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Expo 2005 pre-show news

By Chris Williams. Published: 17th Jun 2005, 20:55:04.

Fun in Holland for everyone who missed Wakefield

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."

Links
Going to the show? Tell us what happened

Discussion

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Has there been any word of RiScript? When nothing surfaced at Wakefield I hoped that there would be a relesase at this show. I just want to know where to send the money for my copy! ;-)

jc on 17/6/05 10:53PM [ Reply | Report ]

Surely the big news should be Firefox, although when I last looked the required pledges weren't stacking up quite fast enough (although the latest jump is pretty impressive!)

SimonC on 18/6/05 1:21AM [ Reply | Report ]

Well, the internet connection here seems to work.

mrchocky on 18/6/05 9:53AM [ Reply | Report ]

well that's one over wakefield - a show with inernet...

;-)

ROHC on 18/6/05 12:33PM [ Reply | Report ]

ROHC: Apparently Richard Brown had internet access up and running at Wakefield too.

dgs

dgs on 18/6/05 1:35PM [ Reply | Report ]

Yes, I'm in the queue for RiScript too. And one or both of the new browsers.

We live in hope :-)

TonyStill on 18/6/05 6:32PM [ Reply | Report ]

dgs is right about Wakefield and internet. I saw the demo version of O3 on his bit of the Castle stand.

charles on 19/6/05 9:40AM [ Reply | Report ]

Of course I have been away. so have not been able to update my meter, but I can mention briefly from where I am at the moment that it is currently at only 1% to go until I will release the first Firefox beta. Naturally, since I am presently in the European mainland I ask a little bit of patience.

You will of course be able to see myself and Firefox at ROUGOL on Monday night, and presumably claim a CD with it on should the 1% be met in the next 24 hours.

Many thanks to all who contributed to the project at the show.

mrchocky on 19/6/05 12:01PM [ Reply | Report ]

I would have like to have gone to the show, but unfiortunately like last year its right after a long distance holiday, and the budget doesn't stretch to both

druck on 19/6/05 8:21PM [ Reply | Report ]

Thanks go to the show organisers - we had a great time on our first Expo visit. The hostitality was warm (as was the weather!) and that fast HSS ferry is just awesome!

Cheers,

/Neil/

spellinn on 20/6/05 8:01AM [ Reply | Report ]

Show report can be found at:

[link]

of course you have to understand German.

andretim on 20/6/05 8:21AM [ Reply | Report ]

You can always use [link] to translate it (roughly) for you

andypoole on 20/6/05 11:58AM [ Reply | Report ]

Peter, neing a lowly student, I can only afford a pledge for firefox, and not a year subscription :@P

I am assuming that to pay, I would have to click on the 6 month button?

em2ac on 20/6/05 12:16PM [ Reply | Report ]

My understanding of it was that you could take out a subscription to provide Peter with money now, or pledge an amount you will pay when it finally becomes available.... ...which appears to be about now! Yeah! Firefox beta can be downloaded from here [link]~peter/firefox/index.html

I'll be at the ROUGOL meeting tonight with cash in my sweaty palms to make good on my pledge. As ROUGOL now has a braodband internet connection we should be able to see Friefox doing its stuff on real live pages for the first time :-)

And if I may put in another plug for ROUGOL, [link] we have Oregano and Netsurf demos scheduled for the next two months, so it's an entire summer of browsers!

It's like buses round here :-)

helpful on 20/6/05 1:13PM [ Reply | Report ]

It's there? Excellent!

At the risk of commenting on it before I've even had a chance to try it yet, I would like to say a huge thank you to Peter, and to everyone who has contributed in any way, shape, or form for bringing this massively important program to RISC OS (even if it is still at beta stage).

SimonC on 20/6/05 1:47PM [ Reply | Report ]

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