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Email: Private ICQ: AOL: Yahoo:	Username: joty Realname: John Tytgat About me: Homepage: Face/Logo: Comments posted: 51 (show all)

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On RISC OS 5 pictured running on ARM Cortex-A8 kit:

> I guess DHCP is the major features that makes RISC OS 5 a real upgrade for RISC OS 4.0x users. Point taken. I forgot we didn't had this in this about 10 year old OS. But for those RISC OS 4.0x users needing DHCP, spend 20 pound at ROL online shop and this problem is solved. > The large application memory slot feature might be a big advantage if you are running a 256 MB Risc PC and suffer from DA clamp/high bit DA problems. Aren't those high bit DA problems ironed out by now ? And if DA using software is not fixed for those problems, then on a 32bit OS they are equally buggy. > I agree however that - at the moment - there is very little real, user-facing advantage for Select/RISC OS Six users. However, people actually paid for an upgrade from 4.39 to RISC OS Six despite the lack of real, user-facing advantages... Repeating this statement doesn't make it any true. I don't think you're trolling but truly mistaken. Direct visible user features are things like filer shortcuts, filer thumbnailing, significant upgrades to the core RO applications like Draw and Paint, 64K colour mode (twice that many colours for the same VRAM usage), transparency support, CIELab, CMYK sprite support, better JPEG support (more variants), well integrated graphics card support (better than what the original Viewfinder could do), submenus which are no longer obstructing each other but sliding away, more user friendly system configuration tools, ... and I probably am doing injustice by only summing this up and leaving out the 101 smaller things done. These are perhaps not enough or well communicated by ROL themselves at [link] but very recently being written on here at this very same website. You missed it ? Ever wondered why emulation users want RISC OS 4 and even RISC OS 6 ? I don't think I saw an end-user wanting to emulate RISC OS 5. And as developer or technically interested person, when you look under hood of RISC OS 6, you see a much cleaner design by modularization, richer API (unfortunate underused) and a much more interesting grow path for development than RISC OS 5 currently is. > I also don't buy the QA argument. The changes people submitted for RO 5 so far are surely of similar quality than ROLs changes after the 4.39 release. I think that's a reasonable assumption but not my point. Who's going to do QA or shall we just hope for the best ? Note that there are RO5 specific bugs which are not present in RO 4 nor 6 and this is based on ROOL's bugs db. From my own experience I can tell that RO5's FontManager does have regressions against RO4 one and I'm not talking about Unicode support. And being a little bit aware of the amount of bugs fixed in RO4 and 6 I believe RO5 has a big catchup to do in this area. > The big advantage RISC OS 5 has is of course its ultimate cheapness. I'm sure you didn't mean this but in Dutch 'cheapness' has a 2nd meaning which is not positive at all. > You are not sure if you want to replace your trusted RISC OS 4.02 with RISC OS 5.xx? No problem, it is softloaded, and if it does not work as expected, you always have a safe fallback. Compare that to the 4.39 upgrade which some people had to rip out again because of severe problems. I'm not sure which problems you're referring to (not FUD I hope) but if so, one could equally softload RISC OS 6.16 or any newer RISC OS 6 version in case of those so called problems. > I also cannot see the validity of the "burden for developers" argument. Currently, the biggest burden for developers is the rather expensive and sometimes incompatible RISC OS Six branch of the OS. Incompatible with what ? Is there a reference ? I've seen several of those 'incompatible report' being later analyzed as in fact buggy programs. E.g. when an application is wrongly writing to address 0 this will be faulted in RISC OS 6. From user POV, this might be perceived as an OS being less stable, but when you really look at the facts, using RISC OS 6 results in a more stable end result because otherwise the whole system might be taken out if we leave this buggy program further running. Or is RISC OS 6 so called incompatible because it has richer sprite and JEPG support which RISC OS 5 does not support ? Reversibly the argument can be hold for the Unicode FontManager support. It is just a feature difference. > A free RISC OS 5 variant for RISC OS 3.7 users would actually reduce the developer's burden. Really ? I'm not sure if we have significant number of active 3.7 users but I'm sure a RISC OS 4.0x upgrade instead will not increasing the variants a developer needs to consider. BTW, on a 32bit RISC OS 5 RPC how will all 26bit podule software suddenly work ? Who's going to fix that (assuming those podules have flash) ? Or will it be a 26bit RISC OS 5 RPC version ? How will the Viewfinder ever work ? Ask JK ? Or hope the current driver software will work as is ? Unless major things happen beyond what I consider realistic, I don't think RISC OS 5 on hardware like RPC is solving anything for the end-user and I believe it to be disruptive for the very fragile RISC OS market we have right now. joty on 26/4/09 5:15PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On RISC OS 5 pictured running on ARM Cortex-A8 kit:

> It's a big upgrade for anyone running RISC OS 4.02 or below Apart from Unicode FontManager support (which, so far, only one mainstream program is using when it is available), what makes the upgrade "big" ? > It's fully 32 bit so the 28 MB application slot limit is removed Not sure what real end-user difference this makes but most, if not all, memory hungry applications can happily use DAs these days. And as soon as you're running the Aemulor, the 28MB application slot limit is back. > Old 26-bit applications can be run with Aemulor (which is free) Free? Ahem. > Most software is 32 bit now anyway Which happily run on non-RISC OS 5 versions as well, so ? > You can have the same OS across your RiscPC and IYONIX (in the case where you own both) Eh, yes? And what advantage would that be ? Today RPC, VRPC and to some extend A9Home already can run the same OS. Hardly an advantage of RISC OS 5. > It's free and future updates are free I think this is the first time I see this long time promise. Does this mean Castle will never ask a fee when you distribute a licensed RO 5 under all circumstances ? > If you're a programmer and find a bug, you can get at the source code and fix it yourself We don't need to have RO 5 running for that. I suppose cherry picking could be an option as well. > There is a bugs database and active forum at www.riscosopen.org where you can discuss any issues if you want There is a similar forum for Select users as well. And I suppose the ROOL bugs database can be used to log bugs of all RISC OS versions, which incidentally would be great to track which fixes have been made in which RISC OS versions. TBH I don't see many user convincing arguments here for replacing RISC OS 4 or RISC OS 6 by RISC OS 5. As developer I can see some potential excitement to do this kind of development, but this does not have a chance for ending up with a clean & reasonably QA'd OS version which end-users can comfortably install and use. And it puts a further burden on the few RISC OS developers which see their product being deployed on yet another variant of RISC OS which need testing and supporting. joty on 26/4/09 12:51PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On RISC OS Firefox port in bug fix update:

To put your comment in perspective: I've seen crashes myself when Firefox autocomplete code of fill-in fields gets used but I never could pinpoint the real problem. joty on 4/1/09 12:44PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On GCC 4.1.1 port first release available:

We can certainly help you further on the gcc mailing list [link] . joty on 1/1/09 2:57PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Voting now open for the Drobe Awards 2008:

The "RISC OS eXperience 2008" show link points to our RISCOS.be website (Belgian RISC OS users) and although we were present there as one of the stand-holders, the show was in fact (excellently) organized by the Dutch Big Ben Club. joty on 22/12/08 8:48PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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