Latest news

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 Press coverage, Miscellaneous, Community | 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 Community, New component | 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 Community, New component | 8 comments

Bounties earn 10 year merit badge but want 3 more

Posted by Steve Revill Sun, 25 Apr 2021 19:31:00 GMT

It’s hard to believe, but the RISC OS Open bounty scheme was launched in ten years ago and in that time has delivered £39,249.91 of improvements to the OS, with a further £13,990.72 currently work in progress.

How does it all work in practice?

You can see how we select bounties and what the current status of those running are at any time by clicking on the ‘More information’ link beneath the totaliser.

Each of the currently active bounties also include an overview of what they are trying to achieve, as well as a guide target amount. The target is based on costing a rough project plan as a way of comparing one with another; so a high target is more work than a low one, rather than a guarantee that a developer claims it the moment it reaches 100%.

Posted in Community, Miscellaneous | no comments