What software would you like to see on RISC OS?

Just curious if there is any software that you would really like to see on RISC OS that is currently missing or out-of-date?

I’ll kick off the discussion with:

1. Modern web browser—yes I know its been discussed to death already but I still want one!
2. Integrated Development Environment—I have a copy of the DDE and all the tools are great, but what I would really like is everything in one program, this could just be a wrapper for the DDE.
3. Text editor capable of saving as UTF-8—this could be part of the IDE above!

What else would you like to see…?

Check out http://www.reallysmall.co.uk/Pages/categories/riscos/development.php I have not used it but it integrates with the DDE or GCC as someone who as used a IDE on other systems give us your comments.

Ooh interesting! I wasn’t expecting one to be available…perhaps I should have done more searching before my post!

Relating to number 1 on my list your website doesn’t look so good on NetSurf (I can read everything but its a bit jumbled).

Will download the software and let you know how I get on with it though.

This maybe a bit a a rant but here goes.
The whole design of RISC OS is based on cooperation, apps are small with minimal foot print, all apps are designed to to share with each other so that you can have a word processor that can import graphics from a photo editor or a vector editor in this case draw or something more heavy weight like artworks just by clicking on the graphic it will launch the app that originally created it to edit it then feed the changes back to the word processor, this allows for your creativity to do the work not some wizard that you have no control over, just turning out more copies of the same thing over & over.

So an IDE is just a way of manipulating the programming environment to make life easier so for instance you can choose which editor you prefer that will give you more control over the layout format the text will be in have a look at zap or stronged to see which you want to you.
It puts thing in nice boxs so that you can organise your thoughts and processes in affect do the grut work for you to lay out your projects seem a good idea with the drawback of a learning curve before you can start to use it.
A quick look at sourcery and the tools available and it seem to be wot you are looking for.

I think one of the main advantages of an IDE is better integration with documentation/library reference. For example, being able to choose a library function and have immediate parameter / type / class information. “Drop in” code fragments can also be handy for repetative jobs.

StrongHelp manuals provide some of the convenience of IDE documentation, but it could be a lot more context-sensitive. If I type in wimp_ an IDE might give me immediate lists of wimp_ functions (or SWIs) and then remind me of the data types for each parameter. That information is available via StrongHelp, but it isn’t automated. Of course, now that I’ve said that, cue Fred telling me that StrongEd will do all that (either now, or in the next version!).

@Glen Walker – I plead guilty about the website!

IIRC, when I redid it it looked like most of the traffic was coming from other browsers. I did try and make it look better on NS but there were some CSS things that still weren’t supported in NS at the time – I think box-sizing appeared not to work, and I questioned whether it was worth the effort to support NS.

I’ll do this in reverse order…

Richard said:

I questioned whether it was worth the effort to support NS.

Its the only browser I have that works on my RISC OS. I tried Ottar and it took ages to load and then crashed straight away (this is on a Pi B+ so maybe not enough resources for Ottar…?)

Andrew said:

I think one of the main advantages of an IDE is…

Yes true, I think the best IDE I have used for desktop applications is Qt Creator which does this very well but it is easier for them because they have control over both the the IDE and the library that you are working on. For embedded applications Eclipse is absolutely fantastic and has a really strong run/debug loop—someday I’d like to be able to do embedded programming on RISC OS in the same way that I do it in Eclipse on Linux but I think that might be some way off. For the record I think Visual Studio is horrible unless you really don’t care what your code is doing and just want to throw buttons around and build yet another database based program on Windows (actually a point aside, most of the tutorials for Qt Creator assume that you want to do everything visually too and they get really irritating when you want to do something advanced but once you get past all that the actual IDE is good for the underlying stuff as well).

So in summary an “IDE” to me is a text editor, some useful built in help, useful project management of files and a good run/debug loop. I don’t care about fancy draggy-droppy type interfaces; I want to know what my code is doing and where the errors are.

I guess, coming from other operating systems I’m used to things all happening in one window.

Rob said:

A quick look at sourcery and the tools available and it seem to be wot you are looking for.

Agreed it does look quite good. I have downloaded it and had a scratch around but I’m not quite ready to create a project. Will give it a thorough testing soon hopefully!

Going back to my original topic though, I would also like to add:

• Movie player capable of playing ISO image files off a server as well as showing mpeg streams (we have satellite TV coming through a server and getting sent out across the network—same server also has ISO image files of all our movies stored on the hard drive).

this allows for your creativity to do the work not some wizard that you have no control over, just turning out more copies of the same thing over & over.

Indeed. I look at the “templates” in various packages, and wonder how many recruitment agents see identical looking CVs, and if this might influence their thoughts regarding the person applying.

