Just some of the comments we have had from our large membership base.
ANS really is going from strength to strength as the weeks go by. BUT, this
is not only due to our hard work, but also to the generosity and helpfulness
of members. This includes personal members, and companies. Our membership
has increased by over 35% in the last two weeks alone!
We are pleased to announce that the small comment in last issues editorial
really is showing some major signs of progress. This is the comment of a
large competition I mentioned. In 48 hours after e-mailing companies,
they had donated over 400 UKP worth of products!! This competition is
promising to be one of the largest you have seen in the Acorn world! And,
current ANS members will all be informed as soon as it starts, by a posting
through the list server. Watch this space. The proposed start is in the
next two weeks, with the competition lasting about 4 weeks.
I must stress that Richard has pointed out that a large proportion of people
are still coming to the ANS site through our old "digicron" and "virgin"
addresses. If you have these bookmarked, please use our "acornusers" address
directly instead. Please check you site links on your webpages as well. ò0
This fuss is due to the fact that there is no guarantee on how long these old
address will stay active, and we do not want people to get used to using
them. Thank You.
I must personally thank Paul of Archive magazine. He has been sending a
large proportion of people to our site, through his "ncs" site, as well as
his new Archive magazine website, which you can find at:
http://www.archivemag.co.uk.
Archive magazine is well worth subscribing to.
Thank you to all the companies who have recently joined ANS, as well as all
those who have been generous enough to join us in our unique competition,
soon to be announced!
Don't forget that the current banner exchange competition ends on 27 July.
Please keep sending in those news items. All news items are appreciated.
Clubs are reminded especially of the need to send in news items well before
their next meetings. This will ensure that it gets into the correct issue of
ANS. Many times it has come to late for the preset issue, and the next issue
is well past the meting date!
For those of you who find errors, please don't tell me! I've done this all
on my new Psion 5, so errors are bound to slip in. Not e-mailed from it,
because the modems are out of stock in Britain. Augh! I know a few errors
slipped in last issue. this was due to me leaving myself and hour and a half
to get it all together!
For those of you who do not read editorials, which I must admit are
sometimes quite boring, you've missed a load of great information! For those
of you who did, thanks! (humm...really makes sense!)
Watch out for news of the competition. Until then, enjoy ANS, as well as
your holidays.
Thank You
Eytan Abrahams
Editor
General News
------------
1) Scottish Acorn Computer Show
The 3rd annual Scottish Acorn Computer Show will take place on Sunday the 8th of November 1998 from 10am until 5pm at:
The Glasgow Marriott Hotel,
Argyle Street,
Glasgow.
The main thrust of show will be Phoebe 2100 and NC's.
Exhibitors will be announced as they are confirmed. Watch for news from Acorn and for advertising in the Acorn Press. A web site will be operating with info on the show. find it at:
http://www.tecs.co.uk/sacs/
Anyone wanting more info please mail:
sacs@tecs.co.uk
2) C StrongHelp Manuals Updated
The StrongHelp manuals for Acorn C/C++ by Neil Bingham. have been updated.
'C-Version5' documents data structures and functions in CLib. This includes
all ANSI calls and RiscOS specific functions.
'Toolbox' documents all c functions, data structures and #define statements,
plus details on the SWI interfaces for Basic etc.
Both manuals can be downloaded from:
http://www.binghams.demon.co.uk/stronghelp/
3) FBD website now online
The new Fractal Bonsai Design website is online at:
http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~parm/fbd
4) Acorn Users ICQ list
With the release of an ICQ client for RiscOS, an Acorn Users ICQ list has
been put together. Find it at:
http://the.hypermart.net/acorn/icq/
5) Socketeer users' list created
A Socketeer mailing list, has been set up . The list is for discussion of
problems among users, suggestions, and any other related mail. It has been
set up in response to the fact that a lot of people have been asking me
similar questions.
Anyhow, if you'd like to subscribe, send an email to:
maillist@soup-kitchen.demon.co.uk
with:
SUBSCRIBE sock-l <you@your.email.address>
in the subject line (or UNSUBSCRIBE if you change your mind later).
Commercial News
---------------
1) Ovation Pro list moves
David Pillings Ovation Pro support mailing list has moved. David used to ò0
undertake the task of running this list from his own machine, which I can
tell you from experience, can get tough at times! The list, which has a
substantial membership base, has moved to the same sever as we use. To
subscribe to the list, send an e-mail to:
majordomo@lists.barnet.ac.uk
with the following in the BODY of the message:
subscribe ovationpro
2) BombzII
Wag Software have announced that BombzII has now been released at a special
price of 8ukp until 1st September 1998.
BombzII is a puzzle game for all Acorn machines running RiscOS 3 or better,
and it will run in both TV and VGA modes depending on available hardware.
Included with the game is a full WIMP level designer and import/export tools
so new levels can be easily designed and distributed.
To order a copy, send a cheque/postal order to:
Wag Software
5 Queens Close,
East Markham,
Nr. Newark,
Notts.
NG22 0QY
E-Mail:
richard@wilsontigger.demon.co.uk
3) ESM Computers Updates
ESM have updated their website.
It now includes :
* Phoebe 2100 page
* LG Monitors
* Iiyama Range Extended
* Iiyama Prices Lowered
ESM will be constantly updating the site over the coming weeks, so if you
have any suggestions they would like to here from you.
Due to the amount of work put into this program, it has been made
SHAREWARE.
Junkmail2 is a program for generating complaints about e-mail spam. When you receive an e-mail spam, you can drop it into Junkmail2, which interprets the message header, determines the best person to complain to, and places the complaint in your outgoing
mail queue.
