Two become one – group hug!
Following a discussion on the RISC OS Open Ltd forums, there is now a mailing list hosted on RISCOSitory.com’s sister site, RISCOSitory.co.uk, for users of AppBasic and DrawScript, two pieces of software by Joe Taylor.
AppBasic is a tool that allows the rapid creation of RISC OS applications. It “hugely simplifies the complex task of development, allowing the user to rapidly build high-quality applications” – which themselves are written in BASIC and make use of the RISC OS Toolbox, and can therefore be expected to work on every version of RISC OS from 3.10 onwards – though AppBasic itself is yet to be updated to run on ARMv6/ARMv7 based machines.
DrawScript, which is sadly not currently 32-bit compatible, is a module that provides the user with a programming language for producing vector drawings – when a DrawScript program is double clicked, the resulting drawing appears in a Draw window, from where it can be saved as a Drawfile.
Both of the applications originally had their own mailing lists. The DrawScript mailing list was hosted by SmartGroups, which was closed down by its then parent company Orange in 2006. AppBasic’s mailing list was hosted by Joe himself on his jettons.co.uk domain using MailMan. According to Joe, this “became broken when the webhost moved the jettons account to a different server,” noting that it would therefore have to be rebuilt, probably with a different address, and suggested that he would be happy for someone else to take over the management of the list.