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Software news

By Chris Williams. Published: 12th Oct 2005, 14:21:07 | Permalink | Printable

Piles of updates: Firefox, Popstar and Newshound, Google searching and more

A new beta release of the Firefox port shows off the heavy weight browser with RISC OS menus and an iconbar icon. The latest version is dubbed a "work in progress", and users are warned that "it may not be suitable for general use" but will showcase on-going development work. Although it understandably takes a while for the memory hungry software to get going on a StrongARM RiscPC, once a page has been fetched and laid out, the redraw time is acceptable. Your mileage may vary, especially for Iyonix users.

The lead developer behind the Firefox port, Peter Naulls, has also declined to comment on the status of his efforts to secure the open source release of Aleph One's PC card software.

Old Internet favourites re-released
Continuing on the subject of open source: Joseph Heenan has thrown his networking software trove online with the source code covered by a BSD licence. Joseph authored the popular Usenet fetcher Newshound and maintained the email delivery client Popstar originally written by Tony Houghton, which were previously available as freeware. You can grab the code from CVS. Darren Salt has joined the Sourceforge hosted project, and is said to be working on various components, notably Popstar. Michael Curtis is also working on FreeTime, and Joseph encouraged others to contribute.

Mini-Google toolbar
Andy Poole has finished rewriting his previous Google searching effort to create new toolbar, Searchy. The utility places a small window above the iconbar so that users can type in search queries and launch a browser window with the results. Saving us from the shackles of the ever growing Google behemoth, Searchy can be configured to use alternative web search engines.

In brief
Roger Darlington has released for free his board game Continui. The Iyonix compatible title was previously a commercial product, and its off-desktop nature has a particular mid-1990s Acorn User cover disc nostalgia about it. Alligata Media have also reduced the price of Desktop Repton Plus to £6.99 including postage. Email david (dot) bradforth (at) alligatagroup (dot) co (dot) uk for details.

News in brief

Carlos Michael Santillan has developed a new utility that will auto-adjust your computer's time for the daylight savings switch. Amusingly, it works by checking the current time every minute and moves the clock back an hour at the end of October. Users of GraphDraw and MultiPlot are invited to email author Chris Johnson with new features and ideas for his top graphing software. Chris wants to make sure there's still enough interest in his applications before committing time to improving them. He's also developed ID3TagEd, a tool to 'tag' MP3 files with correct artist and album labels, among other details.

Web gallery app Thumbcat has been tweaked and updated with various user interface improvements. File tool Rename can now renumber files with a step size for the index number. Timothy Baldwin has written a patch for Unix utility mtools to support the saving of RISC OS filetypes to DOS filesystems.

And finally, R-Comp have created a new website for their range of Windows PC computers that run VirtualRiscPC.

Links

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Discussion

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"Amusingly it works by [...] and moves the clock back an hour at the end of October." It would not be very amusing if it did that. Fortunately, it does not. It does the right thing and sets/unsets the DST configuration status, which affects the local time as displayed by the system. It does NOT move the clock, which is good because this would be the wrong thing to do.

wuerthne on 12/10/05 3:22PM
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Hehe, if it did what drobe wrote, the computer would forever be stuck in the last hour of October. :-)

JGZimmerle on 12/10/05 8:41PM
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Just downloaded Firefox Beta 5 and it is improving very nicely using it at the moment! I seems to be more responsive on our Iyonix than the beta 3 especially typing in the address field and this comment field!

The RISC OS menus and icon on the icon bar are very welcome indeed. Thanks for the update.

blahsnr on 12/10/05 8:59PM
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Just Dloaded FF beta 5 as well and i see, that it is quite a lot faster than beta 4. Very nice those RISC OS menus in it and is running on RISC OS 4.02 faster than on RISC OS 3.70. All the users, who have dloaded this beta version can notice, that this is the version, where they have been waiting for. But it is still far from the stable release version and work in progress is far better than ever before. Thanks for updating it to a better version.

datawave on 13/10/05 8:31AM
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