Tomorrow's Expo 2005 show, hosted in The Netherlands by the Big Ben Club, is set to be a repeat of Wakefield. We can't expect anything overly new to have been developed in the month between the two shows, and so it gives RISC OS users on the continent a chance to see what was show cased at the earlier UK event.One mildly interesting piece of news is that the developers and dealers travelling to Utrecht today will be met by a national train strike in The Netherlands, which ends at 1am on Saturday - the day the show opens. We're told not a single train is running due to a walkout by signalling engineers. A Big Ben Club source quipped yesterday, "You will understand that the Expo organisers tried everything within their power to prevent this strike, however it turned out to be beyond our possibilities."
Show organiser Aad Bezemer said most exhibitors are travelling by car, although those relying on a train from the airport will be forced to use their initiative.
Meanwhile, the event's theatre timetable has been published, at rather a late stage in the game: Paul Middleton of ROL is on first at 11am, then Jack Lillingston from Castle at 12.30pm and finally Archive magazine's Paul Beverley at 2pm. If you were at Wakefield and can remember the A9home presentation, in which Ad6's practically sleepwalking Matt Edgar did an off-the-cuff presentation, you won't be surprised by the following: A9home distributor CJE Micros was due to present the machine at tomorrow's event in a theatre slot but we've learnt that when CJE asked Advantage6 for the script used for the A9home Wakefield presentation, the answer was that there isn't one.
Mid-week, Dutch dealer Desk revealed that they won't be at the show, for the first time in many, many years. For the past two years, the company has seen a decreasing turnover, and despite shipping Omegas to punters who had pre-ordered the machine, many users are waiting on features like the XScale co-processor. It would appear MicroDigital and its dealers are suffering at the hands of MD's own hype.
We've had the email Desk sent to its customers translated, and in it, Desk's Frank Kraaij apparently alleged to punters, "MicroDigital remains very reserved towards us concerning these developments, and other promised things. We can so far only wait and silently hope."
He further claimed: "Apart from the, for us, essential developments to be expected from MicroDigital, new developments particularly on the software front also remain absent. With no disrespect towards developments [including] DVDBurn by Steffen Huber and the many new features for ArtWorks by Martin Wuerthner that shows fine progress, it is however important for us that there will be new products that we can sell now."
Desk promises to stay active within the RISC OS arena, and provide end user support and parts where available.
In brief
R-Comp, who are exhibiting at tomorrow's show confirmed that they'll be selling what was on offer at Wakefield. R-Comp's Andrew Rawnsley added: "Our main focus will be the MPro3, NetFetch2 and DialUp3 upgrades, which haven't been to Holland before. And of course, this time last year the whole RISCOS Ltd vs Castle thing was in full flow, so we haven't actually properly exhibited RISCubes and RISCbooks there."
MW-Software will also "be demonstrating and selling exactly the same as at Wakefield". Mike Glover of Icon Technology said, "We will be releasing version 8.42 [of Techwriter and Easiwriter] which is the same as the Wakefield release 8.40 with some obscure bug fixes. A free update for 8.40 users will be posted on our site next week."
The RISCOS.be gang will be showing off a new version of Steve Royd-Marker's compact RiscPC, 'RiscBox' and an updated version on the telephone logging system, 'Imdat'. RISCOS.be coordinator John Tytgat said, "And for anyone interested, I will show GCCSDK cross building tools on a Mac Powerbook. GCCSDK big-endian platform is a new feature in the upcoming GCCSDK 3.4.4 release 3."
X-Ample will be sharing a stand with Castle and GeneSys, who will be demonstrating Oregano 3. Neil Spellings of the Aemulor/Geminus team, said, "I believe dgs will be doing a live installation of Geminus during the show." Steffen Huber told us, "Basically, there has been little news since Wakefield - online ordering for CDVDBurn is now available, and hubersn Software will be selling CDVDBurn at special show prices at the RISC OS Expo 2005."
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