Another RISC OS website

In an attempt to pull the vast array of fragmented RISC OS websites together and to provide an afternoon’s entertainment I’ve knocked together a RISC OS website
It’s in its early stages at the moment, as there is a lot of content I need to get onto it.
And NO it’s not complete!
If anyone wants to write content for me, I’d be more than happy to provide a login (you won’t be able to publish it though).
The main things I want to add first are:
1) A comprehensive review of the hardware avaliable (for example the Armini(x) and the PandaRO for starters)
2) A comprehensive review of the main commercial software avaliable
3) A beginners guide to RISC OS

But there’s a hell of a lot missing, I know I found a lot of the software etc. by digging.
My personal focus is to get people spending as much money on RISC OS as I can, where ever that is (bounties, software, hardware). But there are different ways of achieving this, first of all making people want to try it ;-)

Maybe it’s going to be another dead site, maybe not, but I’m willing to give it a go.

Contact me at malcolm at paymentlabs dot com with scathing comments, ideas and any intel related jokes, or any as long they are a little weird:

A tcp packet walks in to a bar and says “I want a beer”, barman says “you want a beer?” and tcp packet says “yes, a beer”

Or email me any RISC OS news and I’ll add it to the news section (which has an rss feed )

Cheers,

Malcolm

I wrote a long reply. Took an hour and a half. Stupid crappy thing then told me to log in again.

Sorry, I’m not writing all that again. I did have other stuff to do tonight.

Grrr….!

That makes me feel better that it happens to other people and not just me!

Once bitten – one then writes anything more than a couple of sentences in zap/stronged/etc and then drops it into the reply box!

I said that you perhaps ought to explain what “RC” means, as I have an RC helicopter… ;-)

I then said that it might be good to outline the differences between RC11 and RC12. On the downloads page, they both have the same build date. You need to wade into the documentation to see that one is from, I think, July last year and the other something like February or March this year.

The rest was a long list of bullet points about the fundamental differences between RISC OS and Linux/Windows. I do not think it is entirely “correct” to expect a person used to either of those to try RISC OS completely anew without mentioning that some of our metaphors are quite different.
Just by way of example:

• There is no “Start” or “Finder”, so where do I find where the applications are?
• Okay, I found some stuff in “Apps”. I double clicked the paintbrush thing several times and nothing happened, is it broken? [hint – user is probably expecting a big obnoxious window to appear on the screen as soon as an application loads, probably didn’t even notice the icon appear on the icon bar]
• Where the hell are the menus? I tried clicking the right button on everything in sight, but not a single menu turned up.
• How do you access the filing system? I clicked on the SD card and a window with what I guess were files inside appeared. Then what? [hint – user is probably expecting an Explorer-like tree view]
• When I finished with using RISC OS, I just pulled the plug. Couldn’t figure out how to shut the thing down correctly.

Etc.

… some of our metaphors are quite different

I think that this is a good point. The people (if any) coming fresh to RISC OS in 2014 are very different from those coming fresh to Acorn in the 1980s. That means that the introductory material needs to be different. Fewer fundamental ideas need to be introduced but more is needed to help beginners to unlearn what they have, perhaps subconsciously, come to believe to be carved in stone. It is also an opportunity to explain the raisons d’estre for the design decisions behind the RISC OS GUI:
for example, filer-windows are nice big targets for dragged icons and they show when the operation succeeds, whereas drags onto icons do not have these advantages. These reasons are old hat to RISC OS users, but they need explaining to others.

Very interested in this exchange. A London Raspberry Pint monthly meet near the Shard is one place I was planning to demonstrate RISC OS to Linux users and, indeed, some non-techie parties (e.g. teachers) who turn up. So, for starters, important comparisons and contrasts between widely practised GUI methods and those of RISC OS seems apt, especially where speed and ergonomics of our interface stand out. Do share your favourite examples here.

Meanwhile, as for Malcolm’s brave new site, I wish it well, though why not rather join forces with an existing site to help it grow in directions that you would like to see? It already says “in conjuction with RComp” [sic] :)

Do share your favourite examples here.

1. Have you noticed that with well-written software under RISC OS nothing happens unless you deliberately press a key or a mouse-button? That is, nothing happens just because the mouse-pointer happens to have wandered over something. Compare this with using a trackpad under XP.

2. When you drag a slider under RISC OS, and the pointer wanders off the slider, does the scrolled window bounce back to the top, or left? This behaviour under XP makes me frantic with frustration.

3. Under RISC OS input-focus is not the same window-attribute as top-of-the-stack. Unless these two attributes are distinguished it is impossible to have a window, from which you need to read, partially covering a window to which you need to write; thus vitiating a major purpose of having a GUI, the facility to write something while reading data from many sources.

4. Having an Adjust mouse-button as well as a Select means that many operations can be performed with a single hand without use of the keyboard. It makes easier scrolling a window to exactly the right place, and navigating the filing system without accumulating too many open filer-windows.

