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Oregano 2 welcomes new master Oregano UK Ltd.

By Chris Williams. Published: 6th Aug 2003, 17:30:08.

Sales, PR, support shifted to new company [Updated]

Starting from this month, new company Oregano UK Ltd. is now responsible for all sales, marketing and technical support for Oregano 2. Oregano 2 is Castle's flagship web browser, launched in March this year. Oregano UK Ltd. was today appointed by Castle to be Oregano 2's exclusive distributor.

Castle explained that the move means they can focus all of their attention on "selling RISC OS to a wider audience". It's all the more clear now that Castle wish to concentrate fully on pushing RISC OS further into new markets; having acquired RISC OS from Pace, Castle must be eager to find products to get RISC OS onto so it can start earning its keep. A separate company to manage the end user side of Oregano 2 would therefore free up resources in Castle that could be used elsewhere and it gives the Oregano 2 userbase a company dedicated to providing support and sales. It's also good to see Castle ensuring end user support by appointing a separate company to take the reins.

Oregano 1 will however be supported by Castle. TV Interactor, the generic core of Oregano 2 will continue to be developed and produced by Oregan Networks. Oregano 2 is a specific flavour of Oregan's TV Interactor, in this case aimed at desktop RISC OS users. TV Interactor can be found in other totally non-RISC OS products, like the Sony Playstation 2 network kit, we're told.

"Oregano UK have plans to continue the development of Oregano 2 building on the work that Oregan are constantly doing for their generic browser. This will ensure that web browsing on the RISC OS platform is kept as up-to-date as possible", Richard Brown of Oregano UK said today. You might recognise Richard from Genesys, a "well known" RISC OS dealer.

Update
[Peter Naulls]

We had a chat to Richard today about Oregano and his new company. He explained he's very keen to see further development of the browser, in particular, he wants to avoid the situation with other RISC OS browsers, and indeed version 1 of Oregano, where development languished or stopped.

He told us that development for RISC OS would continue to be done by Oregan, with his company directing efforts for new releases and new features, although he wouldn't be drawn on dates or specifics of what we might see. This allows Castle to get on with the business of focussing on the Iyonix. Hopefully we'll see some new versions of Oregano soon.

Links
Oregano UK (website seems work in progress at the moment, so email or call them on 01702 462385)

Discussion

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Does this mean that we will get Flash 5 and 6 support for interactive work (sorry, fun) in education?

DaveW on 6/8/03 6:34PM [ Reply | Report ]

Ick. Flash.

(Actually, we do need proper support for it purely for compatibility, but it doesn't stop me hating the damn thing.)

This is all great news, though. Things are looking better and better for RISC OS at the moment. I'm happy

moss on 6/8/03 9:48PM [ Reply | Report ]

Flash is great. I'd like to be able to create flash stuff in RISC OS, but lets face it. Like that's ever going to happen!

Just imagine dragging Artworks documents into animation and interactive websites. *checks pulse* Time for my medicene.

Snig on 6/8/03 11:45PM [ Reply | Report ]

I suddenly feel crapped on again. Hopefully, Oregano UK will release the next version RSN, and we can proceed to fully working browser status before too long. O2 is still too flaky for me to ditch O1 and Fresco totally.

mikeg on 7/8/03 12:37AM [ Reply | Report ]

Does O2 support CSS1 properly yet? They claim complete CSS1 support apart from layers, but last time I asked about it on here, it was nowhere near that. Ahem.

moss on 7/8/03 12:44AM [ Reply | Report ]

You can create flash, with writeflash, see [link]~henrik/

"writeflash supports almost the entire Flash 3 format, and comes with full source and a number of examples. It also includes a utility to convert Drawfiles to writeflash-scripts"

mavhc on 7/8/03 12:50AM [ Reply | Report ]

mikeg: I returned to using O1 again after a very long while of using O2 (I had to swap over my IYONIX and RiscPC having only one monitor). I expected to find O1 much better and faster. What a surprise - I found it slow (more than the processor speed difference would have you believe) and a very poor window onto the web in comparison to how well O2 renders pages. O2 still is flaky in two areas I can see - textareas are hopelessly slow and the toggle window size icon can enlarge the window off the bottom of the screen.

