The RISC OS Midlands show for 2004 is taking place this very Saturday, at the National Motorcycle Museum. The Museum was mostly destroyed by a fire in 2003, and this weekend's show will be one of the first events to use the rebuilt facilities.Compared to other annual RISC OS events, the Midlands show, as arranged every year by the ARM Club, is a low key affair. It doesn't quite have the build up that other shows manage to gather and it doesn't have the publicity attracting controversy that the Wakefield show enjoys. None the less, the Midlands show saw the first Iyonixes on sale in 2002 and will this year play host to new technologies for RISC OS.
The Midlands show is sometimes seen as being light on the exhibitor front, but this year will see 19 stands, all hoping to earn punters' cash.
Toby Smith, the ARM Club chairman, also announced this week that there will be a charity stand at the show, but due to recycling regulations, the club can only accept software, manuals, magazines, and components like hard discs and memory upgrades. By special arrangement, the club can offer to sell a limited number of donated computers - but see the announcement for more details before turning up to the show with a shed load of A440s.
What's new?
In October, we reported that Weiss Niklaus had written a debugging tool for developers and was currently working with a publisher to get the software released. Neil Spellings and Adrian Lees, the team behind Aemulor, and projects CinoDVD and Geminus, have been confirmed today as being DeskDebug's publisher. The team will also be demonstrating the new software at the show on Saturday, we're told. The development kit's feature list is here, and we're told that the software took five years to write.
MW-Software will be exhibiting Artworks 2.32 and the latest release of Gimp-Print. Version 2.32 of the popular vector graphics app is the result of a bug hunting exercise. MW-Software also told us that they may possibly have a "new version [of Gimp-Print] with support for a few additional printers - for example, EPSON Stylus Photo R200/R210, R300/R310, and RX500/600."
Icon Technology will have version 8.31 of EasiWriter and TechWriter, with bug fixes to address a problems involving deleting page breaks, importing the Euro symbol from Word documents, HTML export of long URLs and other improvements.
Castle will also be demonstrating RISC OS 5 on MiMagic 5 powered hardware. Never one to miss a show, APDL will be present and possibly showing off the new Desktop Repton Plus. CJE Micro's and ITC will be on hand to sell spares, upgrades and new kit for your RISC OS computer. Magazines Archiveand Qercus will be touting their subscriptions - the latter publication usually has a special show deal going, or otherwise a stand decorated by teddy bears waving Iyonix flags.
R-Comp are being decidedly quiet for this show, as we haven't have the barrage of announcements from them, but there's always the Friday afternoon dash. Drobe writer Martin Hansen will be exhibiting his art-from-maths software, and generally being his friendly self. Finally, RISCOS Ltd. will be on hand to entice new users of RISC OS Select, while hopefully expanding more on the future of Select32.
The Drobe editors will be at the show - Peter will be exhibiting on the Unix Porting Project stand with CDs and subscriptions to sell and I'll be wandering around the venue, generally pestering people with awkward questions. Feel free to say hello, if you spot us.
The show opens at 10am and closes at 4.30pm, and its venue, the National Motorcycle Museum, is located on the outskirts of Coventry, in Solihull, West Midlands (just off Junction 6 M42). Links to all the exhibitors, ticket prices and other information are available from the show website.
Links
RISC OS Midlands 2004 show website