Presentation Manager provides a windowed graphical user interface for OS/2 applications. The user interacts with these applications using interface constructs controlled by Presentation Manager, with either the keyboard or the mouse. For example, when a program asks you to enter a short piece of text such as a file name, you type it into a Presentation Manager control known as an Entry Field, when a program wishes to display a scrollable list it uses a control known as a List Box, and so on. Presentation Manager has two basic objectives:
The Presentation Manager user interface is based on icons, which are used to represent the objects with which the user wishes to work, and windows, which typically provide views of the contents of those objects. For example, an icon might represent a document which the user wants to modify; in order to do this he would open a view of the document in the form of a window displaying the text in an editable form. When he has finished working on the document he would close the view.
The basics of the Presentation Manager user interface are described in Presentation Manager Components.
The implementation of Presentation Manager under OS/2 Version 2.0 has been enhanced over previous versions of OS/2. Presentation Manager itself has been rewritten to take advantage of the 32-bit functions available in Version 2.0, resulting in improved performance, particularly for complex graphical applications, and several new user interface controls and standard dialogs have been introduced in conformance with the 1991 Systems Application Architecture* (SAA*) Common User Access* (CUA*) Workplace Environment. The Information Presentation Facility (IPF) has also been enhanced.