Forums for RISC OS Programming

What are the best forums / websites for asking questions on RISC OS Programming (Wimp, Games, Basic, C, Charm, …) and RISC OS Hardware. Is there a central place or is it all fragmented …

BW,
Volkert

Fragmented, but you could try here – we don’t bite. ;-)

;-)

What about comp.sys.acorn.*

The problem is, not everyone who reads web forums has access to Usenet, and not everyone who keeps up with Usenet bothers with web forums. There are certainly lots of people who don’t pay attention to the ROOL site (who usually come out of the woodwork when somebody mentions a new feature or bugfix we’ve known about for months, and complain it hasn’t been ‘announced’ anywhere).

The most helpful advice I can give is that if you don’t get useful answers, post the same question somewhere else. It’ll probably get read by different people.

The forums I read regularly are these ones, the Icon Bar forums, and comp.sys.acorn.*. Most people only bother with one or two of these, and csa.* in particular has a large population of aged stick-in-the-muds who don’t use web forums because they’re too modern.

What about comp.sys.acorn.*

Yes, you could try comp.sys.acorn.programmer – however as Martin says, not everybody who accesses one accesses the other. I, from time to time, look at csap but generally I don’t any more.

The reasons are as follows:

1. To access csap on my home computer, I need to load Thunderbird which is memory hungry and doesn’t play so well alongside a memory-hungry browser with several dozen tabs open.
2. To access csap on my mobile phone (“Groundhog” software), I can only do this from home on WiFi. The use of Usenet is blocked on the mobile network as while there are plenty of legitimate uses for Usenet, there are plenty of illegitimate ones too.
3. Frankly, this whole “job” thing takes a big whack out of my day so with travel, eating, sleeping, watching animé… I don’t really have that much time free for something “different”. ROOL I look at a lot because the only hassle with this site is Textile. Otherwise, I try “ri” into my browser (real or mobile) and up it comes. At the table, in bed, in the car… I’ve even (thanks to my Motorola Defy) browsed this forum while in the bath (! ye gads, that’s sad!).

So you may find you need to ask in several places.

and complain it hasn’t been ‘announced’ anywhere

Perhaps ROOL needs an RSS feed or something? I don’t even subscribe to csa.announce and csa.misc these days; and the only time I looked at Twitter in the last year was when the site went down to see if it was known about (it was).
I’ve just “Liked” you on FB, plus all your likes (Register, RO, Beagle, Pi…), hehe that’ll show up in the feeds of all my work collegues. (^_^) But I notice the latest post predates the Pi release – I guess ROOL uses FB about as much as I do!

But, then, there’s no good looking in ROOL’s feed for the exciting news of ROL releasing RISC OS 7 for the OMAP3/4/BCM/etc; for news that ImpressionPublisher is now 32 bit and available for a tenner a download; or the news that TI is one-upping Broadcom and releasing the full spec for the OMAP GPU.
I would say this is where TheIconBar could come in useful as a central location for news (with a little less bull than an open newsgroup), however the main page top announcement says “Next weekend, Saturday the 27th of October, is the date for this years London show.”.
<looks at calendar> Um… It’s Himeji Castle for this month, and this month isn’t October! ;-)

Perhaps ROOL needs an RSS feed or something?

What, you mean like this one?

I made it a bit bigger, but it’s there at the top of every forum page.

but it’s there at the top of every forum page.

My bad. I was looking in the browser title/URL area where RSS feeds (if properly announced in the page) are displayed…

Opera’s showing a properly announced feed for comments on this thread, and if I move up to the forum view, updated threads in this forum.

Firefox is showing the RSS icon now. Possibly a glitch? Either way, good… subscribed.

Bear in mind that by asking on this forum where the best place is to go for programming advice, you are likely to get some bias in the results.

I tend to read this forum and comp.sys.acorn.programmer. This forum is certainly better for getting responses from people who are rewriting parts of the OS, but comp.sys.acorn.programmer still numbers some significant contributors with vast experience of writing applications for various versions of RISC OS, and is worth reading if you can get access.

I keep falling into the school of thought that suggests csa.programmer is gathering dust. It isn’t – I’ve had some good feedback from there over the years, and there are some great pieces of information to be gleaned from it. I’m finding it very useful at the moment, having had a fresh look in it, via Google. :-)