RUNNER - THE ALTERNATIVE DESKTOP - on PD 618 (ST shareware, version 1.60, author Dave Thorsen, USA) Imagine you boot your hard drive and, suddenly, instead of usual Neodesk (or Kaosdesk, Gemini, Teradesk, whatever you fancy) rows of icons you're presented with beautiful picture of D&D kind of landscape with, suppose, some ancient ruins in the top left corner of the screen, gloomy temple in the other, terrifying monsters shadowing in the dark in the nearby forest, etc. Then you click on the temple and, amazingly, "Dungeon Master" is run; clicking on the cave entrance just beside the temple gives you a choice of running "Fate" or "Faerghail", while another click on the red moon launches "Hard Nova", etc. The list is endless. You may be a strategy freak so instead of D&D stuff you may fancy an atmospheric picture of a huge battle raging in the very front of your eyes. So clicking on a burning old T-55 would launch "M-1 Tank Platoon" while a diving MIG may run "MIG-29 Superfulcrum" or...eeer... I'd better shut up. This is just a small part (I mean VERY SMALL one indeed) of what can be done with RUNNER - A DESKTOP ALTERNATIVE (that's the full name in its glory) written by Dave Thorsen from the States. Once I bought a hard drive (thanks to "Fate!") I started to look around for a decent replacement for the usual awful ATARI desktop. I did try major shareware releases (with Teradesk scoring higher than others) only to stick to commercial Neodesk at the end due to its flexibility, good range of features, etc., but most probably just because it's simply a matter of personal preferences. I do enjoy Neodesk a lot but being an adventurous person I tried RUNNER (at that time version 1.22) from that nice chap Mike Goodman. I'd have to be insane not to register the great stuff which I got so now it's version 1.60c along with extremely useful sub-programs which are available to registered users only. At $10 minimum recommended registration fee it turned out to be a tremendous bargain. What is it then? RUNNER is a very quick, very easy to use alternative for the horrible standard desktop. 1 Mb of memory is preferred although it will also run on a standard 520K machine. As it happens to be with most alternative desktops it's primarily aimed at hard drive owners but you can still run it from floppies in case that damn Santa Clause forgot to give you a hard drive last Xmas. It will not run on TT or Falcon but who's that rich? Generally, RUNNER lets you list all your programs on the screen in form of user-definable menus and all of them can then be kicked to life with a single mouse click. What's great about the whole thing is that RUNNER doesn't absolutely care whether your programs are in the auto folder or not; they can be in any folder, any directory and any partition, in fact they just can be everywhere. Look at this example - this is what happens when my hard drive boots: 1/ Whizzz..... whirrrrl... wrrr... 2/ My wife is saying "Wot, again gonna be stuck to this damn thing for the whole weekend?" 3/ Neodesk appears (my wife disappears) with the usual plethora of icons. I still have this kind of setup, since I got used to playing around with files using Neodesk - just like it. Among others, RUNNER icon sits in the corner. 4/ Double click on RUNNER 5/ Beautiful picture fills the screen. Actually this one was included, along with several others, with the newest version which I received for my registration. This one is a colourful (animated, what do you think?) waterfall which gently cascades from among green cliffs. Sometimes other pictures may appear instead as I have configured RUNNER in a way that it select pictures at random so I never know what's going to appear. 6/ Menu appears (waterfall still cascades in the background) - this one defined by myself. I will try to remember what's there (I'm not sitting in front of my ST, y'see). Eeer... it should be something like this: * RPG/ADVENTURES * FLIGHT SIMULATORS * WARGAMES * SPORTS * TRADING/ECONOMY GAMES * UTILITIES I must've surely forgotten something, seems to me there are more entries. Anyway, maximum 15 entries are allowed, more that you will ever need. 7/ Another click on RPG/ADVENTURES reveals another menu which lists: * FATE/GATES OF DAWN * LEGEND OF FAERGHAIL * ULTIMA VI * HARD NOVA ----------- ----------- and some more Again, 15 entries are allowed in this sub-menu. It practically means that you can cram in as many programs as you may only want, it all depends how you nest them, i.e. how deep your sub-menus are going to be. Now simple click on the program's name will run it. Clicking on UTILITIES reveals following sub-menu: * WORD PROCESSING * VIDEO TITLING * ARTS/GRAPHICS * EDUCATIONAL * OTHER Choosing one of them gives access to more than 30 different programs which are nested together for easier handling. And, again, 15 entries are allowed here, i.e. you may specify 15 types of utilities giving them general descriptions but under WORD PROCESSING you may have CRAP WORD PROCESSORS and GOOD WORD PROCESSORS with couple of programs available under these banners. When adding new program to your list you may specify should it run in low, med or high res, you may assign quick keys to them, install applications (so when you choose .DOC file it triggers your favourite word cruncher and loads the file into it), add comments (i.e. to launch .TTP progs, etc.). Desk accessories are supported, too. In case you hate your mouse (and this may be the case if you're still using original ATARI killer-mouse) there are shortcuts for all the operations - most of them can be defined by you. There's access to the file selector (in case you've got UIS, or similar stuff, you have copy, move, delete, etc. immediately available), you can view text files with "move back one page" and similar options. Registered users also receive MINI-RUN program which is designed to help running memory hungry programs (or just to run things on a standard 520K machine). Another program, REGIONS, is also available for registered users free of charge which lets you set up active screen regions (max 32 of them - probably more than you'll ever need) which can be activated with a mouse click to select all features available in RUNNER. It's all so simple, really - you just draw the screen with your favourite art program. These can be some incredible icons or a full blown D&D picture like the one mentioned at the beginning - imagination is the only limit here. What I've described above is really a tiny part of what RUNNER is capable of. I haven't probably mentioned one fourth of its possibilities but, honestly, I would run out of space. My intention was to give you the taste of this great program and with an excellent, detailed 56 A-4 manual (eeer... you've got to print it out yourself) there's really plenty to discover. An ignorant person like me would probably never use half of the functions anyway but more advanced ones would surely benefit from numerous features offered by RUNNER. In case you've got a hard drive you're probably wondering how you ever managed without one. But if you add RUNNER to that you'll surely wonder how the hell you handled it all without this superb utility. You'll surely feel like donating $10 - $15 to the author to get all the extras since, honestly, if it was ever released commercially I wouldn't mind parting with some œ30 to get it. Real winner, comes highly recommended.