Sine Nomine Software: updates at Wakefield Show

I’m writing this from the train on the way to Bradford for the Wakefield Show – hope to see many of you there!

We have several software updates and a whole new application available at the show. These will be posted on the Sine Nomine Software website by the middle of next week.

ImpEmail, our mail-merging email software, can now even mail-merge attachments (authored in Ovation Pro or Impression) so not only can your e-mails be personally addressed but you can include personalised documents which are attached as PDFs. This is performed in conjunction with PrintPDF – many thanks to Steve Fryatt for helping with the development of this.

ImpEmail can take the data for merging from the databases Impact and Powerbase, or via CVS import in a friendly, intuitive interface.

Our most popular software is RiscOSM which uses OpenStreetMap data to produce maps. Whether you are already a user or not, come and see the software really fly on the new FAST machine from RISCOSbits – we’ll be happy to take you through the many features of the software.

Around RiscOSM we have developed a range of add-on applications over the years. There will be a small, but significant, update to Recce with a new dialogue enabling you to access weather forecasts. Yes, Recce has supported weather forecasts for a long time, but only previously by accessing the location on RiscOSM’s map first. Now Recce gains access to the same place name indexes, postcode databases and online search as RiscOSM.

The secret behind this new development is a new version of our Nominatim application which packages the OpenStreetMap Nominatim service, a big index of places, points of interest, and even individual houses worldwide. The new Nominatim can act as a plugin to other applications via a simple Wimp message protocol. This is fully-documented in Nominatim’s new manual. We’d be happy to help any developer wanting to incorporate place-selection into their own applications.

The real impetus behind these new developments is our new application, AtoB. This is a route-planner for RISC OS, building on two online services, and covering foot, bicycle and car journeys. You can enter your start and destination, along with via points if desired, and get turn-by-turn instructions which can be exported in a wide variety of formats, and of course plotted on a map via RiscOSM.

Come and see us on stand 3, and the demo in the show theatre at 3pm. Please note that our website does not have any of the new releases on it yet: these will be uploaded in a few days.

Ref the Fast – not the Arm chip but a very fast ‘Disk’ or ‘Chip’ acess.

I believe :-)

SATA access without using USB?

SATA access without using USB?

Yes Bryan, we had it for quite a while on the Titanium (Elesar) and the Rapido (CJE) machines and now it’s available also for the RPi branch thanks to the FAST (RISCOSBits) and I believe at the show also R-Comp is showing something on the same line if not NVMe actually.

So the storage situation looks much better now and all software, included the impressive RiscOSM will benefit from this (obviously at diffferent levels depending on how much disk access they do), but surely launching stuff on RO is much faster now.

R-Comp did indeed have a very interesting device branded Hydra. Andrew was showing off using Libre Office in an Avalanche window. There were three compute modules in the machine (it can take four). One was running RISC OS and one of the others Linux. They were all accessing NVMe storage: a filer on the RISC OS side gave direct access to the storage available to Linux.

We came away from the show with a longer than usual bugs list, so the new software may be delayed a little longer. But thanks to everyone involved for a really good show!

I was interested it the Hydra too but was disappointed that RiscOS doesn’t have its own nvme. It only uses the drives of the other ‘heads’ over the network.

With the Rocky Raid and the Forte triangular thing. They’re both using drives connected using USB 2, I think. Emmc on the Rocky Raid aswell so that should be faster.

Over all a very good show. The best RiscOS show I’ve been to in a while.

The new software we were demonstrating at the show is now up on our web site. Everything can be downloaded as a demo version for people to try out.

Please note: if you have installed RiscOSM 2.15 (from SD card at the show) or 2.16 (released on the web site yesterday) there is a fault in the software which will cause the internally-saved Pins and Tracks to be corrupted slightly. No data will be lost, but RiscOSM will refuse to reload them.

Version 2.17, now up on the web site, fixes the bug and will restore any corrupted saved pins and tracks.

The manual for Nominatim gives full details of how to incorporate place selectors into your own applications. Nominatim can act as a simple plugin which will notify your application of the latitude, longitude and description of any place selected by the user.

ImpEmail can take the data for merging from the databases Impact and Powerbase, or via CVS import in a friendly, intuitive interface.

I would be shocked and surprised at the same time if this is really “CVS import” and not the more expected “CSV import”.

My fingers type CVS a lot more than they type CSV!

Version 1.09 of Recce is out today, adding food hygiene ratings for restaurants, takeaways and other establishments as another data source which can be plotted on a RiscOSM map.

Nice had a quick play with the new version of Recce. I was looking to do something with the food hygiene rating thing.

Another Recce bug was fixed a couple of days ago, so version 1.10 is now out. Also a new version of Nominatim, again fixing some small bugs.

New map data for RiscOSM is now available to download or order on SD card if you prefer. A wider selection of countries is available to order, or you can convert your own data using OSMConvert. The contour data is unchanged.