The News Written by Aram Agajanian

OS/2 A report on WarpCast on January 23 stated that Richard Seibt has been put in charge of OS/2 within IBM. Seibt is said to have been previously responsible for OS/2 in Germany. Donn Atkins, who previously held this position, has reportedly been promoted. IBM has released a white paper called OS/2 Warp Vision. C++ IBM released a new version of its multi-platform compiler suite on December 12, 1997. IBM's C and C++ Compiler Version 3.6 facilitates porting of applications between the OS/2, AIX, and Windows NT platforms. Tools are included to migrate applications from Visual Age for OS/2 3.0, Visual Age for Windows 3.5, and C Set++ for AIX 3.1.4. Note that this compiler supports the September 1992 ANSI draft C++ standard. IBM has posted the announcement of this product on the web. Java CodeQuill text editor (with a vi style keyboard) for Java 1.1 has entered beta. You can download it from hobbes. Innoval released the first beta of its J Street Mailer on January 30 to members of its Charter Users Group. Members also receive a single-user developers license for InnoBar, a custom control developed by the company. For a charge, anyone can join the Charter Users Group until the beta test has ended. IBM updated its Java compilers to native binaries for AIX, OS/2, Windows 95, and Windows NT on December 2. Each of these compilers can be downloaded from IBM's Alphaworks site. VisualAge for Java, Version 1.0.1 was announced by IBM on January 20 for availability on January 30. Web Netscape announced a restructuring due to a loss in Q4 1997. The upside is that the company also announced that it is making Navigator and Communicator Standard Edition 4.0 free for all users. A note was posted on the now-defunct Navigator/2 Unofficial Home Page stating that the Communicator/2 (4.0) project has been affected by Netscape's restructuring. However, the note also implies that the product will be released. Two screenshots of Communicator/2 are available online. Netscape also announced that it will make the source code for the forthcoming Communicator 5.0 client available for licensing free-of-charge. Netscape has set up a newsgroup for discussions about Communicator 5.0 source code. The source for the first developers release is scheduled to be available by the end of Q1 1998. The impending availablility of source code for Communicator 5.0 has led some to consider porting it to OS/2 independently. OS/2 Netlabs has announced their intentions to do a port. Opera Software announced on December 25, 1997 that they had signed contracts with developers to port their web browser for Win32 to a native OS/2 version. IBM has released a new version of Netscape Navagator 2.02 for OS/2 that supports both Java 1.02 and Java 1.1. This version also has its own plug-in pack. IBM An IBM Technical Interchange will be held from May 5 through 8 in Orlando, Florida. A web site has been published for the event. IBM's Personal Software group in Austin has been given ITAA*2000 certification by the Information Technology Association of America. ITAA*2000 is the result of a review of the Y2K conversion methodology. IBM has its own Y2K page. Font Driver A replacement TrueType font driver known as FreeType/2 claims to be better than the driver that ships with OS/2. Prolog Visual Prolog 5.0 was released on January 19 by the Prolog Development Center. There is a time-limited version available for free download. MaxBase The MaxBase report generator has been released for the MaxBase database suite. Other IBM is offering a free trial of a time-limited version of IBM AntiVirus. News items to news@edm2.com.