Ben Finn discusses the history of Sibelius with ROUGOL

Sibelius was a music notation – or score writing – package, allowing people to put music to paper (via the screen) in much the same way a writer might use a word processing package. Named for Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, the first version was released in April 1993 – thirty years ago this month. The software went on to become a killer application for RISC OS, putting the operating system on the map for musicians, with some even buying RiscPCs just to run Sibelius – including institutions such as the…

Read More

Chris Hall brings a little speed to the next Wakefield meeting

Wait, officer, no, that’s definitely not what I meant! Computer technology in general tends to improve in a number of areas, with newer machines sporting any or all of more memory, greater storage, and faster processing speeds – although equal developments in the software that runs on them, to make use of those improvements, can sometimes mean the end user doesn’t necessarily notice the gains that have been made.

Read More

Up periscope! Nemo to navigate Nautilus up the Thames

An obvious reference like that is impossible to resist – sorry! The next meeting of the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) will take place on Monday, 20th March, and the guest speaker will be telling us how his submarine, Nautilus, is controlled via RISC OS. Wait, what? No, okay, then. The guest speaker will be Nemo20000, rather than Jules Verne’s fictional captain Nemo. ‘Our’ Nemo doesn’t have a submarine, but he does have some interesting RISC OS things to talk about.

Read More

Desktop dock demonstration in Droitwich. Ish.

That’ll be in Wychbold, then!1 The Midlands User Group (MUG) will be meeting up in person this Saturday (4th March) for the first time since before the pandemic – meetings in the interim have all been held online – and the ‘main event’ of the meeting will be a demonstration of the Desktop Dock, for use with laptops such as the Pinebook Pro.

Read More

Attend Dr Wimp’s Surgery with MUG

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.

Read More