I hope Castle fix these O2 problems. -- Simon Wilson, Boulder, Colorado

ksattic on 7/8/03 3:02AM [ Reply | Report ]

moss: I see you are another one of those cavemen who don't like Flash, Shockwave, Animated GIFs, JavaScript, Frames, Tables, Images, Bold, etc?

Personally I want to see the internet and browsing be the richest experience possible. Ideally a kind of 3D interactive TV. However, I still want a nice UI and that is one area where poor design of Flash systems can muck things up.

Blame the designers, not Flash. -- Spriteman.

Spriteman on 7/8/03 5:05AM [ Reply | Report ]

Flash == Slow

AndrewDuffell on 7/8/03 8:41AM [ Reply | Report ]

All new web technology is fine providing it is not used by halfwit web designers with no concept of sites degrading correctly when the features aren't available.. -- Jess

jess on 7/8/03 9:05AM [ Reply | Report ]

ksattic: As far as speed goes, Fresco widdles all over both Oreganos. O2's total lack of control over image and document colour makes it a pig in a lot of areas. As does its habit of crashing for no apparent reason.

The announcement talks about sales, marketing and technical support. The company providing support hasn't been able to slap together a temporary website for the launch date, which would indicate that they are either overworked or understaffed.

What is missing from all this is a guarantee that development of O2 for RISC OS will continue. "Oregano UK have plans to continue the development of Oregano 2 building on the work that Oregan are constantly doing for their generic browser" and "Oregano 2 continues to be produced by Oregan Networks Ltd" don't inspire any confidence at all.

As I said, a release of the next version in short order and an indication of the development plan would be useful.

Mike

mikeg on 7/8/03 9:11AM [ Reply | Report ]

Well i did talk to John Balance at the wakefield show (I know it was a long time ago) and he said there might be improvements to flash and maybe even "Shockwave"!!!!! - maybe, but maybe not because he said some things just can't be done on RISC OS. Hope these things are still going to plan with Oregano UK Ltd.

Timothy609 on 7/8/03 9:19AM [ Reply | Report ]

I don't mind flash for a pretty animated logo in the corner. It's the people who use it for whole, or large chunks of their website. It makes the back/forward buttons uselessly, history and bookmarks useless, you can't copy and paste, printing's near impossible (although it depends on your browser) and Flash-implemented scrollbars are almost always cack.

nunfetishist on 7/8/03 11:09AM [ Reply | Report ]

Also flash doesn't degrade at all, so disabled people/people without the plugins are unlikely to be able to access it. Stick to w3c standards for essential parts of sites - that's what they're there for.

john on 7/8/03 11:33AM [ Reply | Report ]

So, what things can't be done on RISC OS then?

fwibbler on 7/8/03 12:33PM [ Reply | Report ]

I aggree with mikeg that Fresco is very quick at rendering basic HTML. However I find it strange that he criticises O2 for "crashing for no apparant reason". On my Risc PC Fresco is the browser of choice for random crashes!. For all the faults of the current version of O2 it crashes only occasionally compared to Freso crashing regularily. -- Victor Shears, Maidstone

vshears on 7/8/03 2:49PM [ Reply | Report ]

Fresco crashes predictably, and pv has various hints and tips to avoid most crashes.

O2 will always crash if I close the homepage window before it's finished rendering, and also just stops for no apparent reason.

mikeg on 7/8/03 3:08PM [ Reply | Report ]

Fresco has the image and JS on/off buttons on the toolbar, that alone makes it great.

mavhc on 7/8/03 3:51PM [ Reply | Report ]

Fresco and Browse are great browsers, they are just dated in thair suppoort for the latest standards. O1 is also quite a good browser

AndrewDuffell on 7/8/03 4:05PM [ Reply | Report ]

Spriteman:

> Personally I want to see the internet and browsing be the richest experience possible. Ideally a kind of 3D interactive TV. However, I still want a nice UI and that is one area where poor design of Flash systems can muck things up. > Blame the designers, not Flash.

