RISC OS Developments offer OBrowser software as fundraising initiative at London Show

Early in 2017, RISC OS Developments’ directors Richard Brown and Andrew Rawnsley were discussing the recent port of OtterBrowser to RISC OS. Although the exact words are now lost to time, Richard bemoaned that whilst it was a nice tech demo, it didn’t feel like a RISC OS application and he couldn’t use it alongside his other RISC OS software – “It doesn’t even have an iconbar icon!”, he (might have) said. Something flickered behind Andrew’s eyes and ideas began to spark…

Fast forward to summer 2017, and RISC OS Developments shareholders received a small bonus gift – a new download called “!OBrowser”.

OBrowser is a front end for the Otter engine ported by (amongst others) Chris Gransden and Lee Noar. It provides a range of RISC OS pleasantries that would be otherwise unavailable to Otter users. Examples include:

• Iconbar icon, including usual menus, choices and quit/shutdown facility

• Drag’n’drop

• Double-click files to open

• URL launch protocols (both ANT and Acorn) for wide compatibility with other programs – click on a link in Messenger and open in Otter, for example.

• Copy/paste capability (eg. copy a link out of !Edit)

• Text file parsing for URLs

• File links

• Auto BGR swap for Titanium/Pi3/IGEP modes that need it

• Friendlier (faster?) loading

• Optimised settings

• Users report some performance benefits, but since the engine is the same as ordinary Otter, we’re a bit skeptical of this one.

Anyway, users seemed happy with this gift, and it received further updates this month (Oct 17) with updated engine and more functionality.

Side note for clarity – OBrowser is unrelated to RISC OS Developments’ main projects, and was developed as a fun side-project to make using OtterBrowser more pleasurable.

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Pause…. Cut back to Wakefield Show… Some show visitors expressed a desire to financially support RISC OS Developments’ work, but couldn’t justify the cost of becoming a full shareholder – quite understandable.

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You can probably see where this is going…. Idea forms – why not offer OBrowser as an way of fund-raising for RISC OS Developments and allow folks to make smaller contibutions? Thus, at the London Show this weekend, you’ll be able to buy a CD containing OBrowser, and help fund RISC OS Developments’ work. We suggest two levels of donation – if you’re just using it on one system, and want to make a smaller contribution – 40ukp. If you’d like to use it on more systems, and/or can afford a larger donation – 80ukp. You’re welcome to offer more, but that’s down to how you feel about RISC OS Developments and what you can afford.

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Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea – if you’re looking to play with OtterBrowser, we strongly recommend downloading it for free and enjoying it. The links are in the posting on the ROOL Announcements forum, and we’d urge you to try it out.

Please only consider our OBrowser CD if you’d like to support our RISC OS Developments work, and/or the enhancements shown above seem worthwile. We need to stress that the prices mentioned reflect funding RISC OS Developments’ work, rather than OBrowser itself, which was always a bonus item for Shareholders. Indeed, Investors do not need to buy this CD, as they can already download OBrowser free of charge.

This is purely a case of “well, we made OBrowser available to Shareholders, so why not offer it to people who want to make smaller donations too?”.

So there we are. Companies don’t often give you reasons why you shouldn’t buy their products! But then, RISC OS Developments isn’t an ordinary company. For a start, it isn’t set up to sell things, so the CD will be available from Orpheus and R-Comp stands at the show. But with that all said, we hope you’ll be able to support our RISC OS Developments work, and perhaps even consider signing up to find out more about our projects…

I hope it’ll be on !Store.