RISC OS Awards 2014 – a reminder, and a memory jog

Remembering it for you, so you don’t have to. With the form for the 2014 RISC OS Awards poll now having been online for more than half of the intended period – it was opened for votes at the start of December, and will be closed in just three weeks at the end of January – it’s disappointing to note that the number of votes is worryingly low, at just 50 so far. And glancing at those votes, quite a number of people have only cast votes in a small…

Snippets – 12th October, 2014

If news were a hot dog, this would be the ketchup. (Ketchup? Catch-up? Geddit? No? Ho hum – where’s my coat?) Here at the RISCOSitory/Soft Rock Software top secret underground bunker (whose entrance is cunningly disguised as a ramshackle shed) things have become somewhat busy positively hectic over the last couple of months, which has resulted in no news being posted to the site whatsoever for almost a month – not even in the ‘press release’ format whereby an announcement is simply quoted in full. So, in order to catch…

Show Report: Wakefield 2014

I never knew the RiscPC tasted so good! This year’s big RISC OS event in the North – the Wakefield Show – took place on 26th April, so it is once again time to put pen to paper fingers to keyboard, and write about it for the benefit of those who were unable to attend. As usual, the show took place in the Cedar Court Hotel, Denby Dale Road, just off junction 39 of the M1 – the same venue in which it started some eighteen years ago (making this…

Portsmouth’s first RISC OS show

Putting Portsmouth on the RISC OS map. The first ever RISC OS show in Portsmouth took place on 28th September, 2013- and it seems to have been a successful one, with both exhibitors and visitors reflecting positively about the event. The venue itself, the second floor of Innovation Warehouse Portsmouth, was comparatively small, offering a much more limited amount of space than other RISC OS shows, but the number of exhibitors filled the space very neatly, giving a good balance of things to see and people to talk to versus…

RISC OS 5.20 officially available

 A chip off for the old block RiscPC. Shortly after unveiling it at the Midlands Show on July 13th, RISC OS Open Ltd announced the official release of RISC OS 5.20 – the latest ‘stable’ version* – towards the end of the month. This version incorporates a massive 625 changes for the IYONIX pc, and 654 changes for the OMAP3 platform, as used on the BeagleBoard. Many of the changes are common to both platforms, but there are – obviously – differences between the hardware and facilities offered by the…

Midlands show report

Organise it and they a handful of them will come. It’s now been two weeks and a day since the Midlands Midsummer MUG Show 2013 took place, and people are telling me that it’s about time I sat down and wrote about it! Well, they aren’t, perhaps because I’ve already said in various places that I’m busy, but they’re probably thinking it. So here’s that report. I’ve flicked a coin, and it told me to take an anti-clockwise tour around the show.

Exclusive: A new interface for a new era – introducing RISC OS Rainbow

The new Display icon

Paint the whole RISC OS world with a rainbow! There can’t be many RISC OS users who haven’t encountered a modern touchscreen device, such as a smartphone or a tablet computer – indeed, R-Comp have been selling a tablet now for a couple of years, and have made quite a big thing about it, so it’s difficult to imagine how any RISC OS user could have missed the technology. Smartphones and tablets are often very powerful computers in their own right, but – surely everyone knows – they’re designed to…

What a show – London 2012

Pinch me, I must be dreaming! First of all, I must apologise for the very long delay in producing this show report and keeping up with RISC OS news in general. The reason for this has been a combination of the usual workload (with the period after this show normally being one of my busy ones) with some health issues thrown in for good measure, including a short but unexpected – and very unwelcome – stay in hospital. The most recent significant event in the RISC OS Calendar took place…

New development tool for C programmers

DrWimpC is in the house Peter Miller has released a new development tool for C programmers using RISC OS 4 or higher. The software, explains Peter, is intended as “an application creation and development tool for WIMP applications written using the C programming language” and is the result of some discussions Peter had with the late Ray Favre, who looked after the DrWimp BASIC library from 1999 until his death in 2010, having taken it over from Andrew Ayre who originally developed and maintained it from 1995 until 1999. The…