My main problem with Flash is that it's proprietory; simple as that. If it was an open standard, I'd be using it myself (whilst still making sure my sites were accessible to all, of course).

Let's hope we get animated SVG at some point

moss on 7/8/03 5:03PM [ Reply | Report ]

This is obviously a case of YMMV. The only thing I find predictable about Frescos crashes is the regularity of them. by contrast O2 only crashes once every few days. I will look at PV's tips, if they can get the crashes with Fresco down to the same level as O2 I will be well impressed.

-- Victor Shears, Maidstone

vshears on 7/8/03 5:03PM [ Reply | Report ]

Animated SVG? Yeah, open standard. Pity it's cack, and hardly anything supports it. Flash is a much nicer system, even if just for vector graphics.

nunfetishist on 7/8/03 5:33PM [ Reply | Report ]

I didn't actually know there *was* such a thing as Animated SVG yet. I'm an idiot.

But still, I'd rather not use anything than use Flash. Luckily, with the kind of sites I do, I can get away with that

moss on 7/8/03 5:40PM [ Reply | Report ]

SVG is not cack. It just isn't supported very well

AndrewDuffell on 7/8/03 6:29PM [ Reply | Report ]

I would like to see Flash 4+ so that children in my school can e.g. go to the BBC website to use interactive content. That is currently PC only.

DaveW on 7/8/03 6:48PM [ Reply | Report ]

Flash isn't that bad as a technology. It's when 'designers' come along and make a pig's ear of it, that annoys people. No different to how people code bad HTML to make our browsers fall over.

These tools are only good in the hands of competent people. How many of those are there in the world?

sascott on 8/8/03 5:19AM [ Reply | Report ]

sascott on 8/8/03 5:20AM [ Reply | Report ]

OK quick oar sticking in session.. Personally I quiet like the idea of flash - as it's something that was designed from scratch to work as a plug-in rather than messing around with proprietry HTML as the browsers used to do (sorry about spelling, I think!)

Secondly, what is the current version of Oregano and is it a great improvement over the demo? I'm delaying the purchase of it after being burnt by O1 - ie. paying for it and then seeing a couple of a very small upgrades over it's life.

-- Ryan Hitch, Cottingham

drjones69 on 8/8/03 8:24AM [ Reply | Report ]

This post isn't entirely relevant to RISC OS browsers due to their (lack of) support for JS and CSS, but I'm posting it anyway to stick in my two pence.

Flash is bad, for several reasons.

It's slow for anything complex. For anything non-complex you might as well make it a lot cleaner and use HTML, CSS and JS to achieve the same effect.

There's no browser intergration (it breaks the back button) and doesn't look native to the browser. This is bad for an essentially *browser-based* application.

If you want to make the user's browsing experience richer, there's plenty you can do without Flash (or Shockwave, Java, etc). If you want style, then use CSS (see www.csszengarden.com for a show on what you can do with CSS, if you've got a browser with good support). If you want interaction, then there's JavaScript. If you do it right, you've also made your site a lot more accessible, too. Top banana.

Note I'm not saying that there aren't places where Flash is good, I'm just saying you're generally better off using HTML/CSS/JS (and most of the time forgetting about JS), and possibly, when the time comes that major browsers support SVG, that too.

For an example of this in the real world, see Tim Bray's (co-creator of XML) blog, the entry "Unflash" - [link]

And drobe's comment boxes really are far too small to rant in.

takkaria on 8/8/03 1:24PM [ Reply | Report ]

It appears I'm the only one who has a moral problem with Flash, though

moss on 8/8/03 5:57PM [ Reply | Report ]

You can download the Flash spec pretty easily though.

mavhc on 8/8/03 5:59PM [ Reply | Report ]

Let's just hope that upgrades happen...

this version of O2 is still dated 01/04/03....

and it is the latest...

epistaxsis_RISC OS on 08/08/03 7:20PM [ Reply | Report ]

Heh, my Oregano 1 is dated from August 2000. I suppose we should be patient and wait for developments to be announced, Richard wouldn't be drawn on specifics.