So an IDE is just a way of manipulating the programming environment to make life easier

In theory, yes. Having dabbled with Eclipse (so damn slow I uninstalled it) and VisualBasic (in the VB6 era), while I can say there are some benefits to clever IDEs, but there are also benefits to the RISC OS setup. For example, my DDE is pre-booted at machine startup so everything is available right off the bat. To begin coding, all I need to so is double-click on the sourcecode. It loads into Zap (which starts in a split second if it wasn’t already loaded – it usually is).
Once a MakeFile has been written (copy from an earlier project and tweak the filenames), pressing Ctrl-Shift-C will save the file I’m working on and start the build process.
It is lightweight, minimalist, and everything happens near instantly. No waiting an eternity for overly complicated things to do stuff in the background.

I don’t think RISC OS needs a nice IDE. It needs:

1. An app generator. You can feed it a Template or Res file, and it will spit out some boilerplate code in a manner not unlike VisualBasic, code that you can use as a basis for your own application. I have something that does this for DeskLib from Template files, but i never finished it, it does enough for me to get a basic “template” set up. Maybe I ought to look at improving it?

2. A debugger that doesn’t suck. I only turn to DDT when it comes to weird or tricky bugs, because often it is a less tedious job to spit rubbish at DADebug and read that than to go anywhere near DDT. I’m sure DDT is powerful, but it’s behaviour is convoluted.

It puts thing in nice boxs so that you can organise your thoughts and processes in affect do the grut work for you to lay out your projects seem a good idea with the drawback of a learning curve before you can start to use it.

I really don’t understand people that use those strange “thoughts organiser” applications. Do they have a broken BrainFS implementation or something? The only organiser I have is a diary synced between my phone and the iPad. So I can remember that I need to do something at such and such a time. I’ll be seeing the dentist on Monday 24th April at 6.20pm. There’s a pretty good chance I won’t remember a month from now. So I’ll add it to my diary, as “Dentist 😢💉” (for RISC OS users without emoji support, that’s an “oh crap” smiley (which for some reason looks like snot-smiley on iOS, Android is better) followed by an injection needle. Because _ that_ is what bothers me about dentists.

If I type in wimp_ an IDE might give me immediate lists of wimp_ functions (or SWIs) and then remind me of the data types for each parameter.

I’m in two minds here. I liked that about VB, I could type “Form.” or “Me.” and just pick off all the stuff I needed. But on the other hand, I only sort of know the parameters or how to write them. Why? Because there was zero incentive to bother to remember because the IDE always offered choices. I think the assignment to set text in label “lblTest” in form “frmMyWin” is frmMyWin.lblTest.Caption.Text, but I’m not certain because, well, I didn’t need to remember it.
To see if Select is being clicked on a window click handler in DeskLib, on the other hand, is event→data.mouse.button.data.select, I usually copy-paste generic code, but I’ve written it myself a number of times so I can recall stuff like that. ;-)

I’ll resist the urge to mention wanting a browser, but…

• A chat client compatible with XMPP or Jabber or whatever it is that Hangouts uses. I took a look at libpurple a while ago but it had so many dependencies and looked like a nightmare to build.
• A modern video player; we already have an OpenGL demo app for Pi and I would’ve thought that getting videos running would be even easier! But the Raspbian code was, again, really complex and didn’t look easily portable despite already having the VCHIQ module :(
• While I’m at it, a modern audio player would be nice too. I’ve only found one thing on RISC OS that can handle AAC files, and it’s single-tasking. I’ve had iTunes for nearly 15 years so the vast majority of my music library is AAC.

With those sorted out, I’d only really need my Mac for video editing and the odd game. It’s not going to happen overnight though…

A chat client compatible with XMPP or Jabber or whatever it is that Hangouts uses

A lot of bleeding bandwidth that’s that pile of poo referred to as “hangouts” uses.
I think it’s in line for an award for being so bad.

Jabber is more likely to be a decent target as Cisco like to dress up open source as their own (e.g. AnyConnect)

I looked it up. Jabber is now called XMPP, so they’re the same thing. Hangouts is mostly proprietary but still uses XMPP for text chat (which is the only thing I use it for – mainly with Apple’s “Messages” app).

All good stuff…please keep them coming.

I’d like to get to a point where we have a list of things that are “missing” and then any potential future developer can come along and go “oh, I know a bit about that…maybe I can write a program to do that for you…?”

I’ll let this thread run for a bit and then put a summary of things up somewhere.

Since you asked, my two cents worth.
1) I would love to see an IDE/App builder. I started using Visual Studio for building and compiling Visual Fortran programs around 20 years ago and then moved over to Winteracter which provided many additional features to speed up development time. I guess that I could do it all using command lines but it was so much more convenient to use an IDE. Dr WIMPC comes with what could be described as an App builder, perhaps that could be a starting point?
2) Ability to print directly from RISC OS to current printers.
3) Wireless networking from USB adapters or use built in adapter such as Pi 3.

A YouTube application would be sweet. I think most people at some time or other passes a bit of time on there. Could probably go hand in hand with point 2 of what Chris Mahoney said above

I would love to see an IDE/App builder.

You might consider the URL for Sourcery quoted by Rob Andrew earlier as a starting point

Ability to print directly from RISC OS to current printers

Current PCL, current Postscript, current GDI… ?

