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Letters Page

Back into the ITU, it's the RISCWorld letters page...

After a surprise recovery last issue the letters page has taken a turn for the worse and has had to to go back onto an intravenous drip. So lets see what letters we have actually received...

Hi RISCWorldlings,
Greetings from planet Earth (or Mud World as we don't call it)! Got an upgrade for UniPrint recently, installed it carefully as per the instructs and hey wow, I do like the application launcher! Now I can choose if I look at a PDF or Word file using windows or EasiWriter etc. With the previous version I'd disabled that facility as it wasn't very convenient to have every word doc automatically passed over to Windows. So what? Well, since I've been using Virtual RiscPC on my Windows laptop, I've had the "MY Documents" folder appear as a disk drive so I can easily swap between Windows and VRPC, for example I can download pages using Firefox,then edit them etc from VRPC. Silly me, after installing UniPrint 2.02 I tried out the application launcher, and found it to be 'intermittent'. So I re-installed it, same problem, it wasn't until the next day that I realised that, IT ONLY LAUNCHES STUFF THAT'S ON THE 'REAL' HARD DISK! Should be obvious really, except that it gives the message "The file has been launched and should be opened shortly on your PC desktop" even when it hasn't! It works OK for the CD but not for the USB floppy. Fair enough, so if anyone else out there is as daft as me, now you know. I haven't told R-Comp about this because I don't want to look like an idiot . . . maybe I shouldn't be telling you either. On the subject of R-Comp, isn't it nice to be recognised and have your enquiry dealt with by the boss? You don't get that with Microsoft! "Hey Bill, this software's crap." "Oh hello Lol, yes, I'm sorry, but I've been a bit busy recently working as a Kermit the Frog impersonator . . . " Bye bye from Mud World
Laurence Simmonds

UniPrint is a very useful program and one I often recommend to VirtualAcorn users as it allows the use of any Windows printer. I'm not sure what you mean about an application launcher, UniPrint comes with a file launcher that allows you to load a file under Windows. You might find that the file launcher only works when the file you are trying to launch is on the same drive as your scrap folder. You may be interested to know that HostFS also supports a command for opening files under Windows from inside RISC OS. You can find more details on this in the VirtualAcorn article in this issue.

As for having your enquiry dealt with by the boss, you are right, it's great and you are right, you don't get that from Microsoft, because Microsoft has enough money to employ people to answer the phones! If you think about the average RISC OS company might consist of 4 people, so you have a 1 in 4 chance of speaking to the boss on your first attempt. Microsoft employs tens of thousands of people, so even assuming Bill Gates answered his own phone the chance of getting him on the line is very very small.

Ane now it's cock up corner once again...

Dear Aaron
It would appear some gremlins have got into this months Iyonix column ! After the bit about Geminus, the Spelling website URL should be there, instead it starts with my Z80 request which is all in underlined red text!
What happened and how did it get missed? As it looks terrible! I have checked my original article and it is all the as it should be.
Also the www.pledgebank.com doesn't appear as a highlighted URL when it should have done.
Another thing that's gone wrong is in the bit about new Castle phone numbers the word 'Target' is there , where did that come from?
Also in the 4D adventure games review bit instead of the APDL website URL there is the last sentence of the article in red highlight!
Something has gone a bit wrong this month - any ideas what ? the articles looked fine when I sent them!
Matt Thompson

I can only apologise, a closing quote got missed out from a link and caused chaos. The problem only shows in some browsers, if you try looking at the article in Browse, for example, then it all comes out fine. Normally we check each article in a range of browsers to make sure that they are OK. Somehow this one got missed out hence the problem. It has been corrected for the end of year compilation in this issue.