Hewlett-Packard Co introduced version 4.0 of its object-oriented NewWave 4.0 Desktop Manager software for Microsoft Corp Windows, adding support for Object Linking and Embedding. The company claims significant improvements in all areas of desktop management including the desktop organiser, workgroup library and work-automation support through its exclusive agent macro facility. It adds drag-and-drop printing, 32-character titles for all data files, and drag-and-drop file attachment of Windows documents to the NewWave desktop: all MS-DOS and Windows applications are now interoperable with the NewWave desktop manager. The enhanced software-installation process makes these applications available as icons on the desktop automatically. Users can now customise the appearance of the desktop and an object finder enables users to locate and open objects housed in folders without opening the folders. Agent tasks now can call directly any Dynamic Link Library, functions that can be loaded into memory when needed and shared by multiple applications, such as the Paradox Engine from Borland International Inc – by calling the Paradox engine from an agent task, the task could perform a database query directly on the data without opening a database front end. The agent-task language has full support for dynamic data exchange. Agent tasks now can be triggered by events such as opening a file on a network or receiving electronic mail. It uses an English-like procedural agent-task language that mimics the user’s physical actions so that in most cases, users merely act out their tasks and the Agent language is generated automatically. NewWave Desktop Manager is $200, now.
