BARUG News
October 2003September's guest speaker was Chris Hall, who demonstrated his RISC OS program which simulates the actions of a signal box, and described the program's development over several years. This program is intended for railway enthusiasts and a demo version can be found at http://www.home-in-bristol.fsnet.co.uk/Software.htm Thanks, Chris, for sharing your hobby with us and for an entertaining talk! This month we are due to have as guest speaker David Snell, the author of ProCAD+. David last visited BARUG several years ago, when we were still at the Burden Institute. ProCAD has moved on a long way since then, with the upgrade to the ProCAD+ as well as a parallel PC version becoming available. However, David has now produced a new program, WebWonder. This is an HTML authoring program and it's this which David will be concentrating on during his talk this time. Details can be found at http://www.dsnell.zynet.co.uk/WWinfo.html I'm sure David will have copies of both WebWonder and of ProCAD+ with him for sale on the night.... :-) Apologies from last month - owing to neglect on my part the threatened Drawfile with the membership renewal details was NOT attached to the newsletter. You should find it attached to this one - for those who weren't at the September meeting and won't be at the October meeting either, please ensure that your renewal is sent on to the Treasurer, Graham Stewart, as soon as possible. Key news this month: I attended the SE Show this past weekend in Guildford, as did at least one other member I talked to. There wasn't much very new on offer: dealers were certainly selling, but it was mostly upgrades to existing software and hardware. One team was demonstrating their DVD player, which was said to have had only 5 weeks development so far, but was already playing DVDs at a reasonable, if slightly jerky, rate. More improvements are promised and the programme is still very new: however, it appears to be an Iyonix-only program. Castle certainly sold a fair number of new Iyonix machines, but there was no sign of the Omega on any of the stands as far as I noticed. RiscStation has apparently threatened to make a statement on the situation with the portable, but at the time of writing it has yet to appear, and neither CTA nor RiscStation attended the Show. There was certainly major interest in the recently released Virtual RPC with RISC OS 4.02, and Aaron Timbrell and his colleagues were kept busy demonstrating to customers, most of whom bought the program. Both STD and RComp had their 'cube' PCs on sale, both running the VRPC emulator and both exciting considerable interest. Assessment - the market isn't dead, but it needs something exciting injected into it to stimulate it! For another view of the Show, see Drobe http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact851.html Unfortunately, the planned Midlands Show has had to be cancelled. It was to have been held as usual at the National Motorcycle Museum, but there was a disastrous fire there in September and the venue is unusable. See you next week! Steve |