Midlands show warm up - RISC OS News, Software and Information

Midlands show warm up

Published: 2nd Dec 2004, 14:04:54GMT Source: drobe.co.uk
By Chris Williams

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What to expect to see this Saturday

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

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Col1 2/12/04 2:35PM	Damn, can't make it this year but best wishes to all the exhibitors.
arawnsley 2/12/04 4:00PM	Quick heads up - R-Comp are hard at work to get out the Iyonix release of DialUp3, new versions of DialUp3/NF2 with enhanced Hermes, oh, and a little thing we like to call Messenger Pro 3 There's also Network Printer Drivers 2 (probably not hugely of interest to everyone, but nice for those that need it) and we've also been tinkering around with DataPower again for a customer. Not to mention RISCubes and RISCBooks... Busy Busy!
arawnsley 2/12/04 4:01PM	Oh and I still have to write some new wireless ADSL router documentation and give the print-server-with-USB-as-well-as-parrallel-ports a workout.... Gulp.
imj (+1.0) 2/12/04 4:22PM	Get on with it then, rather than wasting time reading Drobe and blabbing
chriswhy 2/12/04 6:14PM	... and there I was looking for an A440 to justify driving 200 miles for the show
markee174 3/12/04 8:15AM	When can we buy Messanger3 Pro?
mrtd 3/12/04 8:50AM	More to the point WHY should we buy Messenger Pro 3, what improvements does it have? How much will it cost? Well, no doubt I'll find out at the show.
arawnsley (+1.5) 3/12/04 2:53PM	MP3 is availble now As to why - because it is better than v2 of course! Being serious for a moment, right now MP3 has some nice new features (new multitasking engine for operations that are time consuming, better message display, word wrap, enhanced distribution lists, groun-mail handling etc. etc.), and a lot of fixes/enhancements compared to the old version. However, what we're really doing is supporting the on-going development of the product "under new management" (which is how it has got this far), so there lots more good stuff to come in due course (it is a bit like MusicMan in this regard - compare MM1.4 to MM1.0!!!).
markee174 3/12/04 6:25PM	Any details on pricing/upgrade?
Revin Kevin 3/12/04 7:56PM	Rcomp have also updated Netfetch and Hermes. Plus the Messenger Pro 3 upgrades look interesting as well.
arawnsley 3/12/04 8:17PM	Upgrade price is 19ukp. I'm sure people will say this is outrageous, but we haven't charged for a MPro update in about 3 years. Before you say "i'm not paying that!", remember it is about the cost of a steak-dinner & desert for one - not too bad for all the development and support that goes into these things! And yes, we've issued a whole load of updates this week - Iyonix DU3 made it in time for show too. As did the print-server-box with USB support, not to mention some RISCubes and RISCBooks for collection at the show. It has been a BUSY few days.
Grek1 3/12/04 10:14PM	*In reply to arawnsley:* I have placed an order for an MPro3 upgrade using the order form at rcomp.co.uk Thanks for continuing the development and support of MessengerPro, NetFetch and Grapevine.
arawnsley 3/12/04 10:33PM	Thanks Grek