From the Editor Written by Larry Salomon, Jr.

Administrivia Volume 1 issue 5 went out with only a minor glitch, which is better than a major glitch. The really exciting news is that the auto-mailer worked quite well, so we should be able to handle higher volumes of subscriptions. My thanks go to the person that informed me of the already-written 'majordomo' which also does mailing lists but I found out that panix does not have it installed and that the system administrators have said before that they would not like mailing lists to be done from panix (and, futhermore, they would probably charge by the KB sent per month if a mailing list ate up too much CPU). So, it looks like I will have to continue the mailing using my home-grown 'submail'. This issue has some really good stuff in it. The Want Ads section resulted in a flurry of "wanna-write" notes on REXX. While we actually received only one article for this issue, the interest of knowledgeable people to become an author seems high. Also from the Want Ads, I hope that everyone will enjoy the - not one, but - two articles on multithreading. Finally, I must apologize to everyone for not writing part 4 of the "Container" series, but I have this annoying problem called "a job" and it has been eating up a lot of time lately. I, as well as Andre Asselin ("OS/2 Installable File Systems"), will try to finish up next month. EDM/2 officially welcomes IBM to the network distribution, courtesy of David Singer who runs the IBM (internal and external) gopher servers. We would like to thank Gordon Zeglinski for rewriting the installation program. It no longer depends on the system installation to work properly. Functions submitted for the Snippet(s) of the Month portion of Scratch Patch will be included as snippet.zip in the distribution from this issue on. New look (again) We are still tweaking a few things regarding presentation and are interested in your feedback. Tell us what you like and dislike about the format of the magazine (no promises that we will listen to you, however... :) Annoucement This is from IBM's "Software Developer Support & Services" group. Many of you probably saw the same in comp.os.os2.announce. IBM announces the PS (Personal Software, which includes DOS, OS/2 and LAN Systems) Worldwide Developer Assistance Program mailbox for users of the Internet. If you have a question about our program or would like to join, please write to us at wwdap@vnet.ibm.com. Snippet(s) of the Month I received only one reader submission for this month, so there seems to be no competition to see which will be published this month. Remember (I cannot stress this enough), submitted functions must be modular in fashion. This means that you should be able to compile them separately and need only link them with your applications to get them to work properly (versus actually including the source code as part of your application). The functions below do not quite meet this criteria (they still require the application to define a constant), but they are close enough. The snippet this month is for saving and restoring window positions in an .INI file. It should be noted, therefore, that OS/2 2.x provides a superset of this functionality in the WinStoreWindowPos() and WinRestoreWindowPos() API's. Documentation Chop Shop Our bug of the month bit me when writing a multithreaded application. It is in reference to the DosSleep() API which does absolutely nothing when you specify 0 as its argument. According to the documentation, this should give up the remainder of the current timeslice. The workaround is to specify 1 as the argument. Want Ads Below are the hot topics as of this issue's writing. Feel free to write on any of these. Workplace Shell Programming (hot) lately, I have noticed two things: lots of people want to learn how to write new Workplace Shell classes and no one who knows anything about it is telling the rest of us how to do it. I'll even stoop down to accepting an article in ASCII format on this topic! :) Anything on Rexx/2 (hot) many people have requested more articles on Rexx/2. This issue sees the first article on this topic, but we can always use more. Writing "Enhanced Editor" macros in Rexx/2 and interfacing with the Workplace Shell from Rexx/2 are still open topics. Using Input Hooks (hot) this is a complicated topic which is brought up frequently in the comp.os.os2.programmer.misc newsgroup. Hit testing (warm) one reader noted that the Jigsaw sample in both the IBM and Borland toolkits (are they not the same?) perform their own correlation and wondered why? Charles Petzold, in his OS/2 book "Programming the OS/2 Presentation Manager" briefly describes correlation and hit-testing, but does not go into any detail nor does he describe the Gpi functions used for this purpose. Animation (warm) a few readers expressed an interest in the various animation techniques that can be applied to PM applications. The ultimate article, in my opinion, would be one that develops a sprite library a la the Commodore 64's (and Amiga's?) built-in routines, since this is probably the hardest component of any good animation sequence. Client/Server (warm) using either named pipes (with or without a network) or sockets, client/server programming is all-the-rage these days. Some time ago, I started development on a post-office and a named-pipe implementation of FTP; maybe I will get time to finish them and will write articles on them.