May 192013
 

Wait! What? Why did I put the pun in the title instead of here? D’oh!

First released a little over a year ago, MoreKeys is an application designed to make it easier to enter ‘extended’ characters – those not normally found on a standard keyboard – in a way that was inspired by the on-screen keyboard on developer Rick Murray’s mobile phone. Continue reading »

May 192013
 

Wave, Gen, you’re on RISCOSitory!

A couple of old applications for generating RISC OS sounds have been updated for 32-bit compatibility by Jon Scott.

The first of these, announced by Jon on the RISC OS Open forums as a re-release of a very old voice module generator, is Wavegen, an application that can create perodic sounds based on mathematical formula such as a simple sine or complex harmonic wavforms. Continue reading »

May 192013
 

No, just because it’s on the internet and it’s called Cat_Draw, that doesn’t mean there are cute pictures of cats.

Long time RISC OS user Martin Carradus popped up on the RISC OS Open forums in February in response to a comment about his application, Cat_Draw, not being 32-bit compatible. Martin initially offered to supply his source code, presumably to allow someone else to make the application 32-bit compatible, but a couple of hours later posted again to say that he had now recompiled it himself. Continue reading »

Apr 182013
 

 Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to Workakefield we go!

We are once again rapidly approaching the time when the attention of the RISC OS community falls fairly and squarely upon Wakefield, with “the North’s premier RISC OS show” taking place this coming Saturday, April 20th.

The show is now in its 18th year, and once again takes place at The Cedar Court Hotel, Deby Dale Road, Calder Grove, Wakefield, WF4 3QZ – the show’s original venue, before it moved to locations such as Thornes Park Athletics Stadium. Continue reading »

Apr 072013
 

It’serial-ly useful thing.

Dave Higton released LPC1114 at the beginning of February, with an update about a week and a half later, for use with a small piece of hardware with the same name – the LPC1114 being one of a family of devices [PDF] from NXP Semiconducters, all of which are ARM Cortex-M0 based and, due to their low cost and power requirements, are ideal for simple embedded applications.

An example application for the LPC1114 device is given by Dave, who explains: Continue reading »

Apr 072013
 

Sound as a 32-bit compatible pound.

There are a number of ways to make RISC OS computer play sound samples – perhaps for sound effects in games – and one of these is to turn the sound sample into a voice module, an option often provided by software that works with audio samples. One such example was Armadeus, which came from Clares Micro Supplies – and is the software I used myself for the sound samples used in some of the budget games released by Soft Rock Software in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Continue reading »

Apr 012013
 

You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record JPEG baby, right round round round.

Chris Johnson, well known for a number of applications, in particular the likes of Snapper and SyncDiscs, both of which began life with David Pilling and later taken over by Chris, recently announced version 1.00 of TranJPEG (mirror), soon followed by updates to version 1.10 and 1.20, which presents a RISC OS front-end for the Independent JPEG Group command-line utility “jpegtran”, giving the user a friendly and easy way to make use of the features it provides.

Continue reading »

Mar 272013
 

One, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, one hundred.

Snapper is a screen-capture program, originally written by David Pilling and supplied with his scanning and image processing software, and now maintained and further developed by Chris Johnson.The software provides an easy way to save areas of the screen as sprites, something that can also be done with Paint, supplied as standard with RISC OS, but with additional options that make Snapper much more versatile. Continue reading »

Mar 272013
 

Keeping up with the Joneses YouTube Wget

Murnong, Christopher Martin’s application for downloading YouTube videos, has been updated to version 2.32.

The software is designed to parse web pages fed to it that have been saved from YouTube, Google’s video sharing website, so that the address of the embedded video can be established. Once it’s done that, it launches Wget to download the file so that it can be played with FFplay or converted with FFmpeg – both of which have been ported to RISC OS by Christopher. Continue reading »