PD World
Paul Brett with the latest PD roundup.
New, and updated, versions of RISC OS public domain and freeware titles are continuing to appear all the time, everything featured this month has been released since the last issue of RISC World went to press. Looking over this issues collection of the new and the good does seem to reveal a bias towards graphics applications. There are some very exciting developments in the free software field at present, perhaps we will be able to reveal more in the next issue. In the mean time this issues new releases are as follows.
CamPins - Stuart Halliday
If you double click on one of these TaskObey script files in the CamPins directory your computer tries to download an image from a site on the Internet and then places this image onto your Pinboard as a Sprite. Some of these scripts grab an image from a webcam site. Some of these scripts grab an html page first and then download an image referred to by that page. CamPins uses ChangeFSI to convert any images it finds into RISC OS sprites. You will need to follow the instructions supplied inside the CamPins archive to install the software.
Chromax - J. David Barrow
!Chromax is designed to map any tint sequence to any other tint sequence in all 8-bit (256-colour) sprites. The sprite needs to have either a standard 256 colour pallete, or no pallete at all. Chromax's main use is for creating colour variations on sets of icons. It can be very useful when making graphics for web sites as you can easily alter the colours of all the sprites used.
Chromax
Delerium - Kulture
Delirium is a highly configurable screen saver with Demo-style effects. It has been designed to get the most out of high spec computers, and so a StrongARM RISCPC with VRAM is recommended. It won't run on anything less than an A7000, so don't even try it! To install, simply drag the enclosed !Delirium somewhere nice. Once run, you can click on 'help' in the Delirium icon menu for further information.
Delerium
Director - Director Developers
Director is a general purpose desktop tool. It allows you to customise your desktop by creating menus of useful commands and icons to attach the menus to. Any number of menus or icons can be created and attached in any order to each other. Director also allows an alternative and faster view onto files in the form of directory menus and allows these menus to be attached to other menus. Director has some other useful features such as remembering the most recently used files, the ability to add key strokes into the keyboard buffer and the ability to produce directory menus over drive icons.
Director
GraphDraw - Chris Johnson
One of the most popular RISC OS applications from the last few years has a new version, and so we are including it here. For those who don't know GraphDraw allows you to produce graphs from x,y data. The resulting graph can be saved as a draw file, or printed out using the RISC OS printer drivers.
JClean - J. David Barrow
!Jclean is a desktop front end (or interface) for the Independant JPEG Group utilities 'jpegtran' and 'wrjpgcom'. It allows all operations available from these utilities to be performed by clicking and drag-and-drop rather than having to resort to the command line. Click SELECT on the icon bar icon to open up the Jclean options window. This lets you select the operations that will be performed on the JPEGs when you drop them on the icon bar icon or on the !Jclean icon showing in the options window. Clicking ADJUST on the icon bar icon will close the Jclean options window.
JClean
Jess - J. David Barrow
!Jess is designed to extract JPEGs from Windows ScreenSavers where a sequence of incomplete JPEGs rely on a common set of Quantization and Huffman tables preceding the JPEGs. !Jess will also extract multiple complete JPEGs embedded in other files, such as Drawfiles. It will also convert Exif format JPEG files (e.g. created by some digital cameras) which contain an embedded thumbnail JPEG to two separate JFIF format JPEG files. It will also extract multiple JPEGs embedded as comment segments within other JPEGs.
LAME - Various
LAME is a command-line program which encodes digital audio into the lossy compression format known as "MP3". See the standard documentation that comes with it for more details. Just copy the LAME binary into your library directory. This is usually: !Boot.library. Also ensure the 'Next' slot in the task manager is at least 1800K. LAME needs around 1.8MB of memory free to run. Or more to be on the safe side. The ARM7500FE version is intended for RISCStations and the StrongARM binary is for StrongARM RISC PCs. The StrongARM version will not work on ARM 710 and older, as it uses StrongARM-only 64-bit multiplies.
PDF - Colin Granville, Leo Smiers & Derek Noonburg
An updated version of the RISC OS PDF (Portable Document Format) viewer. This allows a RISC OS machine to read files created using Adobe Acrobat. Increasingly a lot of documentation is supplied in this format as it allows for a high degree of compression. This version requires the RISC OS toolbox modules.
That's all we have time for this issue, as usual if you have any PD, Freeware or Shareware applications you would like featured why not get in touch with the Paul Brett