If you are interested in software development on RISC OS, the time has come again to gather around the fire, and meet up with other people with a similar interest to discuss the topic. The next ‘friendly fireside chat’ for RISC OS developers will take place on Saturday, 26th September.
These meetings, which take place entirely online using the Zoom video conferencing system, are a way for developers, and anyone interested in the topic, to get together and discuss the issues they face, the problems they’ve encountered, and hopefully resolve those problems with the help of others present.
Taking an informal approach, there is no set agenda to the meetings. Instead the topics discussed are those anyone wishes to bring up, so you could take the opportunity to ask for clarity on how a particular SWI call is used, for example, or look at a piece of code to try and find the problem with it.
If you are currently working on something – especially if it’s a potential tool for developers – you could use the meeting as a way to show off an early version of it, and get feedback from the very people who might go on to use it when it’s released.
At the last meeting, Graeme Shrimpton – the developer behind TWimp – demonstrated MyChoices, which is designed to make it easier to save and load elements from within Choices files. The evening’s discussion also covered the use of Perl and PHP, including the use of BBC BASIC to set up PHP scripts. Martin Eastwood showed the group an application for MacOS that could load and save RISC OS sprite files, display their contents, and import/export individual sprites as Pings.
The scheduled time for the meeting is 7:30pm, and it is open to anyone, no matter how experienced or otherwise you are as a developer. To join, 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.