Straight up! Or curved a bit, with a variable width and graduated fill! For what may have been a first, this year’s Wakefield Show saw Martin Wuerthner demonstrating a new version of ArtWorks that wasn’t actually ready for sale – though he expected it to become available soon after. After only a very short time, ‘soon after’ has arrived, and Martin has announced the availability of that new version. ArtWorks 2.X2 introduces a major new feature, in the form of ‘Artistic Lines’, which presents the user with many new creative…
Read MoreMore puzzles in Wrangler and SuperDoku
Even more ways to avoid being productive. Hot on the heels of Wakefield, Sine Nomine Software have announced new versions of their popular puzzle games, Wrangler and SuperDoku, adding new puzzle types to both. SuperDoku is an advanced Sudoku generating and solving application, which can handle more than just standard Sudoku puzzles – it can cope with puzzles of different sizes and shapes, jigsaw blocks, extra blocks, and much more. This update brings it up to version 1.27, which adds Diamond puzzles; Sudoku puzzles with extra blocks, forming an overall…
Read MoreOpenVector, OpenGridPro and DrawPlus: Three apps, three updates
You’re once, twice, three times an upgrade. Christopher Martin has been busy of late. Not content with updates to FFmpeg, FFplay, amongst others, he has also released three updates to OpenVector, OpenGridPro and DrawPlus. These three are open source enhancements to Draw, with OpenVector and OpenGridPro themselves originally being developed by Jonathan Marten from DrawPlus, and released as commercial applications by 4Mation (as Vector, which featured layering and object library capabilities, and GridPro, which was customised for drawing grids and other regular layouts). They were subsequently made open source, and…
Read MoreImpulse module updated after 10 years
Apps can’t help acting on impulse. The Impulse module was originally released by Computer Concepts (now Xara), and was in part the result of the company’s plans to develop a replacement for Arthur, the operating system used on the Archimedes computers before Acorn brought out RISC OS 2. The module provides a mechanism for inter-application communications, command execution and data transfer, and is used by databases such as Impact and Powerbase in conjunction with Impression, ImpEmail and Ovation Pro to perform mail-merges and produce reports. Until now, the most recent…
Read MoreDRenderer module updated
That is not the DRenderer you are looking for. The DigitalRenderer (DRenderer) module, which is usually supplied along with the SharedUnixLibrary, is used to provide sound support for applications and games ported to RISC OS which make use of that library. However, the version supplied with SharedUnixLibrary on riscos.info can play back audio at the wrong speed and contains some bugs which could theoretically crash a RISC OS computer if they are triggered, although it’s considered unlikely to happen. Christopher Martin has been updating the module, and provisionally hosting it…
Read MoreHheretic and Hhexen ports
Hheaps of hhectic gameplay for the price of a download or two. Chris Gransden is continuing to keep himself busy porting things to RISC OS, with Hheretic and Hhexen having been announced just a couple of days before this year’s Wakefield show. These two games are ports of Hheretic and Hhexen, which are Linux ports of Heretic and HeXen – with the extra ‘H’ in each name standing for ‘Hacked’ – originally developed by Raven Software and published by id Software.
Read MoreDrawPrint 1.38 available
Free printing utility even better value for money than before. DrawPrint is an application that allows the user to print a Drawfile (or Sprite or JPEG) over several pages, with full control of the scale. Margins can be set, with the option of the printed image overlapping from one page to the next, or have page breaks inserted more intelligent way. Free to download and use, the software was originally developed to provide a way to print from NetSurf on the IYONIX pc, but it can also be useful for…
Read MoreFFmpeg and FFplay updates
Movie magic! Development of FFmpeg and FFplay continues, with Christopher Martin having released version 1.23 of these applications a few days before this year’s Wakefield show. FFmpeg is a versatile, open source, multi-platform video and audio converter, described as “the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created” on its home site. The software makes it possible to process many movie formats which would otherwise either not be possible, or at least very difficult and…
Read MoreNew version of Impact available
Keep tabs on your data. And probably in it, as well. Following its launch at the recent Wakefield Show, Sine Nomine software has now made the new version of Impact available from their website, along with the new accompanying application ImpEmail. Originally developed by John Skingley of Circle Software, and taken over in 2003 by Matthew and Hilary Phillips of Sine Nomine, Impact is a relational database for RISC OS, which is easy to use and provides facilities to create, edit, import and edit information, and features the ability to…
Read MoreEasyFont Pro updated
Font front furthered. A big weakness of the RISC OS font manager lies in the way in which it handles and organises lots of fonts from the user’s perspective – which is to say, it doesn’t, not in a meaningful or sensible way*. Normally, the fonts installed on the computer are presented with only rudimentary grouping – for example, under Homerton there is medium and bold, with an oblique variant of each – and when lots of fonts are installed, the user normally sees them in applications as a very…
Read More