Shortest route found: to their desk to use a computer with Zoom installed.
Hilary and Matthew Phillips of Sine Nomine will be joining the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) as the guest speakers for their next meeting, which takes place on Monday, 17th July.
The main subject of the talk will be RiscOSM, their application that uses data converted from OpenStreetMap to present vector-based maps on the RISC OS desktop. However, they won’t simply be demonstrating the software on its own – they’ll be venturing slightly more off-grid, looking at features that are less well known and more advanced.
Perhaps the most significant of these is the communication protocol they have devised that allows other software to interact with RiscOSM, and a very good example of a third party application that does so is Chris Hall’s SatNav, which can relay GPS data to RiscOSM for a map of the local area to be displayed.
However, Hilary and Matthew have written a few applications that make use of the protocol themselves with Recce, which displays information about a given location, AtoB which can plan a route and have RiscOSM display it, and BusWatch for live tracking of buses, with their current location displayed on a map.
Another of their applications, Nominatim, forms a significant part of the chain, by providing a hook through which other software can look up geographical places and features by name. The location being sought can be passed to Nominatim as a WIMP message or via the command line, but also in a more integrated way; Nominatim can be used by any other application as a plug-in, which means it can display its own icons in that application’s window(s) to allow the user to look up information directly.
Beyond RiscOSM and related items, some of Sine Nomine’s other products have also seen recent updates – so they’ll be prepared to answer questions about the Impact database application, its mail merging sidekick ImpEmail, and printing tool DrawPrint, as well as any of their other pieces of software.
The meeting will be a hybrid one, with some people attending in person and others online. In both cases the official start time of the meeting is 7:45pm on Monday, 17th July.
In-person attendees should make their way to:
The Duke of Sussex pub,
23 Baylis Road,
London, SE1 7AY.
The pub is a stone’s throw from Waterloo Station, so easy to reach by public transport, and for drivers there is car parking available on Coral Street after 6:30pm – there are directions for people coming either way on the ROUGOL website.
There should be ROUGOL members at the pub from around 6:30pm, enjoying pre-meeting food, drinks, and chat – look for them upstairs in either the Chichester or Petworth rooms.
Online attendees should make their way to:
A comfortable chair where they can see and hear a screen connected to a computer running the Zoom video conferencing software.
Directions should be unnecessary for this – it should managable without even having to refer to RiscOSM or AtoB – but the necessary credentials to punch into Zoom to join the meeting will be needed. These are unchanged from other recent ROUGOL meetings, so anyone who has previously attended one should have them already, but if not just contacting them in plenty of time for the meeting.
The Zoom meeting will be open from 7:30pm.
ROUGOL is also trying to organise a meeting covering the subject of fixing up Archimedes/RiscPC machines – so if anyone has any ideas on that, or might be able to talk about or demonstrate something in that regard – please contact them about it.
