The RISC OS Expo 2004 show, as organised by the Big Ben Club and held at the Hotel Mercure in The Netherlands, is tomorrow. Like all good shows, there's news and announcements to coincide with the event, so here's a run down of what to expect.The Expo, being the European mainland equivalent of the UK's Wakefield, is sponsored by Desk, X-Ample, Castle, RISCOS Ltd. and last but not least, MicroDigital. Given recent news, and looking at the exhibitor list, we can perhaps predict a toasty show atmosphere - but at least, hopefully, all and any questions users have will be answered by attending parties. Drobe will, naturally, have its spies, sorry, writers present keeping a careful eye on proceedings.
We asked Desk's Frank Kraaij what he expected the show to bring us, however Frank's reply gave nothing away: "sorry, it will spoil the surprise I have for the public. Come and visit." AAUG chairman dgs added it'll be an "exciting show". We've heard whisperings that MicroDigital will be distributing Omegas at the show, although we're not sure how the current Castle vs. RISCOS Ltd. battle will affect that - the Omega developers must be too busy to answer emails, or even pick up the phone.
R-Comp will also be at the show, with STD UniPods in stock and also MusicMan version 1.20, which allows users to select whatever MP3 and Ogg Vorbis audio encoders they choose.
Icon Technology are also on the guest list, as Mike Glover told us, "I will be showing and selling the latest versions of EasiWriter and TechWriter featuring ArtWorks support and auto-save, also on the CD is a free copy of !Citation the bibliographic reference manager." MW Software told us they'll be selling "the same as at Wakefield", which includes Artworks 2 and GimpPrint.
The Belgian RISC OS usergroup will also have a couple of interesting projects on their stand: "In a never ending quest to find the perfect compact and native portable RISC OS computer, the RiscBox got designed," writes John Tytgat. "Not wishing to make compromises on functionality, the RiscBox contains a floppy drive, a harddisc, two half-width podules, built-in power supply and is driven by a StrongARM." The usergroup will also demonstrating the Netsurf Unicode support that they developed.
Castle, who are also attending and sharing a stand with X-Ample, have recently launched the 'Panther TC', which is a beefed up Iyonix in the usual black Panther case, packing 1GB of DDR RAM and two 120GB hard discs. Castle have also extended their Spring LCD monitor offer, but this time we're spared the puns.
Finally, other exhibitors include the Unix Porting Project, Archive, Microsoft and the Aemulor and CinoDVD team. Just kidding about Microsoft.
Last year's Expo went down well, we hope this year's show is just as eye opening.
Update at 19:14 18/6/2004
As pointed out by Adrian Lees of Aemulor, the Aemulor/CinoDVD team have pulled out of the show, and will not be attending.
Links
RISC OS Expo website