|-------------------------- Acorn News Service --------------------------|
| http://www.ans.org.uk/ |
| ISSUE 252 12 July 2009 |
| |
| An independent monthly newsletter for the Acorn world. |
| Send your news items or comments to ans@acornusers.org. |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Featured site this issue: http://www.iconbar.com/articles/hardware/ |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
Contents
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1) General News
2) Commercial News
3) PD/Shareware News
4) Club news
5) ANS information
General News
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1) RISC OS London Show
ROUGOL, the RISC OS Users Group of London, will hold the first RISC OS
London Show on 3rd October 2009, at St Giles Hotel, Feltham, London.
Commercial News
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1) CJE vPod - ViewFinder part exchange scheme
CJE Micro's are pleased to announce a vPod - ViewFinder part exchange
scheme. The vPod offers greater integration into the OS, which enables
even faster graphics rendering than on a ViewFinder. The vPod is also
fully RISC OS 6 compatible, whereas some ViewFinder and graphics card
combinations are not.
* vPod with 128MB Viewfinder in part exchange: GBP79 inc VAT
* vPod with 32MB Viewfinder in part exchange: GBP89 inc VAT
* vPod with 8MB Viewfinder in part exchange: GBP104 inc VAT
The ViewFinder must be complete and in full working order to qualify for
the part exchange offer.
Vpod, the video expansion card for RISC OS 6, provides the following
features:
* Hardware acceleration for many common graphics operations
* 32MB of on-board VRAM
* 64 colour to 16 million colour modes
* Supports 64 thousand colour modes as recently introduced in RISC OS 6
* Auto-detection of monitor capabilities
These features enable:
* A very responsive desktop
* Large, colourful, high resolution displays
(up to 1920x1200 in 64k colours, 1680x1050 in 16 million colours)
* Easy setup for modern monitors
2) Richard Brown joins Orpheus Internet
Richard Brown, also of GeneSys Developments Limited, will be joining the
Board of Orpheus Internet and taking over the day to day running of the
business. Richard brings a wealth of experience in RISC OS and the Acorn
market as well as extensive management skills in business operations.
3) Impact 3.34 released
A free upgrade from versions 3.32 and 3.33 to version 3.34 of Impact is
now available to download from the Impact web site:
Impact (GBP55) is an easy-to-use relational database system for RISC OS.
A demonstration version is available for download from the web site,
together with full manuals and example databases.
This release is mainly to fix a bug which was introduced in version 3.31.
When editing existing filters the filter test was reset to Equals (or And
for compound filters), so if the user did not notice and correct this
before saving the filter would stop working as intended.
PD/Shareware News
-----------------
1) Updated software summary
* FFmpeg v1.3
FFmpeg is a versatile, open-source, multi-platform video and audio
converter. This version includes build 18850 of FFmpeg for StrongARM
Risc PC and newer RISC OS platforms. Some major advantages of this
release over previous releases include AAC decoding, AC3 decoding,
debugged MPEG 2 encoding, and direct to audio MPEG conversion.
* IcnclipBrd v1.14
A module that enables the use of the global clipboard from all writable
icons on the desktop, using the conventional Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V
keys. This version fixes a serious bug in the paste routines that could
the module to crash in some situations when pasting more than 128
characters into a writable icon. Two new keypresses can be enabled:
Ctrl-S swaps the case of the character in front of the caret, while
Ctrl-T inserts the current date and/or time. Since clipboard support
is included in recent versions of RISC OS 4 and RISC OS 6, the module
will be mainly of interest to those with RISC OS 3, 4.02, or 5.
* Music Ripper's Toolkit release 2
A collection of programs designed to convert from and to various
esoteric and/or obsolete music formats, as well as perform other
miscellaneous functions such as decompression. New to this release are
some helpful instructions on what exactly the 'speed' and 'tempo' values
mean.
* NetSurf v2.1
An open source web browser for RISC OS, Linux and other Unix-like
platforms, BeOS, Haiku, and AmigaOS 4. This release contains many bug
fixes and improvements.
* Raffle2 v1.00
A desktop version of Raffle, a raffle ticket picking application.
You can have up to 9 different books and ticket numbers between 1 and
1000.
* Snapper v1.10
A versatile screen capture program. This version includes more precise
methods for defining the size and position of the save area and an
updated manual in HTML.
* Transient v2.03
Provides a temporary directory on your hard disc, creating a new
subdirectory every day to help you organise files.
Club News
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1) Upcoming meetings
* SASAUG (Sussex & Surrey), 13th July
* EAUG (Essex), 14th July
* LAUG (Liverpool), 14th July
* RONWUG (North West), 15th July
* MUG (Midlands), 18th July - Nat Queen, cryptology
* ROUGOL (London), 20th July - RISC OS on the Beagleboard, ROOL
* WROCC (Wakefield), 5th August
* ROUGOL (London), 17th August
* RONWUG (North West), 19th August
* WROCC (Wakefield), 2nd September
* RONWUG (North West), 16th September
* RISC OS London Show 2009, 3rd October
ANS Information
---------------
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---------------- Acorn News Service, http://www.ans.org.uk/ ----------------