Essential guide to stylish development
Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 20 Feb 2015 18:45:00 GMT
Last published in July 1993, today RISC OS Open Limited are pleased to announce the immediate availability of a fully revised and updated Style Guide for RISC OS. This Guide is an essential part of the RISC OS developer’s collection. It describes the standards of ‘look and feel’ to which you should write a RISC OS application. The main aim of the Guide is to help all developers to give their applications a common and consistent look and feel so that users will be able to find their way around new programs easily and will be able to use applications together when appropriate. There is advice on how to implement this, and detailed descriptions of how to produce the icons you will need to use in your dialogue boxes and windows.
Extending to some 152 pages the guide includes the following major changes:
- Lifting of dated restrictions to applications such as memory, colours, and screen resolutions
- Requirement to use standard cut-and-paste, and preferably the drag-and-drop models for selection
- Full details of the facilities afforded by the Choices directory inside the Universal Boot sequence
- Guidance on how to handle Unicode, desktop themes, and alpha transparency
- Integration of the help and keyboard improvements introduced with the Iyonix
- Promotion of the Toolbox to effortlessly create Style Guide compliant applications
- Richer dialogue layouts through use of the Nested Window Manager
as well as numerous corrections, revised or improved drawings and screenshots.
This guide also represents ROOL’s first foray into the world of book publishing, as the title is now available to buy from the store as an actual paper book.
Costing only £16, adjusting for 22 years of inflation, this is represents the equivalent price that a copy would have cost way back in 1993 (£9.95). The book retains the same 7.5″ × 9″ format as the rest of the Programmer’s Reference Manuals and can simply slot into the set to replace your older issue.
If this book is successful, it is planned that other updated titles will also be made available in printed form to the community over the coming months.
ROOL would like to to say a special thank you to the editor, who wishes to remain anonymous and to thank the team of reviewers for their many hours of proof reading behind the scenes.
Getting your copy
As required of any publisher one copy is lodged at the British Library and available to read in their reading room, but if a trip to Wetherby in Yorkshire is a bit too far to go, why not visit the ROOL stand at the Southwest Show on Saturday 21st February 2015 to flick through the pages instead?
An electronic copy with clickable index links will feature on a future release of the DDE but in the meantime existing DDE owners can purchase the book with an exclusive 20% discount by quoting their developer number which starts with ‘DEV07’.
The revised guide can also be purchased through Amazon, though please note the developer discount cannot be applied when purchasing through this channel.
RISC OS Limited? Have I missed something?!
Nice to have an updated official guide, particularly with a low-cost print option. Congratulations.
Where did you see that? Or are you imagining things?
It was a typo which has since been corrected (I saw it too)
First sentance. It has now been corrected. I thought that maybe it was something more interesting than a typo!
You didn’t see it. It was never there. Nothing to see. Etc… :)
Tried ordering by PayPal, but when entering my DEV07 number it was not accepted on the ‘Use PayPal gift vouchers, rewards or discounts’ section.
What have I missed?
The developer numbers haven’t been integrated into PayPal (we haven’t figured it out) so for the time being if you want this discount, you need to contact notify@riscosopen.org to arrange the purchase.