BARUG NewsSeptember 2003
August's guest speaker was Joe Taylor, who demonstrated his freeware application !AppBasic, which is designed to make the use of the Toolbox application easier. For those of us - like me - who had no idea of what was in the Toolbox, and had never considered it further except when a new program complained that a Toolbox module was out of date, this was a very revealing presentation which showed what can be achieved with the Toolbox with only a little knowledge. Thank you for making the trip to see us, Joe: your presentation was very much appreciated. For anyone who may have downloaded an earlier version of !AppBasic, Joe advised that a new version was due to be published within days of his talk. Readers should thus check Joe's website: http://www.jettons.co.uk/riscos/toolbox for the latest version of the application. September's speaker is our own Chris Hall. Chris is heavily involved with the Severn Valley Railway and his talk will be about how he uses RISC OS as part of thiswork. The website Chris has constructed for the SVR can be found at: Chris will be giving his talk on 24 September at 1930 in the usual venue. The BARUG membership year runs from May to April. This year, because of the change in Treasurer, the subscriptions are now overdue. Graham Stewart has kindly volunteered to take over from Martin Grainger as Treasurer. Separately with this letter you will receive a drawfile with the membership renewal details. If you attending the September meeting, please print out and complete the form and bring it with you, together with your payment of £7. If you cannot attend, please send the form back to Graham with your payment: his address is on the form. The plan for the remainder of 2003 is: October - David Snell, author of ProCAD+, will be visiting to talk about that program, and also about his new program WebWonder, an website authoring program. If the latter is as good as the former, it will be a very good program indeed! November - Paul Middleton from RISC OS Ltd will be visiting again to brief us on the state of, and future direction of development of, the RISC OS market. December - on Wed 17th rather than the last Wednesday, there will be the usual 'mince pies and gossip' evening to round off the year. Key news this month: RISCOS Ltd and VirtualAcorn have at last reached agreement to release a commercial version of the earlier VirtualA5000, but with RISC OS 4 instead of the very old RISC OS 3.11. This means that in the absence of a native RISC OS portable, we will at last be able to have a programme suitable for a modern PC laptop which will allow us to take advantage of our familiar RISC OS programs whilst away from the desktop machines. You will be able to ask Paul Middleton about this during his November visit. In addition, Martin Wuerthner, the new maintainer of ArtWorks, has announced a project to ensure that the perennial problem of RISC OS printer drivers becomes a thing of the past. This project will take advantage of the open source printer drivers becoming available for other platforms such as Linux, which will be ported to RISC OS. However, because of the open source nature of the original drivers, any developments must also become open source, making it difficult for developers to make any money from their work. So Martin is suggesting a system of donations to support this effort, rather as he has done for some of the ArtWorks development. Any software with Martin's programming pedigree behind it is likely to be good, and software drivers which allow us to use newer printers without problem has got to be a good thing - so see the new site at www.mw-software.com/software/rougps/rougps.html The suggested level of donation is around £20 per head. This seems very modest for such a worthy contribution to the survival of RISC OS. Martin isn't asking for money up front, but the site asks that you email him a confirmation that you will make a donation when the software is finished and released. I commend this new initiative to you: my own email went off today! The final key piece of news is the release by RISCOS Ltd of a new set of 'universal' Toolbox modules. These are designed to work on all versions of RISC OS from v3, and should be downloaded and installed. They can be obtained from: See you at the September meeting! Steve |