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RISC World

Iyonix Issues

Matt Thompson

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Unfortunately there is very little going on at the moment in the world of RISC OS, which means there is not much to write about, hopefully this is just a slow couple of months over the summer and there will be many new releases and announcements later on in the year.

!AMPlay

AMPlay is a desktop player which allows you to play MP3 music files on RISC OS, it uses the AMplayer module to do this. AMPlay has been around for a while now but has had some recent updates. The current version is V2.03 (30th May 2008) which is a minor update from the recently released V2.02.

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AMPlay main window

Changes in this new version include a redesigned main window and sprite set, to provide larger icons, and to reduce the risk of mis-clicking. This redesigned skin is now the default, the previous skin is still supplied with AMPlay as 'Small Blue'. As well as having larger buttons, the new default skin has the artist, album and track rows the opposite way round to the way they were previously. The new skin has artist above album above track, and uses the track field to display AMPlay messages.

Other changes include corrections to the routines that calculated when to scroll text in the track, album or artist fields. Previously it was roughly right by accident for the default skin, but noticeably wrong for others. Clicking on the progress bar to set the position within the track now works properly in all cases, rather than only when the window is against the left edge of the screen. Custom buttons of type 'Other Application' now display the correct icon. There have been numerous other changes and improvements, including:

  • The "Locating..." message is now "Locating (to x:xx of y:yy)", where x:xx is the target time, and y:yy is the total duration of the track.
  • Skins can now specify which field should be used for displaying AMPlay messages.
  • Fixed bug with the goto menu for albums by the current artist. In some cases, only the first album was being displayed.
  • Very large total durations are now displayed correctly on the database statistics window. The limit is now 2^31 seconds (roughly 68 years), rather than 2^31 centiseconds (roughly 250 days).
  • Skin settings now have a pane in the options all to themselves.
  • Skin previews and descriptions are now available (the skin has to provide these)
  • When run manually, or from AMPlay, AMPlayCfg now remembers its window position, and which pane was selected.
  • When run from Configure, AMPlayCfg opens under the mouse pointer, (as recommended by the Style Guide).

AMPlay is a nice little desktop MP3 player which is well worth getting hold of if you play MP3s on your RISC OS machine, there are many configuration options available so you can customise the program to your requirements.The accompanying documentation provides a lot of information about the program and is well worth reading. AMPlay is freeware and can be downloaded from www.mikejs.com/riscos/amplay.html.

!PDF

This is not a brand new release but an update from last year that I managed to miss. I have been using V3.00.1.18 and I didn't realise until recently that there had been an update to PDF, so I thought I would mention it just in case anyone else had also missed it.

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Front Cover of the Iyonix Manual

The new version is V3.1.19 and whilst there isn't that much different in this new release, there are a few changes such as text export and searching now using the correct Acorn Latin1 character encoding. The source code is also now included for those that fancy making their own improvements.

PDF is a freeware program and it can be downloaded from www.pdf.iconbar.com. As usual a copy is also included in the software directory on this issue.

RISC OS Open

On the RISC OS Open website there are now a number of new versions of the supplied Acorn/RISC OS applications available for download, clicking on http://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads will take you to the download page and then the programs are divided up into a number of different categories:

  • Desktop applications.
  • Desktop diversions.
  • Boot sequence related.
  • Relocatable modules.
  • Other items.

There are now new versions available of the following:

Desktop applications

  • Maestro V1.91
  • Sampler V0.01
  • Squash V0.50
  • Chars V1.21
  • Edit V1.64
  • ChangeFSI V1.25
  • CloseUp V3.14
  • Draw V1.14
  • MakeModes V0.28
  • Paint V2.00
  • T1toFont V1.30
  • Help V3.14
  • Browse V2.14
  • Webserve V0.01
  • FontPrint V1.28
  • PrintEdit V0.49
  • Printers V1.74
  • ResCreate V0.06
  • ResEd V0.51
  • ResTest V0.74
  • SciCalc V0.58
  • SrcEdit V1.25
  • Alarm V2.76
  • TTxtView V0.15

Desktop Diversions

  • Blocks V0.13
  • Clock V0.01
  • Flasher V1.07
  • MemNow V0.04
  • MineHunt V0.01
  • Patience V0.68
  • Puzzle V1.04

Boot Sequence - Configure

  • BootSetup V0.04
  • Configure V2.02
  • DiscSetup V0.06
  • FlrSetup V0.12
  • FontSetUP V0.08
  • HelpSetup V0.06
  • KdbSetUp V0.13
  • LockSetUp V0.06
  • MousSetup V0.10
  • PinSetUp V0.13
  • ScrnSetup V0.12
  • SndSetUp V2.00
  • SysMerge V2.03
  • WindSetup V0.10

Resources

  • PrintDefs V0.46

Screen Savers

  • Acornlogo V0.02
  • Circles V0.03
  • Pogo V0.02
  • ScrBounce V0.02
  • Scrolling V0.05
  • Slider V0.02
  • Smear V0.02
  • Swarm V0.02

Relocatable Modules and Other items are marked as "Coming Soon" so check the website to see these items, as and when, they become available. It should be noted that all of these components are of Beta quality and are completely untested, so don't be surprised if they fail to work correctly. Hopefully over time these components will be incorporated into a new RISC OS 5 ROM for the Iyonix, but I am not holding my breath. As a note having played around with a few of these there doesn't seem to have been a huge amount of work done on them. Some of the applications still have copyright messages for Acorn Computers and some are dated back as far as ten years ago.

You might find something useful here and so I have included a full set of components downloaded on the 8th of July 2008 in the Software directory on this issue.

PCL printer dumper source code

RISC OS Open recently announced the availability of a new printer dumper for RISC OS. PDumperPCL has been contributed by Herbert zur Nedden and based upon PDumperLJ, this is a dumper designed for PCL printers that support duplex printing, such as the Canon i-Sensys MF4690PL. At the moment this is a source code only release. For more information and the source code see the following web page http://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2008/06/06/pcl-printer-dumper-source-code.

Signing off

And so we reach the end of a rather shorter than normal Iyonix column. I am sure that there will be more to talk about next time. As ever if there is anything you would like to see included, any help requests,hints & tips, product placement, feel free to drop the Iyonix column an email at iyonix@riscos.org.

Matt Thompson

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