BARUG News
October 2004September's guest speaker, Paul Middleton of RISCOS Ltd, regrettably withdrew at short notice before the meeting. I understand that this was linked to the anticipated agreement between RISCOS Ltd and Castle not being complete. Instead, the vice chairman gave a further demonstration of the use of Virtual RPC to those who attended. This week Drobe has announced that agreement has finally been reached between RISCOS Ltd and Castle on a joint way ahead for RISC OS development. RISC OS 4 and 5 streams will merge in the near future and areas of development will be clearly delineated between the two parties. 'Adjust' features will become available for Iyonix users at last. This is good news for all RISC OS users, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to Mike Glover, of Icon Technology (publishers of !EasiWriter) for acting as the 'honest broker' in what were clearly not easy negotiations. RISCOS Ltd has also announced a change of name to 'RISC OS Developments'. We welcome as this month's guest speaker Paul Beverley, publisher of Archive and Living with Technology magazines. The former is now in its 18th volume: the latter is a more recent venture aimed at explaining techological advances to non-techies. Paul will give us his thoughts on the RISC OS market, the perils of magazine editing and deadlines and anything else of interest, and I'm sure his talk will be most interesting. One of the programs I demonstrated in August was !Jclean, by David Barrow. What I hadn't realised (until someone recently pointed this out on the newsgroups) is that !JClean allows one to rotate JPEGs without altering the filesize. For example, rotating a 500kbyte JPEG from my recent holiday pictures in !Photodesk resulted in a filesize growth to 900 kbytes. Doing the same in !JClean resulted in no growth. This is because the former decompresses the JPEG data before operating on it, and then re-compresses it: the latter does not decompress to operate. Each decompression/compression action loses some of the information in the JPEG, so it's a good idea to do this action as little as possible. The South East Show is on this Saturday (23rd) , in the same Guildford venue as last year. See for more details: I shall be attending, if only to get rid of a number of older monitors which no-one in BARUG wanted when advertised! I'll report back on the show next month. There will be new versions of !ArtWorks and !EasiWriter available, and no doubt other updates as well. For those who cannot make it, there is the forthcoming Midlands Show on 4 December: http://www.armclub.org.uk/shows/midlands/ See you soon! Steve |