Calibre 3.23 released

Calibre is a very comprehensive application for designing and printing calendars of all shapes, sizes and types, written by the late Ray Favre using Dr Wimp, his utility and function library designed to make it much easier to write fully multi-tasking RISC OS applications in BBC BASIC.

The last “official” version of Calibre, as found on Ray’s website (along with manuals and source code), is version 3.21, but Chris Johnson has made some changes, and is able to make available an updated version 3.23, which includes the following changes:

  • Works without crashing when run from a Fat32 formatted drive or memory stick (which is probably of most relevance to BeagleBoard and ARMini users).
  • Choosing ‘Format 6’ calendars no longer crashes the application.
  • Now sets a <Calibre$Path> system variable in the !Run file for use when adding or removing the ‘Moon’ font to <font$path> – therefore helping prevent a “Buffer too short” error on RISC OS 5 when the latter variable becomes too long.
  • When editing the “RLDs” (permanent and single year red letter days), navigation between writable icons using the keyboard (up/down arrow, tab, return) is now possible.
  • The application now correctly deletes dynamic areas used for font menus when it quits (which probably only applies to RISC OS 5 systems with RAM of 512 MB or higher, where dynamic areas may be high in the memory map).
  • Updated to use the new DrWimp library, version 5.02.

Chris is temporarily hosting these new versions on his website (mirror), until Ray Favre’s original DrWimp site is fully maintained once again – once that is sorted, these updated versions should find their way back to their original home.

It should be noted that since the Dr Wimp website is still fully accessible, and Calibre (as well as any of Ray’s other software) can still be downloaded, there is a danger that two or more people could update software such as this independently of one another, which could cause confusion for users. Anyone considering doing any work on any of this software should do their utmost to avoid such a situation, by discussing their plans in public before proceeding, to find out if anyone else has been doing anything with the same app – and if this turns out to be the case, collaborate and coordinate with that person. My understanding is that Ray’s wishes were for Archive Magazine to become responsible for ‘looking after’ the software and website, so perhaps the best place to discuss such things is the Archive-online mailing list (which I believe Chris has himself done).

 

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