Junkmail2 contains the following improvements over Junkmail v1:-
* Simpler setup
* Suppression of complaints to your own forwarding service
* Domain aliasing service for relaying the spam.
* New improved "domain" algorithm.
* Reduced number of complaint destinations.
* Confidence scores on complaint destinations.
* New Ant transport, which doesn't need its own special templates.
* Configurable maximum size for the quoted message.
* Soft version updates.
* Supports X-Trace:, X-complaints-to:, Sender: and Return-Path: headers.
* Detects web page URLs and possible reply addresses in the message body.
* User entered complaint destination.
* Knows that messages can't really be from hotmail if there's no
X-originating-ip: line.
* Cc: and Bcc: template lines now actually work (except in the SOUP
transport)
* Much wider coverage of numeric IP addresses.
Wow! Real improvements. The first version worked for me fine (normally!) , I
guess the second will be better! (Ed.)
4) armTeX 3.14159 release 3
armTeX release 3 is a new, complete TeX distribution including TeX, LaTeX2e,
Metafont, fonts and more. Carol Carpenter has kindly donated server space at;
http://freenet.barnet.ac.uk/armtex/
and
ftp://freenet.barnet.ac.uk/pub/Acorn/armtex/
The major differences/improvements to Robin Watts' release 2 are:
*) TDS compliancy. (TeX Directory Structure).
*) New, registered filetypes.
*) Support for both paper/tex and paper.tex style filenames.
*) Fully recursive path searching in TeX and Metafont binaries.
armTeX should work on all RISC OS versions (maybe not RISC OS 2) and on
machines with 4MB or more.
5) Deth v0.06
Deth is an editor for Doom I and Doom II wads allowing new levels to be
created and existing levels to be altered. Features include:-
* Drag and drop of vertices, linedefs, Things (objects), etc,
* Textures, flats and Things displayed while editing,
* Texture browser,
* Doors shown in key colours (optional),
* One step undo,
* Error checking,
* Sprite viewer.
Changes since the last announced version (v0.01) include:-
Node building code reinstated from DEU (maps are now rebuilt properly), A5000
support and support for compressed wads (ArmDeu v1.10 or greater required for
compression).
Deth can be downloaded from:-
http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/leenoar/
6) Play Pie Gates!
The Windows game 'Pie Gates' which lets you throw custard pies at the
Microsoft big cheese has recently been converted it to RISC OS.
Get it from:
http://members.tripod.com/~microsloth/
(go to the 'Computing' section, then 'Games')
7) New software from Fraug (The French Acorn User Group)
You can now find a patched version of RMCompare for Risc Os 3.5+ from
Philippe Donsback.
Fraug's WebSite contains more than 2.8 Mo of true software for Risc Os.
Email:
fraug@mygale.org
Web:
http://www.mygale.org/~fraug
8) StrongHelp 2.60
The release version of StrongHelp 2.60 can now be downloaded from:
http://home.eunet.no/~guttorvi/strong.html
The major change in this version is to make it easier to organise multiple
manuals in the !Manuals directory. Instead of just having them as one long
list, you can now organise them in sub directories. This will be reflected in
the StrongHelp root page, and in the way you select manuals to search in the
freetext search window.
StrongHelp has also been given a new set of icons.
There is also a new manual available; StrongHTML.
9) CathlibCPP - Standard C++ Library for Acorn C++
An implementation of the Standard C++ Library for Acorn's CFront is now
available.
CathLibCPP is a C++ library written by Miles Sabin. It aims to:
* Implement the Standard C++ Library as fully as possible with Acorn's
CFront;
* Add a degree of exception handling and runtime type identification
(RTTI) capability to CFront;
* Reduce the amount of code "bloat" caused by the Standard Template
Library (STL).
Miles Sabin is no longer programming for RISC OS, and has kindly
allowed CathLibCPP to be released more or less "as is" on the condition that
he is not asked for any help. It may be freely used and copied providing
suitable copyright messages are included in all copies. Full details of the
conditions of use are included in the documentation.
CathLibCPP should be used in conjunction with Acorn's C++ compiler (C release
5), Jonathan Coxhead's OSLib (release 5.1), and David Daniels's Drlink
(version 0.34 included).
The Acorn C User Group have kindly hosted the CathLibCPP distribution, which
is available for download from:
http://www.accu.org/acornsig/public/cathlib/
Please contact:
alex@thouky.tcp.co.uk>
with any comments or questions.
10) !NumberFix 0.11
Certain programs, Spacetech's !Photolink is one of them, output files
numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ..... 10, 11 and so on. Often one deletes some of
the files and wants to renumber the sequence.
Sometimes one wants to insert sprites at the beginning. To do this one has torenumber all the files to, for example, 31, 32, 33, 34. Often one wants to add extensions to the files, i.e. 12/jpeg.
One might even want to call them Hol_12/jpg were 12 is the number of the
file.
When files are called 1, 2,3,4, 10, 12, the filer will list them
alphabetically and 10 is in front of 2 and 3. This can only be fixed by
renaming all single cipher numbers to 01, 02, 03 etc.
All these operations have one thing in common - they are a pain in the neck.
NumberFix was written to ease this neck pain considerably. It will do all the
above operations with a click of the mouse.
The program is shareware and for the moment, relies on informed use.
Download it from:
http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/tudor
Club News
---------
1) New Scottish User Groups
Robert Todd is interested in creating a Scottish User group. All interested
parties should contact him at:
info@tecs.co.uk
2) News from ARMada
Web page of the ARMada's French mailing list:
http://www.liste.armada-fr.net
How to Send in News
-------------------
To send in your news items, simply include the following information, and
