Snippets – 27th June, 2015

You heard it here first eventually! With a ridiculously busy period now over (mostly – and until/unless things get silly again), it’s time to round up what’s happened in the intervening period in the world of RISC OS.

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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…

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PipeDream and Fireworks hosting and linking

Announcement from Gerald Fitton, 3rd February 2014 Colton Software and Abacus Training together with Stuart Swales, the former lead programmer of Colton Software, have decided that the time has come to make PipeDream and Fireworkz more widely available. Colton Software are the owners of PipeDream and Fireworkz; we at Abacus Training have the exclusive distribution rights for which we are now waiving our exclusivity. Of course copyright remains with Colton Software.

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A new version of Fireworkz for the new year

Well, there are always fireworks to mark the new year, so why not Fireworkz as well? New Year’s Day 2014 saw Stuart Swales announce the release of the latest version of Fireworkz – v1.35/00 – for both RISC OS and Windows – with a long list of changes, some affecting the RISC OS version only, some the Windows version only, and some both. Looking further, that list is even longer, if other updates since the last mention of Fireworkz on RISCOSitory are taken into account – the update to version…

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Fireworkz and Fireworkz Pro updates

Dynamite! Back in late 2011, RISC OS users saw the welcome return of Fireworkz and Fireworkz Pro, an integrated word processor, spreadsheet and – in the case of the Pro version – database package. The software, originally from Colton Software, had been resurrected by Stuart Swales, and has seen a number of releases since. Fireworkz (and the file compatible Fireworkz for Windows) are now free to download from Gerald Fitton’s Abacus Training website, and are both now up to version 1.34/10. Updates to Fireworkz Pro, which remains commercial and is…

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Snippets – 24th February 2012

Basalt and the Toolbox Steve Drain, prompted by a discussion in the RISC OS Open Ltd forum about AppBasic, has written a document about the using the Toolbox with Basalt which, he explains, has never been very well described. Basalt (“BASic ALTernative keywords”) is a module that extends BASIC by providing “alternative keywords by extending the use of actual keywords and adding new keywords, both of which are used completely as native BASIC keywords.” The document is available online, at the link given above, and it is also included in…

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Snippets – 19th November 2011

Following on from the news that Pipedream is now free to download, Gerald Fitton has announced that Fireworkz for RISC OS is also now free to download. Fireworkz is an integrated word processor and spreadsheet package, with some very powerful and useful facilities, which works in a fundamentally different way to PipeDream. Both are very powerful and useful pieces of software and, if you haven’t used them before, they come highly recommended. A mailing list has also been set up for the software on Google Groups by Stuart Swales, the…

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Snippets – 9th October 2011

Pi in the sky – or, at least, near Heathrow Airport For those interested in the Raspberry Pi, the RISC OS London Show (29th October, 2011, St Giles Hotel, Feltham) will be well worth a visit, since the tiny, low cost computer is set to make an appearance. It’s not known at this stage if it will be running RISC OS by the time of the show, but it seems likely that it will be on the RISC OS Open Ltd stand, judging by comments in their forum. Speaking of…

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