A new version of Pinboard 2 has been released by RISC OS Developments. The software is a replacement for the standard ‘Pinboard’ supplied with the operating system – the component that looks after the desktop background, allowing backdrops to be displayed, icons to be pinned to it to save navigating to the relevant files or applications using the filer, and so on – and provides quite a number of new features that make it a worthy replacement.
For example, as well as pinning icons to the desktop, Pinboard 2 allows files to be saved to the desktop – which can be a handy quick fix if you’re about to save something, and realise you don’t have a filer window open. It also provides a ‘sticky notes’ so that instead of having post-it notes and similar stuck to your screen, they can take the form of little note files pinned to (and accessible from) the RISC OS desktop.
And another feature is the ability to allow the icon bar to be semi (or even almost completely) transparent – and it is this latter feature that is the basis of the headline improvement in the release of version 2.05.
A slightly unsightly (!) side effect of adding transparency to the icon bar was that its edge would remain visible – which may or may not have looked odd, depending on the perspective of the user, and the degree of transparency in use (and perhaps even the backdrop being displayed). So this version gains the new ability to remove the edge when the icon bar’s transparency reaches a certain level (though to benefit from this, you will need a recent version of RISC OS).
While the improved (edge) transparency was highlighted for this release, it isn’t the only benefit the new version brings – and according to the announcement, wasn’t the driver of the release, which was really the intent to deal with a number of minor issues with the previous version that have been reported to RISC OS Developments in recent months.
So, in addition to the improved transparency, you’ll also find that there’s better support for screen modes that may be used less often, such as those with lower colour depths, or those with odd EX/EY (eigen value) settings. There are also sanity checks on sprites and JPEG images that could cause problems – such as incomplete or corrupted files, or some that have been downloaded that might not be 100% as RISC OS expects them to be. Finally, there are tweaks to the way files deleted from the Pinboard are handled.