Wireless networking from USB adapters or use built in adapter such as Pi 3.

So a whole new network stack and a set of wireless drivers

A YouTube application would be sweet.

Support for the various video formats used by YouTube and others as opposed to a browser that will show the basic page without the embedded content. There is no “YouTube application” per se.

Glen Walker – and anyone else who is interested for that matter, I have taken another look at my site and updated it so it better renders on NetSurf. It isn’t 100%, but hopefully you’ll find it much easier to navigate. Tested on NetSurf 3.6 on RISC OS 6.16, as that’s what I have to hand.

Cool thanks!

I actually really like NetSurf…maybe I should get stuck in and help out with making it better…?

I actually really like NetSurf…maybe I should get stuck in and help out with making it better…?

Please do!

I only skimmed this. Sorry if I missed something. has anyone tried building libpurple? It’s the backend of the Pidgin messenger among others. It needs a front end to be useful, but it’s where all the magic happens.

A tool to create arbitrarily sized Raspberry Pi boot SD cards.

A utility to feed source trees through that converts files from foo/b to b.foo directory structure. Unless it already exists. If so, then what is it?

freepascal. It seems do-able. I’ve got the source tree sitting on my “build server” hard disk. I have a suspicion that almost duplicating the arm-linux target and stuffing it through parts of GCCSDSK’s toolchain with perhaps some headers fed through the h2unit (or whatever it’s called) could get a very basic stage 0 build up and running, either as a crosscompiler or native. But I’m just guessing. Not going to lie, I’d love Lazarus on RISC OS, but that’s on a whole other level.

More of a broad request, but support for audio DACs.

Synergy mouse / keyboard sharing (I’m working on that)

Again more of a vague request but support for file types set from magic numbers or even file extensions from external sources like downloads.

A utility that looks for duplicate apps. It can display the versions of found items, have the ability to ignore, delete, duplicate or relocate an instance.

EXTn FS support module.

A better shutdown menu with restart as an available option.

An SSH server. With all the othfer available programs, it’d be easy enough to write and build code remotely. The inverse of what I do with Nettle and Sunfish currently.

A CAD program maybe?

A tool to create arbitrarily sized Raspberry Pi boot SD cards.

SystemDisc can do this (but its site is apparently down at the moment).

A utility to feed source trees through that converts files from foo/b to b.foo directory structure. Unless it already exists. If so, then what is it?

srcrename

You might consider the URL for Sourcery quoted by Rob Andrew earlier as a starting point

Agreed, it is a great resource.

Current PCL, current Postscript, current GDI… ?

I am aware of PCL and PS printers working under RISC OS but perhaps you could elaborate / link to info on printing to GDI printers from RISC OS.

@ Richard Thanks for developing Sourcery, it is a great tool. My main observation is that if you go to the make a donation link in NS, it does not progress to getting actual credit card details (even with JS enabled). Also you want to update Sourcery in !Store as it is at ver 1.15 and not the latest 1.17.

@ Glen, many thanks for getting the discussion going. For people like me,coming from a Windows background RISC OS can be quite daunting. It has made me aware of a good RISC OS IDE and hopefully will learn a bit more about using GDI printers from RISC.

Thanks Chris!

The CAD program was a truncated thought. It was post “as is” or lose everything I have typed.

I will preface this with: Do not go to the program’s web site with NetSurf!
Recently I discovered that FreeCAD works on my Orange Pi PC using the OpenGL1.1 to OpenGLES(I think that’s the right one) shim. The program seems to be written with C++ and Python, and uses Qt+. I think most of that exists for RISC OS doesn’t it? I don’t know about the shim.

Here we go two commercial CAD packages available
ProCad+ by david Snell http://www.dsnell.co.uk/CADindex.html free demo available
RiscCAD by David K Buck http://dbquadrant2.com/shop/4587673057/CAD no demo but some you tube video’s https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmOftmffqr5R4Qh4c0wpwZA
not strictly a cad package but could be used for cad because it has layers Etc and is free http://www.keelhaul.me.uk/acorn/oss/
Printing directly to a windows GDI printer you would use Uniprint from Rcomp but again a Commercial product. http://www.arsvcs.demon.co.uk/rci/uniprint/
There are a number of free network printer programs available.
hope this helps

Current PCL, current Postscript, current GDI… ?

I am aware of PCL and PS printers working under RISC OS but perhaps you could elaborate / link to info on printing to GDI printers from RISC OS.

Too cryptic again. I was referring to the vagueness of the description “current printers”
Is the wish for support of a current version of PCL or a current version of Postscript or something else entirely? There are commercial products that do parts of what is mentioned but I’m guessing people are wanting free stuff built into the OS

You’re aware of support for older versions of PCL and Postscript but I don’t think those are current except in a sort of legacy status. I don’t think the PCL support has got as far as PCL4 for example. Postscript 2 is the limit on built in support.

In the past I’ve hacked around with both PCL and Postscript (raw output in files) while sorting problems on PeeCee based systems