Latest news

London Show gets physical

Posted by Steve Revill Sun, 24 Oct 2021 20:04:00 GMT

Saturday 30th October heralds the return of the RISC OS London Show at its usual location in the St Giles Hotel, Feltham, UK. After the previous show moved online due to government restrictions, the situation is looking more favourable this year, and we’re looking forward to seeing users and developers from the RISC OS world.

On the stand

Drop by and ask us anything about what RISC OS Open is doing, we’ll try our best to answer. It’s also an opportunity to add to one of the currently collecting bounties, or take home something tangible like a T-shirt.

Or just listen

Even if you can’t make it to see us on our stand, please drop into the show theatre for an update on ROOL’s activity with our favourite OS. We’ll take a look at recent changes available to download and try out yourself, status of the bounty projects we’re coordinating, and big topics on the horizon. It’s highly likely the show talks will be streamed online, so follow there if you cannot come along in person.

Be prepared

As the venue is an indoor setting a face covering is recommended, and please don’t be offended if we don’t shake your hand. If you decide to buy something from our selected merchandise our preference is contactless payment by card rather than cash.

Also take note of any specific advice on the day from the show’s organisers and other relevant sources.

Posted in Community | 2 comments

ROOL recognised in annual RISC OS awards

Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 10 Sep 2021 16:53:00 GMT

All of us at RISC OS Open are very proud and thankful to everyone who voted in the RISC OS Awards. In keeping with the delay of a year to these awards, its taken us a while to spot the fact we’d actually been both nominated and had some success!

Thanks also to Vince Hudd / Soft Rock Software for organising this event.

ROOL’s results

Best new development

And the winner, with 44% of the vote, is: RISC OS 5.28, from RISC OS Open Ltd and contributors.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Community, Press coverage | no comments

Ping! Another one fully cooked

Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 13 Aug 2021 16:21:00 GMT

Portable Network Graphics, with file extension PNG and often pronounced Ping, is a common bitmap graphics format which offers lossless compression for faster transfer over the internet. PNG sits somewhere between Sprite, which is uncompressed, and JPEG used for photos, which uses lossy compression (throwing some information away) to shrink the file even smaller.

What do we gain?

There are two aspects to the new PNG support:

• Being able to save directly from Paint as a PNG graphic
• Being able to convert anything ChangeFSI can open and write it out as a PNG graphic

Underneath this there’s a new support module, called CompressPNG, which does the real work and which other applications will be able to make use of.

If you are a developer and you’d like to add PNG export to one of your own applications it’s simply a case of making a few system calls from whatever language you prefer to use. It’s very similar to the CompressJPEG module which has shipped since RISC OS 3.60, so much so that Paint has also gained the ability to save out as JPEG via that same approach.

Posted in New component, Community | 5 comments

Going round in circles, quickly

Posted by Steve Revill Sat, 10 Jul 2021 11:15:00 GMT

There are a few areas where the potential for speed-ups are huge yet to date RISC OS has been unable to harness them. One such area is where the more complicated floating point mathematical operations are used, like sine and cosine, rather than simple add/subtract/multiply/divide – but that has all changed in our nightly RISC OS 5 ROMs from July 2021 onwards.

Posted in New component, Community | 8 comments