Category: Applications

For the first time in Cerilica's history, one of its products is getting fully discounted for a show. To welcome in Cerilica Vantage's new product format, Cerilica will be providing an amazing 66.50ukp discount for visitors wishing to buy RISC OS' most advanced design and publishing system from the previous 241.50ukp to a more palatable 175.00ukp (fully inclusive).

News in that even this close to Wakefield, those bods at R Comp have released a new package...

Grapevine, is a brand new application for RISC OS users which has been under development for some time.It will be available at the Wakefield show this weekend!

Introduction

Communication is an essential part of our daily lives, be it talking to friends, family or business colleagues. The more in-depth letter has its electronic counterpart in the form of email, but what about the immediacy of phone or informal conversation? The answer is Instant Messaging, and that's where Grapevine comes in. It allows you to communicate in real-time with friends, family and colleagues directly from your computer.

It's amazing just how useful this is - you go online to check email, or browse the web, and can see any of your friends or contacts who are also online. You can then have a conversation, whilst also doing the browsing or emailing you started out to do. These people can be anywhere in the world, not just local people, allowing you to keep up with old acquaintances many miles away.

In the PC world, instant communication tends to be split into lots of different programs, making it laborious to use if you have friends on different services. Grapevine's aim is to provide a single application, initially supporting Microsoft's "MSN" service and the more chat-room orientated "IRC".

Why is Grapevine significant?

Instant communication is one of those things that may seem pointless until you have used it. Now that the Internet has become commonplace, the ability to see friends and family online, and converse with them when you are browsing the web, or checking email, becomes an essential part of internet usage. And you thought that the internet was about passively browsing the web!!!

By bringing everything under one actively developed roof, RISC OS users can communicate with people without needing lots of disparate applications, and enjoy a consistant user interface. And of course, although you are using RISC OS, your friends can be on Windows, or Mac, or Linux etc...

From a personal perspective, I now have the choice of Grapevine under RISC OS, or Microsoft's versions under Windows. And I can tell you, for the last few weeks (or more!) it has been Grapevine that has been my weapon-of-choice (it's running a conversation as I'm typing this!)

Cerilica have been busy with their next revision of the !Vantage vector package, the upgrade is free to existing customers and should be with us before the Wakefield show!

There's an impressive list of new features that are rounding out the facilities nicely for those of us who are mere design mortals...

Cerilica is proud to announce that its brand-new software product Insignia has been officially released and is now in stock.

From CSA.Announce:

Maybe some people haven't noticed, but AcornICQ doesn't function well anymore. ICQ has been taken over by AOL and now they have changed the protocol drasticly. They don't support the old protocols fully. It's only possble to login and to send messages. All other functions won't work.

So we (aICQ developers) have decided to recreate aICQ from scratch...

A new shoutcast player has been released, with source, at http://duffell.cjb.net/. It should work on any RISC OS 3.5 or greater machine which AMPlayer works on. This is much more efficient than any previously available version.

Download now, and enjoy. go to http://www.shoutcast.com/ for lists of shoutcast server.

Make suggestions and bug reports to me, John Duffell (York address).

Artex Software have announced the re-release of their BotKiller 2 platform puzzle game as freeware.


They have also included a level editor, so when you get tired of the pre-defined levels, you can spend many a happy hour inventing your own.


Download details: BotKiller 2

Anybody interested in contributing to the WebsterXL wish list? It's a bit quiet in there!

David Pilling, the man behind SparkFS, Twain and OvationPro has released a pile of updated software for his products.

Software updated (new version bracketed)

• Ovation Pro (2.66)
  
  
• CrossStar (2.11)
  
  
• Snapper (1.06)
  
  
• ImageMaster (1.15)
  
  
• Freshen (1.06)

All except Freshen & OvPro are available at www.davidpilling.net/up.html.

Freshen can be found at www.davidpilling.net/soft.html with the OvationPro upgrade being directly available here

Also available....

OvationPro Script Language Reference Manual

A manual version of the Script document on the OvPro CD. A5 sized, wire bound and costs a fiver (includes p&p)

Epson scanner drivers

Support is now available for the Perfection range. To obtain this, send back your original Epson TWAIN disc.

In an important step forward for RISC OS, Justin Fletcher has released several XML tools for our favoured platform.




Tools released thus far are:

• xmllint - an XML file tester
  
• xsltproc - an XSLT processor
  
• libxml2 sources
  
• parsexml module useful for other applications
  
• !RSS - a Rich Site Summaries reader application (& can therefore be used with My RISC OS as well as many other sites!)
  
• Example C code using the ParseXML module
  

For further details visit the temporary home of these tools http://homepage.ntlworld.com/justin.fletcher/XML/




For more details on XML see http://www.w3.org/XML/ and for XSLT see http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/


Note: XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language and is a simple standard way to interchange structured textual data between computer programs, one of its major advantages is that it is still readable and writable by humans!




XSLT stands for eXtensible Stylesheet Language and is designed for transforming one XML documant into another - it an also be used to transform XML into many other formats such as HTML




RSS stands for Rich Site Summaries, RSS files are an XML document that describe the changes to a web site, saving you having to visit the site in question without missing for example new article updates.

Following the release of a Rich Site Summaries (RSS) reader for RISC OS by Justin Fletcher it has been tested with My RISC OS and works well. Thanks Justin!


In order to use !RSS with My RISC OS, you will need to set it to fetch http://www.myriscos.co.uk/myriscos_news.php


!RSS can be downloaded, however you will also need a copy of JFShared also by Justin Fletcher.


Note: RSS are XML files that give descriptions of website changes (often news feeds) that allow you to keep up to date without having to re-visit the site. RSS are widely used with the Netscape & Mozilla browsers.

eQ R&D (http://www.eqrd.net) have launched a new version of both their MPEG video player (!Kino) and StupidPlayer (MP3).

StupidPlayer (unfortunate name!) is a very good MP3 player. While it does not have the advantages of AMPlayer, it does one thing that AMPlayer doesn't - allow decent sound and bitrate audio on the likes of the RiscStation 7500.

Kino is (currently) the only MPEG video player for RISC OS which allows sound to be played as well. It does a bang up job as well!

To use the software, you must download the 32 bit libraries from the RISCOS Ltd website.