R-Comp have announced that they have a stock of 25 inch LED-backlit monitors. These monitors, from a well-respected brand, offer excellent picture quality, with built-in ISF/image calibration features, and provide HDMI, VGA and older analogue connections, allowing you to use them with older computers such as RiscPCs and IYONIX pcs, as well as digital computers such as the ARMini or RISCube. These screens also have built in freeview, allowing their use as ordinary TVs.
Read MoreNew versions of OpenVector, OpenGridPro and DrawPlus
New versions of the three open source enhancements to draw, OpenVector, OpenGridPro and DrawPlus are now available. Version 3.36 of the applications includes a number of bugfixes, such as rulers not scrolling consistently with their document windows, and text-area columns always being imported onto layer zero, and new to this version is that grid-snapping is enabled for bezier control points while being dragged. This was quickly followed by version 3.37, and according to Christopher Martin, who currently maintains these applications:
Read MoreBASIC libraries galore
Steve Drain has released a number of BASIC libraries, and a new version of the Basalt module. The Strings BASIC library provides routines for handling long strings, referenced by normal string variables. All the standard string keywords are emulated and work with any combination of normal string variables and expressions and long strings. Written to explore a new idea for providing long string support in Basalt, which is yet to be fully written, Steve is releasing the library because it may be of interest.
Read MoreCD and DVD support comes to ARMini
While RISC OS users have been able to access CDs and DVDs from their computers many years, users of R-Comp Interactive’s ARMini computer (as well as those using BeagleBoards in their own right) have only been able to do so via another computer and a network connection: Accessing the media in CD and DVD drives connected to the computer by USB was not an option. Until recently.
Read MoreDate spotted in the wild for London 2012
Although there has been no announcement yet of a London Show for 2012 – which is hardly surprising since only a month has passed since the 2011 show, at which we saw the Raspberry Pi running RISC OS, amongst many other things – it appears that ROUGOL (the RISC OS User Group of London, who normally organise the London Show) may have already made the decision to go ahead with a 2012 show. They’ve posted the date of the 2012 show on their website: Saturday, 27th October, 2012.
Read MoreWakefield 2012 Announced
About a month has passed since the last RISC OS Show, held in London, and everyone should by now have had a chance to recover – and begin thinking about the next show. This would normally be the South West Show, which is followed within a month or two by the Wakefield Show. Sadly, no South West Show has yet been announced – and if it doesn’t go ahead, then that will be a great shame after the success of the last one, at which the ARMini was first shown…
Read MoreHongKong – same game, new name
HongKong is a new version of the popular Mah-jong patience game, Shanghai, from Steve Drain, written chiefly as “a demonstration of Basalt and its Toolbox keywords” (which is why it can be found on the ‘examples’ page of his website).
Read MoreYou have my number; call me
Call is a newly released (beta) module by Steve Drain, designed to send WIMP messages to an application – and therefore allowing the application to carry out specific functions – after a set period, or at regular intervals. The RISC OS timing system and call-back mechanism is normally used by way of two SWIs (software interrupts): OS_CallAfter and OS_CallEvery, which are used to set up an interval and point to an address in memory; if OS_CallAfter was used, then after the interval has passed, the code at the specified address…
Read MoreBookMaker updated to support NetSurf
Nick Roberts has released version 2.15 of BookMaker, an address book manager for major RISC OS browsers, as well as many email, telnet and FTP clients. This version brings long-awaited support for NetSurf, something that has been sadly lacking due to the way NetSurf works – or, rather, worked; “Thanks are due” says Nick, “to the NetSurf RISC OS developer for implementing the protocols that allow NetSurf and BookMaker to interoperate.”
Read MorepiLEARN: Reuniting education and RISC OS
Martin Hansen of The MathMagical Software Company has unveiled a new website, called piLEARN. The main thinking behind the site is for it to be a starting point for those people who wish to try out RISC OS on the ARM based Raspberry Pi computer, due to be launched in the next few weeks. He also hopes to have additional material and resources available from the site, with education being an obvious focus since the Raspberry Pi has been intended from the the outset to as a device on which…
Read More