Pinboard 2 v2.05 released

RISC OS Developments is pleased to announce the release of v2.05 of Pinboard 2.

Whilst primarily intended to address various minor issues reported over the prior months, v2.05 introduces the ability to remove the blank edge to the iconbar when dropping the iconbar transparency below a definable threshold (typically 50%).

This allows for a completely transparent iconbar (effectively removing the physical presence of the iconbar), without the tell-tale black edge that was previously visible. You’ll need a fairly recent version of RISC OS 5 to benefit from this.

Essentially this makes the transparent iconbar effect much more practical and visually appealing.

Other fixes include better support for less-used screen modes such as low colour depths or odd EX/EY modes, sanity checks on sprites/JPEGs which might crash the OS plotting routines (eg. corrupted files, or some downloaded JPGEs) and tweaks to handling files deleted from the pinboard.

The software can be downloaded from the ROD website – https://www.riscosdev.com/

We’d urge users to upgrade when they can – the extra checks to avoid corrupted files (etc) can boost system stability over and above even the original OS pinboard.

Enjoy!

v2.05 introduces the ability to remove the blank edge to the iconbar when dropping the iconbar transparency below a definable treshold (typically 50%).

I can’t find anything in the Configure options to achieve that. It just behaves as in version 2.02 – which also means that my desktop font (gillsans.medium) still gets blurred as soon as I choose a transparency less than 100%. Am I missing something?
(RO 5.31 (30-Jun-24), 4té2, Pinboard 2.05)

yes you have missed something! As the announcement said above when you set the transparency below 50% is when the black line at top of the icon bar disappears. As for the font blurring are you using “font Blending for icon text” option? worth trying otherwise you might want to try a different font. There are several versions of Gillsans font floating about – I have the font, but no gillsans.medium

As Chris says, GillSans is a funny font in that there are both free and commercial versions (possibly more), and whilst they seem similar on the surface, they may not be as comprehensively constructed under the hood.

Have to say I wish this had been brought up in the recent round of beta tests – all the reports that I recall (apologies if I missed this) were of 2.05 working better for iconbar text with transparent iconbar. Funnily enough, I think Chris H above was having a problem with 2.02, but 2.04 fixed it for him, leading me to believe 2.04/2.05 was/is much better for iconbar text handling.

My suggestion is to try Trinity/Homerton and confirm it is OK with those. Then try some other fonts and see how they behave, then return to GillSans. This will help identify if the problem is a more global one (eg. all fonts cause trouble on your setup) or if it is a specific font (or fonts) that is causing trouble. From there, we can investigate if a fix is possible.

Edit – my own copy of GillSans is in an EasyFont group called “Monotype” suggesting that’s where the original came from. It has about ten weights, but no “Medium”, only a (Regular). IIRC I had to purge the pd version at some point, but I forget why. I’m afraid I haven’t had a chance to test my version of GillSans as a desktop font, though.

The GillSans that I use since many years is a commercial font from EFF. I think they called it Eric. However, it is true that most other fonts (but not all!) behave nicely on a transparent icon bar. And it has been discussed before, for example here.

A first remark since I had deinstalled a previous version due to the crashes it was causing when trying to test the !Els and !Spectrum plugins in various colours modes: dropping the provided !Boot on the existing one overwrites the current !PinSetup so after deinstalling Pinbooard2 I was forced to restore manually the old !PinSetup from an Hardisc4 archive.

While checking the new version in various colour modes I noticed a little issue in 256 grey/colours. Using black text colour and font blending for the icon text, a selected icon:
- has black text on a black background if you select ‘Always use highlight box if icon selected’
- cannot be distinguished from a non-selected icon if that option is off.