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By Chris Williams. Published: 15th Jun 2003, 23:05:19.

X11 developments, earthquakes, spam, !Paint and lots more

Another weekend passes so whilst we brace for impact with the Big Ben Show, it's time again to leaf through this week's updated and newly released software that you can get downloading for your RISC OS machine.

Top story is that the Unix Porting Project has released an early version of its ChoX11 library, "so that interested parties may experiment". As a replacement for XLib (yes, it's that big a project), ChoX11[1] uses Desklib to translate software calls made by X Windows programs to RISC OS Window Manager calls. Thus, the plan is to use ChoX11 to port the huge number of X11 based applications over to RISC OS and have them run as native programs, rather than inside a clunky X Server.

Riscos.org were quick to interview Jochen Lueg following an update to his earthquake monitoring software, Quaker (check out the hardware page).

Don't despair if there are no ground rending earthquakes of biblical proportions near your RISC OS machine as you can use Quaker to snoop on your neighbours, as Private Eye Jochen told riscos.org, "They are building a bypass a few miles from here. When they built the new bridges, I could detect the rhythmic thumps of the pile drivers. Apart from that, I have discovered that one of my neighbours has some rather strange late night/early morning driving habits."

For those Select users enjoying the new !Paint and alpha sprite system, Sebastian Weinberg has developed and released [direct zip download] BrushMake which automatically generates improved brush shapes for drawing with. "!BrushMake is a simple programme that creates circular brush sprites with 'softened' edges, for use with the new version of !Paint in Select 3", Seb announced. "It uses the new alpha channel functionality of Select 3 to achieve this."

Dan Maloney has sneaked out a new version of his SuperFPEm software; see here for more details on how the floating point emulation speed up works. Andreas Dehmel has unleashed version 1.12 of C64/VIC20/other emulator, VICE. A new beta version (0.36) of the essential desktop tool Director has been released. Michael Gilbert has uploaded some "Acorn Access management tools".

Version 1.10 of the immediately popular AntiSpam freeware-yet-GPL app has been issued by author Dave Highton. There's also a mailing list you can dive into.

Speaking of mailing lists, Wimpbasic.org have announced a "new mailing list for all programmers using wimpbasic"; drop an email to forum@Wimpbasic.org with your Wimpbasic serial number and 'subscribe' in the sign up subject.

Finally, Morbo "not my real name, honest" Jones is planning a RISC OS Programming Notes website, using the infamous ofla error as a banner logo so John-ofla.info-Hoare beware.

"I'm currently working on the code which will create most of the site automatically - I have a database of articles, contributors and publications which all gets 'baked-out' into a website, with everything cross-linked (so that you can read an article, then find out what else the author has written, or what magazine it came from)", Morbo told us.

Links
News? Comments?
[1] - ChoX11 is developed primarily by Peter Naulls, a drobe.co.uk editor.

Discussion

Viewing threaded comments | View comments unthreaded, listed by date | Skip to the end

Still can't spell my name correctly, eh, Chris?

Higton, not Highton.

But thanks for the publicity anyway. :-) -- Dave Higton, Southampton

is a RISC OS Userdavehigton on 16/6/03 7:47AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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