Mystery new product to be revealed in London – on 21st October

Wait, the London Show is on 26th October! What’s going on? If you read the London Show preview, you’ll notice that Adrian Lees is planning to launch a major new application, with no details available as yet about what it is – so the nature of that application is a mystery. Five days before the London Show, however, its organisers – the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) – still plan to have their regular monthly meeting, and there will be a mystery new product revealed at that meeting.…

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News nybble: Butterfly screen saver now available on !Store

If you look at Richard Ashbery’s Graphics Programming website, and in particular at the Animated Graphics examples, you’ll notice an animated GIF that isn’t included in the programs that can be downloaded from the site – but if you want to see the program in action, it is now possible to download it via !Store, in the form of a screen saver. That GIF is described as a Butterfly Curve. The shape is formed from parametric equations – in this particular case, discovered by mathematician Telple H. Fay – which…

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Wakefield 2020 date revealed

The latest issue (37:7) of the WROCC (Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club) newsletter has been sent out, and tucked away within it at the bottom of page five is a piece of show news: The next Wakefield Show will take place on Saturday, 18th April, 20201. That’s the weekend after Easter and exactly eight weeks after the next Southwest Show, itself seventeen weeks after the London Show – which is two weeks from today.

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The 2019 London Show looms

Hang on, have I written the Southwest Show report yet? Ah, yes. What about Wakefield? Er… The countdown until the end of the Long Gap, when the RISC OS London Show takes place, has now ticked down to twenty days. It takes place on Saturday, 26th October at the St Giles Hotel, Feltham – so I hope everyone has their travel (and if necessary hotel) arrangements made, and that the show will be busy with plenty of visitors.

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News nybble: Currency now outputs CSV and HTML

Kevin Wells has updated his Currency application, which allows users to check exchange rates by tasking Wget to obtain data from the Free Currency Converter API site. The new version gains the ability to save the last eight days of exchange rates as either HTML for displaying in a web browser, or CSV for loading into a spreadsheet or other application. It also sees a bug dealt with, whereby the last eight days view stopped working for a short period.

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News nybble: Southampton meeting – 8th October

The next chance for RISC OS users in the Southampton area to meet up, chat, discuss or show off their latest hardware and software projects, and so on, will be on Tuesday, 8th October from 7:00pm until 9:00pm. The meeting will take place in the Sports Centre of Itchen College, Deacon Road, Southampton. The car park entrance is accessed from Deacon Road, opposite Whites Road, and once in you need to head for the College Centre, an open area with tables and chairs, next to the Sports Centre Reception desk.

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Using Ovation Pro in the professional world – Wakefield, 2nd October

Gavin Crawford will be talking at the next Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) meeting on his use of Ovation Pro – one of RISC OS’ desktop publishing packages, and the only one that runs natively on 32-bit platforms. Gavin has used the software to produce professionally printed hard back books, and has put RISC OS to use in a research project into historic textiles – a project that was ten years in the making.

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News nybble: Animated graphics examples land on Graphics Programming website

Richard Ashbery has updated his Graphic Programming Website, on which he provides a handy introduction to writing graphical ditties in BBC BASIC. This update inserts a section 6, entitled Animated Patterns, on which there is a zip file to download containing over thirty programs to run, edit, and just enjoy. Referring to the page, Richard tells me he’s been “looking at the numerous and sometimes remarkable curves that can be created from parametric equations” – highlighting in particular the Butterfly Curve. Discovered by Overpuddlian mathematician Temple H. Fay, just two…

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