WINDOWS ON THE WORLD

Dick Pountain/13:00/06 September 1995 Idealog 13

I don't think that I CONSCIOUSLY set out to avoid the Windows 95 launch hype, but nevertheless August the 24th found me sitting in tiny croft in the Scottish highlands (50 miles south of Wick) with no electricity, no telephone, no TV and no radio. Even so, as I strode through the vast expanse of flowering heather I half expected a light aircraft to appear over the hill and skywrite "First fire, then the wheel, now Windows 95" in red smoke - in the event all that turned up was an eagle looking for a rabbit lunch. On the couple of occasions that I ventured into Golspie to buy the Guardian, I discovered that Windows 95 had made it onto the front page (and I'm told MS bought the whole of the Times for a day.) I could spend this whole column sounding off about the desirability - or otherwise - of allowing billionaires to purchase the front pages of newspapers of national record to advertise something which is considerably less important than, say, bathroom fittings, but I won't bore you.

Instead I'll talk about the product itself. I've now installed Windows 95 on the HP Vectra I use in PC Pro's office, but not on the Elonex 433 that I do most of my writing on at home, which continues to run Windows 3.1 with the Wintools replacement shell. This direct comparison of Wintools and Windows 95 has not proved flattering to the MS product, confirming the fear I aired in this column a year ago that Microsoft has muffed its one opportunity to significantly improve the Windows user interface.

Wintools (called Aporia in a previous incarnation) is published by Tool Technology Publishing of San Rafael California, and it's one of those alternative shells, like Norton Desktop, that replaces the Windows 3.1 program manager to offer a different way of viewing your computer. I first encountered Wintools when I reviewed several such shells for Byte back in 1992, and though I found its object-oriented world-view slightly unnerving, when the test was over it was the one I couldn't give up.

Wintools and Windows 95 have several points of similarity. Both allow you to place icons directly onto the desktop - Win95 calls these 'shortcuts' and Wintools calls them 'tools' - and these icons can represent programs, or files, or subdirectories (whether local or over the network). Both products bind these icons only shallowly to their underlying disk files, so deleting the icon doesn't delete the actual file, and if you move the file the shortcut will longer work. By contrast Macintosh System 7 and OS/2 both have an internal object model that maintains such links dynamically, but frankly I'm happier with the shallow approach at this point in history - until we get a secure, fully object-oriented disk storage system I prefer to manage my files directly and use the desktop icons just to launch applications. 

Here Wintools offers something that Win95 forgot, namely a virtual desktop. I can have up to 16 virtual screens, each containing its own collection of tools. Wintools remembers the exact layout of all these tools and restores them next session, and it also (unlike Win95) remembers the position and size of the window for each tool. I use this facility to create a 'rooms' metaphor - one screen is my writing room, with word processor and dictionary , while another is my comms room with Ameol, Galahad and Winfax and so on. Unlike OS/2, Wintools can't actually relaunch the same applications you were running last session, but that's rarely what I want to do; having them all one click away is enough.   

Wintools allows me to group frequently used tools into toolbars, which follow me around from virtual screen to screen. I can drag a tool folder onto the 'open' tool, whereupon its tools will pop out onto the desktop - drag it a second time and they are all put away again like magic. In addition to program, file and directory tools, I can create keystroke and DDE tools. Clicking on a keystroke tool starts an application and passes it a sequence of keystrokes (or you can drop the tool into a running window where it will discharge its keystrokes) - an object-oriented way to do macros. A DDE tool does the same thing with DDE messages.

All Wintools tool icons are fully fledged objects with lots of internal properties, which you set by dragging them onto the 'change' tool (equivalent to right clicking and selecting 'Properties' in Win95). One property all tools possess is a schedule time, so you can have them automatically launch themselves without using any separate scheduling program. You can give any tool its own help and notes files and you choose what editor to view these with, so they could be pictures or sounds. Every tool has its own extensive set of permissions too - for example I can deny the right to move icons I want to fix, as in a toolbar. Using these facilities a network manager can create whole new user interfaces which let users access just selected programs and directories at a single click without them ever being exposed to Windows at all. 

I'm not trying to persuade you all to run out and buy Wintools - that would be irresponsible since it will never be a mainstream product like Window 95. I guess what I'm doing is complaining that Microsoft could trail so far behind products like Wintools. All the other engineering industries have a concept called 'best practice', which roughly means watching your competitors closely and adopting the best bits so that the state of the art (whether in cars, or aeroplanes, or bridges, or hi-fi systems) will steadily advance. Microsoft's monopoly of the software industry ensures that no such mechanism can operate here - we get only the bits MS feels like including.