It is sad that so many Linux GUIs thoughtlessly repeat the poor features of Windows.

This is a great idea.

A few thoughts:

A news section made up from RSS feeds from all the active RISC OS sites. (And perhaps looking for ‘RISC OS’ in the feeds from sites like the register, raspberry, etc.)

Links to existing resource pages, but with the site maintaining a cached version, which is presented if the containing site disappears.

Resurrect Drobe?

Starting an app does NOT open a big empty window in the middle of the screen.
Closing the unwanted window does NOT quit the entire application.

You have no idea how much that bugs me in Windows. Oh, and dragging stuff to the big obvious iconbar icon actually does something…

FYI the “in conjunction with RComp” is more to do with my programming work.
i.e. NewsUK and WeatherUK which is heavily tested by RComp and he provides valuable feed back, which is what is largely responsible for it’s general stability – not my “skill”.
That and also the stirling work ROOL have done on the OS and ChangeFSI, which is why I’m so keen to plug both RComp and ROOL as much as I can.
It’s a real shame I haven’t had (bar one or two) any feedback generally during the length of the projects.
That said I’ve had some serious assistance from people on a technical note, which is greatly appreciated and why I’m continuing to swear continually more as I dig into RISC OS but enjoying every minute of it (specifically modules, which for the moment I’ve given up on so I can actually progress my socket project to something usable)

I’d be really happy to give access to the CMS for people to update, whilst I’m more than happy to do all the content there is only so much time I have and there is a huge vacuum of documentation missing from RISC OS and my priorities lie with:

1) Adding detailed tutorials for Messenger PRO
2) Adding a RISC OS “bare bones” guide

Those two will chew up a month of my spare time at least I would imagine and I’d really like to do some programming as well.
The main issue is that netsurf isn’t up to the job of editing the CMS – but it’s good to burn the dust off the CPU in my x86 box from time to time..even if I don’t find it a pleasurable experience.

Generally I don’t care how the site grows, as long as it stays 100% RISC OS focused, as it is the /riscos section of my website.
I would like to see a comprehensive programming section as well as a complete list of applications and tutorials on them. I really need to improve my socket tutorial, it’s pretty **** at the moment.
I only just found out about PROCAD+ the other day, it really shouldn’t be this hard!

Sorry if this seems a little ranty…

There was the ‘RISC OS Search Engine’ project by Rebecca Shalfield.

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/2304

What is the state of play of that project now?

Handy things I always use in RISC OS and drive me crazy because other OSes fail to implement it in a similar elegant manner:

• Dragging scrollbars with Adjust allows 2D scrolling
• Adjust-closing a filer window opens its parent
• Adjust-double-clicking on directory in filer opens dir and closes parent
• Adjust-clicking or dragging in filer window adds to existing selection
• moving a window with Adjust keeps its position in the window depth stack
• clicking on menu entries with Adjust keeps the menu open

It’s a real shame I haven’t had (bar one or two) any feedback generally during the length of the projects.

Not a surprise. With my projects…

On RISC OS there was little feedback unless I roped in a few interested parties and keep at it enough that they don’t get bored. Most of the feedback is only when things go wrong, though one time I got my bug reports from a jerk or two slagging me off publicly which was distasteful (but it was two decades ago so I’m over it…).

With my Windows programs, I would get requests that are insane, infeasible, or questions that could be answered by actually, like, reading the instructions. But with one of my programs I discovered an EPIC bug that I can’t believe nobody discovered… I guess reporting bugs is too hard for some people.

That said, I guess silence is better than “it crashed” with somebody expecting results while providing next to zero information.

My rant over. ;-)

Handy things I always use in RISC OS and drive me crazy because other OSes fail to implement it in a similar elegant manner:

One other thing I miss on non-RISC OS systems is Adjust-clicking on the close icon of a document to open the filer window where that document is saved.

Yes, the RISC OS Search Engine at http://www.shalfield.com/riscos and http://84.92.157.78/riscos is still up and running and desperate for others to take up its aims.

Most of the listed aims don’t seem to duplicate your efforts
“2) A comprehensive review of the main commercial software available” is the closest but if it aims to review software not just list them, then even that is not a duplicate. Unless I’ve misunderstood your aims!

As Chris J says:

There was the ‘RISC OS Search Engine’ project by Rebecca Shalfield.
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/2304
What is the state of play of that project now?

Why oh why in the RISC OS World do we just keep duplicating our efforts?

I’m not aware of another RISC OS search engine.

For what it’s worth, I posted a link to your search engine on Arcade BBS just a few days ago. I found your site by looking for “rebecca database risc os”. https://www.google.fr/?gws_rd=ssl#q=rebecca+database+risc+os 7th entry down.

You need visibility, and to pop up every so often to talk about / announce stuff that has been added. I also see nothing in comp.sys.acorn.announce from you in years – https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.sys.acorn.announce/rebecca$20shalfield. Visibility, that’s the key word here.