South West Show goes ahead with new organisers

Jan 142012

The first show of the RISC OS calendar is usually the South West Show, which traditionally takes place during February. Paul Middleton of RISC OS Ltd, who has been organising the show for the last few years, is reported in Archive Magazine issue 23:3 to have told Jim Nagel, the editor, that “he usually learns a date at the last minute when the hotel offers special deals”. However, even last year’s show, which was held later than usual, in March, was officially announced towards the end of November 2010, and the date for the show had been spotted over a month earlier, during October 2010. With it now being January, therefore, it was beginning to look as though there wouldn’t be a South West Show in 2012.

However, keen to ensure that the RISC OS community doesn’t miss out on one of it’s main events, one which was particularly notable in 2011, Orpheus Internet and R-Comp Interactive have joined forces and announced that “the show must go on!” Continue reading »

Snippets - 14th January 2012

Jan 142012

Following the release of version 1.32 of DrawPrint, Sine Nomine Software have announced version 1.34, which fixes a number of bugs, crediting Harriet Bazley for finding most of them, and offering apologies to users who have downloaded version 1.32 or 1.33 in the last few days, who will now need to download version 1.34 instead.

“Even if you don’t expect to use the new page export features,” explains Hilary Phillips, “you should still download the new version as it fixes a couple of bugs which have been around for a while.”

And Harriet Bazley has herself announced a “tweak” to SideDiff, her application to display the differences between two versions of a text or BASIC file, side-by-side in a colour-coded format. Continue reading »

Impact 3.40 now available

Jan 142012

A new version of Sine Nomine‘s relational database application, Impact, is now available. A commercial product, the software is now at version 3.40, and is available as a free upgrade to anyone who has purchased version 3.37 or later – with users of versions 3.37 to 3.39 urged to download and install the upgrade as soon as possible, since it fixes “a nasty bug in card design mode, which was only present in those versions.”

In addition to this, there are lots of other bug fixes and minor improvements in version 3.40, with the major work in this release focusing on speed improvements and the import tool: Continue reading »

DrawPrint 1.32 released

Jan 082012

DrawPrint is an application from Sine Nomine that is designed to provide more versatile printing options for Draw, Sprite and JPEG files. It allows you to print these files over several pages at the scale of your choice. You can set margins and overlap between pages, or have page breaks inserted more intelligently.

Today, Sine Nomine have announced a new version, version 1.32, which adds a new feature that has occasionally been requested by users: Saving individual pages as Draw files. Continue reading »

Drag 'n Drop volume bundles

Jan 072012

For those who have yet to try Drag ‘n Drop, Paul Stewart’s PDF based RISC OS magazine, back issues of the first two volumes are now available to buy in volume bundles, priced at £9 each for the first two, both consisting of four issues. Features include show reports and previews, an ongoing series about sorting algorithms, and much more.

Volume 3 issue 1, the current issue, released to coincide with the 2011 London Show, is also still available from the Drag ‘n Drop website for the usual price of £3, and features an articles on the 8-bit games scene, Flicker, and running Messenger Pro 6 as an IMAP client.

 

MakeHelp released

Jan 072012

Rik Griffin has recently released a “C99″ manual in StrongHelp and HTML formats – which he explains is an ongoing work, and that he’ll be making a new version available soon. This manual was created using what Rik describes as “a ‘documentation generation system’, albeit a very slimline one.” Continue reading »

jpegtran BeagleBoard compatibility

Jan 072012

There are a number of applications available for RISC OS that carry out various transformations on JPEG files, such as JCut, JClean and Jigwas. These make use of the IJG (Independent JPEG Group) software to apply the transformations but, unfortunately, the “jpegtran” module supplied with these applications will not run on the BeagleBoard.

Some months ago, Chris Johnson reported that he now had a working jpegtran module, but had needed to modify the BASIC programs that called it. He has now recompiled the IJG software (version 6b, as originally used for the version supplied by the apps named above) using BeagleBoard friendly settings. Continue reading »

Konto: Yet another bank manager

Jan 072012

Mark Beerling has released what he describes as “(yet another) bank manager application.” He explains that he has been using BkMgr (which I believe is a very old application called “Contex Bank Manager”) for many years, but that application hasn’t been updated for BeagleBoard compatibility – hence his new application, called Konto, which offers some compatibility with BkMgr. Features offered by his new application include: Continue reading »

London Show videos, 2012 date officially announced

Jan 072012

With the 2011 London Show now a happy memory, ROUGOL (the RISC OS User Group of London, who organise the show) have uploaded videos of the various theatre talks from the show. Most are available in both AVI and MPEG formats, with the latter being described as “RiscPC friendly”. In some cases there is a second, smaller AVI file. Continue reading »

Calibre 3.23 released

Jan 042012

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: Continue reading »

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