The next friendly fireside chat for people interested in RISC OS software development will take place at 7:30pm on Saturday, 20th September. Taking place online via the Zoom video conferencing service, these meetings are intended as an informal way of allowing RISC OS programmers, and anyone interested in the subject, to get together online to discuss relevant matters.
These meetings don’t have a set agenda, and topics discussed are based on the questions people might ask or what they’ve been working on and choose to demonstrate. For example, topics covered at the last meeting included issues pertaining to a hypothetical 64-bit RISC OS, rewriting modules in C (and why writing things in assembly should be avoided), the compatibility of GPL with RISC OS, the difficulties developing a Bluetooth driver, the problems with touchscreen user interfaces, an explanation for the StrongED/BASIC random number problem identified at the previous meeting (when a BASIC program is run directly from within StrongED, it clears memory that includes the random number seed – effectively resetting it to be the same each time it’s run), menu handling and limitations, colour mappers, and more.
The meetings are open to anyone, regardless of their programming prowess – you could be someone with no programming experience looking for advice on where to begin and what tools to use, an expert with many years of development behind you, or anything between the two extremes; all are welcome.
To join the meeting, you will need a platform on which Zoom can be run, along with the meeting credentials. If you’ve joined a previous fireside chat, those credentials remain unchanged, but if not you can get them via one of these routes:
- You can contact Andrew McCarthy on Twitter or Mastodon – or indeed from your RISC OS computer using ChatCube.
- Or you can send an email to me here in the RISCOSitory bunker. Please note, though, that any emails sent to me on the day of the meeting itself will not receive a reply until very close to the meeting’s start time!
If you can’t wait until the next meeting to discuss RISC OS development issues with others, or want to continue a discussion started at the meeting, there is also now a Discord discussion forum – The RISC OS Coding Community.