Dark theme?

How is the RISC OS 5 icon bar generated? Is it one big sprite, or is it a shape tiled with a smaller sprite?

Also, could it be made transparent?

Is it one big sprite, or is it a shape tiled with a smaller sprite?

I’d imagine it’s a smaller sprite tiled.

Also, could it be made transparent?

Pinboard2 already does. It makes quite a difference to the look of the desktop, plus pictures come out the right size (and not bodged to fit into the area above the iconbar).

(have a look at eBay prices!)

eBay prices make no sense. Slap a “retro” label on something, and it suddenly costs silly amount of money.

https://www.ebay.fr/itm/204465347229

I have one in my bedroom. In a box, that’s about the same state. Manual in English. I paid either £5 or £10 for it just before coming over to France. I got it to see what a ‘contemporary’ of the BBC Micro was like inside. Oh, and the keyboard is my definition of hell. Whoever thought that was a good idea? It’s arguably worse than Sinclair’s dead flesh.
But, hey, it’s “retro” so you can buy it for €179 (plus €14 postage).
Bloody thing cost about that new.

<shakes head in disbelief>

How many times I had “clashes” with Rick

You call that a “clash”? I have been far more animated about my choice of tea when eating out…
…and you’ll likely get much harsher responses from people if you take a side on the issue of whether or not pineapple chunks belong on pizzas.

Really, it’s a gentle prod at best, and I often play devil’s advocate as my mindset prefers to look for flaws in the beginning to ensure they’re addressed at the start and don’t turn up halfway through.

RISC OS 5 on at least the Iyonix seems a sensible place to draw the line to me.

It’s a different proposition when writing software for free than for sale. If for sale, blocking the older users could block a significant number of users. I don’t have any statistics, but I’ve heard that people selling stuff estimate there’s just as many with the Mesolithic as with the new.

My own personal approach is to support RISC OS 5. I don’t say only as the API hasn’t changed that much really so I’d imagine a fair few things are largely compatible.
But I don’t test on, or give much consideration to, those older machines. They had their day, once upon a time.

It’s only fifty quid for a new Raspberry Pi, after all.

Don’t even need the newest and greatest. The Pi in my room (the main machine) is a 3B+, and the one here in the living room (that I wrote SimpleSeq on) is an original ARMv7 Pi 2.
I find, as long as I’m not doing stressful things like modern websites with Iris, it’s quite acceptable.
The Pi 1 is notably slow in comparison, more than the mere 200MHz difference in clock speed would account for, but then the Pi 1’s core is an old ARM11 (pre-Cortex).

That all being said, there are numerous benefits to something like the Pi compared to the older machines:

• Relatively inexpensive.
• Way faster.
• Works with a lot of modern generic hardware (USB keyboards, mice, SD cards, etc).
• Massively better video support.
• Automatic GPU scaling, so your monitor will always see its native resolution and RISC OS can use whatever weird mode that game wants to use…
• Small size – put it in a little box, and a bit of gaffer tape to stick it to the back of a flat screen monitor and job done.
• And maybe the most important these days with the exorbitant rise in energy bills, it’s extremely frugal when it comes to energy. Mine uses so little it is always on (except thunderstorms).

These days, that which you’d pay for a Pi to replace a RiscPC might well repay itself in a year or two in energy savings alone.

I’d imagine it’s a smaller sprite tiled.

Up until July 2021, it’s just a window called “iconbar” that uses the regular “tile_1” sprite (the default window background tile).

Afterwards, that is to say Wimp 5.81 or later, it will also look for “tile_i” to use as an iconbar-specific tile. I think what Pinboard2 is doing is working out what the iconbar size would be, sort of semi-transparently merging the normal tile into it, and making a “tile” that is the size of the entire iconbar.
Something like that.

As you can see from the picture, it’s quite effective.

But I don’t test on, or give much consideration to, those older machines. They had their day, once upon a time.

Exactly. It’s pretty cool that there are still many running, but I just don’t know how people can put up with the old 2MB VRAM situation. I used to find it incredibly limiting.

it’s extremely frugal when it comes to energy

This is a major strength of RISC OS on native ARM hardware, especially based on things like the Raspberry Pi. It could have serious applications where the energy supply relies on batteries or solar panels, as well as lowering household energy consumption.

As you can see from the picture, it’s quite effective.

Yes, it is.

I’m a bit torn. I use the Acorn icon set and I like the traditional 3D look of the GUI. On the other hand, with a modern, Apple-like take on those icons and Pinboard 2, RISC OS could look quite modern.

Bloody thing cost about that new.

I find the whole retro price situation to be ridiculous. I find it especially questionable on Acorn computers. I think the form factor and the build quality of the cases stand out even today, but as RISC OS is still going and runs on modern hardware, why would one pay through one’s nose to hamper oneself with limited hardware?

As you can see from the picture, it’s quite effective.

@Rick: But how do you manage to keep the text underneath the icons readable? When I set the transparency to whatever value, the texts get doubled – unless the sprite has a solid background, which is ugly too.

the texts get doubled

That’s peculiar. I haven’t ever seen doubled text.

unless the sprite has a solid background, which is ugly too.