Chris.

diomus on 08/08/03 7:37PM [ Reply | Report ]

moss: You can download the Flash spec pretty easily though

Fresco has the image and JS on/off buttons on the toolbar, that alone makes it great

mavhc on 09/08/03 11:00AM [ Reply | Report ]

Hmmmm. If you can download the Flash spec easily (I'm talking about the latest versions here, not 4), then why isn't there an open source Linux version that has been ported to RISC OS?

moss on 09/08/03 11:07AM [ Reply | Report ]

moss: I look forward to your port.

mrchocky on 09/08/03 11:29AM [ Reply | Report ]

I think money might be involved.

I think Macromedia ported Flash to Linux themselves. In doing so the need for the original Linux Flash, the one that RISC OS Flash player is derived from, was invalidated.

Snig on 09/08/03 12:06AM [ Reply | Report ]

Chocky: I take your point

However, that's not really what I'm getting at. There's already a RISC OS plug-in for earlier versions of Flash - if the spec to the latest versions is easily avaliable, I would have expected a newer version to appear.

I'm actually impressed if the spec is downloadable, as I assumed it was completely closed-off, which is why we didn't have a newer version - I thought you had to pay for it. I await being told I'm completely wrong

moss on 09/08/03 3:40PM [ Reply | Report ]

I don't think you _did_ get my point :-)

It's one thing to expect something to happen just because some specs exist. It's quite another for someone to spend quite a considerable amount of time doing it - unpaid - and there are plenty of more important things that might be done instead.

It's like Dave Holden said - volunteering everyone but yourself doesn't get anything done.

mrchocky on 09/08/03 4:01PM [ Reply | Report ]

Yes. I agree. Just scrub everything else I said; it's really the last paragraph of my last post is what I'm really getting at - I assumed that as well as someone actually having to put the work in, it was the money needed to be paid to Macromedia for access to the specs that was part of the problem. This would appear not to be true, and it's just the workload involved that means it hasn't been done yet.

I wish I could actually write comments properly :|

moss on 09/08/03 4:29PM [ Reply | Report ]

How about you stop assuming and find out for real whether specs are available? That would have precluded the need to actually make most of your comments ;-)

mrchocky on 09/08/03 4:37PM [ Reply | Report ]

Well, I couldn't be arsed looking

Having now had a look, however, I can't find the specs for Flash 6/MX anywhere online at all. Hmmmm.

moss on 09/08/03 4:46PM [ Reply | Report ]

God bless Google: Two links you can try (if you wish) are the following:

download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/ flash_file_format_specification.pdf

www.openswf.org

Regards

AMS on 09/08/03 4:53PM [ Reply | Report ]

I now feel extremely silly.

moss on 09/08/03 4:58PM [ Reply | Report ]

Hey Moss I wasn't trying to make you feel silly. I am as genuinely surprised as you are that the documentation is freely available (nice to see a big multinational software company *prepared* to allow open use of their standards).

I only looked because someone elsewhere mentioned they were available (which piqued my curiosity).

Kind Regards

Annraoi

AMS on 09/08/03 5:07PM [ Reply | Report ]

Oh, I meant to thank you as well, Annraoi

Yes, I'm extremely surprised. To be honest, it makes me far less anti-Flash.

moss on 09/08/03 5:23PM [ Reply | Report ]

Pity someone moderated my comment down so you weren't likely to see it then.

It's only recently that the spec's been free, and it's very complicated, of course, so I expect it to take a while before there's an open source version to port. Plus there's already a closed source linux player, which will probably slow down the production of an open source version. One can also licence MM's code.

mavhc on 09/08/03 10:21PM [ Reply | Report ]

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