The Midlands User Group (MUG) meeting will take place online, via the Zoom video conferencing system, on Saturday, 4th February at 2:00pm.
John McCartney will be taking the main stage for the meeting, to discuss Dr Wimp’s Surgery – a book published by the late Ray Favre that provided an introduction to programming the RISC OS desktop using the Dr Wimp BASIC library.
The library itself was originally developed by Andrew Ayre in the latter half of the 1990s, after which Ray took over its distribution and support. He first published the book in 1998, and a second edition a few years later.
A regular contributor to Archive magazine, Ray left a note in his will for Archive to look after the books and software – and with that in mind the magazine’s previous editor, the late Jim Nagel, persuaded John McCartney to look at the book with a view to recreating it. The result of that work can be found on the new Dr Wimp website hosted by Archive – and if you’re a subscriber, there’s an article about the subject in issue 26:1.
Once the main talk is complete there will be a second one, given by John Rickman on the subject of StrongED’s ‘folding’ feature – which allows sections of text to be ‘hidden’ until they are opened up, providing a way to see (for example) an overview of a program, showing just the initial definitions of functions, until one is expanded to see the underlying code.
If you’d like to join in, you’ll need a computer or other device set up that runs the Zoom software, and the access details for the meeting – these remain the same as other recent MUG meetings, so if you’ve attended any you’ll have them. If not, just send them an email!