Ugly, and they shouldn’t be doing it.

Okay, I’ll whip through my settings:

• Background → Custom image, full screen, cached. Opacity 65%.
• Pin appearance → Use font blending. Icon colour is white, size is normal.

These are less likely to be relevant, but for completeness…

• Pin arrangement → Iconise to top left horizontally, tidy to bottom left vertically, on a grid.
• Stickies → I’ve just left this as it was.
• Pinboard dir → I’ve just left this as it was.

• Watermark → Not enabled.
• Misc → Ticked: Treat click-click-hold as Sh-DblClick and Always confirm delete.

System font is Homerton.Medium, Raspberry theme. Textured window backgrounds. Icons not protected, no menu backgrounds, and no window 3D borders. This is !Boot → Theme.

Is Pinboard 2 not even in PlingStore yet?

Is Pinboard 2 not even in PlingStore yet?

Maybe people are debating whether to get it put into the ROOL HardDisc download ??

Still technically in beta, isn’t it?

It’s here, by the way:
https://www.riscosdev.com/projects/pinboard-2/

Looking at RODev’s events…

• RISC OS South West Show 2020

Immediately above:

• Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Computer Show 2023

Hmm, I wonder what happened to 2021 and 2022? 😋😷

AFAIK,
Pinboard 2 was released as a release and we are already at 2 updates from base release, so latest should be release 2.0.2.

Is Pinboard 2 not even in PlingStore yet?

Hummm not sure it belongs there, but maybe. You can download both executable and source code from the link Rick shared.

I am using latest release for my tests.

P.S.:

IMHO, ROD should put some effort in having a PackMan repository and an official GitHub/GitLab, but oh well.

Hummm not sure it belongs there, but maybe

As much as all the other free stuff that’s there.

ROD should put some effort in having a PackMan repository

Er, yeah – that was the first place I looked :-)

It would be nice if you could browse the Risc OS Pling site for progs with another OS.

[Edit]
Like a text file of progs available.

That’s peculiar. I haven’t ever seen doubled text.

@Rick: I copied all of your settings (most were the same by the way), but to no avail. I also tried removing 3D borders and textures – nothing. Finally I tried another system font – succes!

I always preferred GillSans.Medium as my system font (which actually is IFF’s Eric.Medium, which in turn is actually GillSans), but now I’m hesitating. Homerton is a tiny bit too chunky for me. Calibri? Hm… why do I actually want a transparant icon bar?
But the culprit is found.

tried another system font – succes!

Ah, I thought that didn’t look like Homerton. That’s why I included the desktop font settings.

Drop an email to Andrew to pass on. (I’ve just done that)

Okay, Corpus and Trinity mess up (along with Ladybird and Paladin).

Using LCDFont, everything goes comically wrong, and not just with the icon bar!

I wonder if it is using sizes hardwired to Homerton, or something?

As an aside, I’m going to have to automate the pinboard text colour selection in my backdrop chooser. I’ve made it black, as white on that was near unreadable. But, this ought to be something that can be done by code!

Hmm, there’s this code in pin:

  // font
  wimp_read_sys_info(8,&info);
  if (info.r0==0) {
    yoffset=0;
    textheight=32;
  } else {
    int ymin,ymax;
    _swix(Font_ReadInfo,_IN(0)|_OUT(2)|_OUT(4),info.r0,&ymin,&ymax);
    yoffset=ymin<0?-ymin:0;
    textheight=ymax;
  }
  _swix(Wimp_TextOp,_INR(0,2)|_OUT(0),1,indirected(p->icondata.buffer,char *),0,&textwidth);
  textwidth+=8;

I wonder if there’s some “unexpected” values being passed back?

I threw together this:

REM >FontDimTest

PROCfontsize("Homerton.Medium")
PROCfontsize("LadyBird.Medium")
PROCfontsize("LCDFont")
END

:

DEFPROCfontsize(f$)
  SYS "Font_FindFont",, f$, 12*16, 12*16 TO fh%
  SYS "Font_ReadInfo", fh% TO , minx%, miny%, maxx%, maxy%
  SYS "Font_LoseFont", fh%

  PRINT f$;" -> ";minx%;", ";miny%;", ";maxx%;", ";maxy%
ENDPROC

And the results were…

Homerton.Medium -> -6, -10, 30, 28
LadyBird.Medium -> 0, -6, 30, 28
LCDFont -> 0, 0, 28, 30

I’m not familiar with what the code is actually doing to interpret those values.

Thanks for alerting us to this feedback, Rick.

Firstly, make sure you’re running the lasted build of Pinboard 2 from the RISC OS Devs project page. I know there were some fixes relating to iconbar font display in the most recent version. However, I think this is likely an unresolved issue, so have passed it on to the Pinboard 2 author for further investigation.

Also thanks to Paul S for highlighting that there’s a problem here. :)

One workaround I found is to use applications that allow custom theming, like StrongED, and set their background to black with white text. It’s not a perfect solution, but it does help with the readability in those apps.