag a document icon over your word processor icon, drop it and open the word processor with the document loaded and ready to edit. You can do it not only for OS/2 applications such as Describe and WordPerfect for OS/2, but also for DOS or Windows applications.
To set up your DOS or Windows application for drag-and-drop, open the application's Settings view, and enter `%*` in the Parameters field on the Program (first) page. This instructs OS/2 that, whenever a file is dropped on this application's icon, it should behave as if the application had been started from the command line, with the file name supplied as a parameter.
I have used this feature with a number of applications including WordPerfect for DOS and Microsoft Word for Windows. It works for any application that can be started from a DOS command line, and which will accept a file name as a parameter.
More DOS OS/2 lets you run multiple DOS and Windows applications concurrently.
With the default DOS settings under OS/2, you get about 620K of free memory in each DOS session. This is because DOS isn't really there; OS/2 is actually doing most of the work outside the 640KB DOS address space.
You can tweak some of the DOS settings, however, to give you more free memory. I have been able to get a DOS session with 768K of free space, which is more than DOS can address. I did this by using a few of the DOS settings that I talked about in last week's column. Specifically, you need to set the DOS High setting to ON, and the DOS UMB setting to ON. If your application doesn't need expanded or extended memory, you can set the EMS memory limit and the XMS memory limit settings to zero, which will disable these features for the current application, and save you some more memory.
If you're still hungry, and your application is a text-based one such as WordPerfect for DOS, you can use the Video Mode Restriction setting to turn off APA graphics for the current DOS session, which will give you back the memory that OS/2 was going to use for the session's graphics video buffer.
There's a lot you can do with these DOS settings. Why not experiment and have some fun? If you mess it up and can't get it back, no problem. Just drop the icon in the shredder and set up another one for your application.
New drivers A lot of new device drivers are appearing for OS/2. Many are included in the OS/2 package, but a number were not quite ready, and more are appearing all the time. For example, if you have a SoundBlaster CD-ROM drive, the device driver is not included with OS/2, but is available.
You can obtain this, and other new drivers, from the IBM Bulletin Board on (02)2412466, or from IBM's service hotline on 131426.
Networking For networking users, IBM has announced a new set of 32-bit TCP/IP products for OS/2. These products allow you to link DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other systems such as Unix, using Token Ring or Ethernet networks, share disks and printers.
© 1993 The Age