Some interesting newsbits from the RISC OS world in the last few days. First of all, “Drobe webmaster Ian Hawkins has unveiled The RISC OS File Repository, an online software database for RISC OS software.” Secondly, “Castle has updated their range of RISC OS 5, XScale powered Iyonix computers, with the addition of a Aria Cube and X300 series of cases.” And lastly, the A9 takes priority.
Why do RISC OS ppl do this?
There are many software database lists on the web for RISC OS users. But they all fall into disuse because no one bothers keeping them up to date.
Why will this one be any different?
Even Nutshell which was based lossely on Wiki, could be edited by anyone. But it lacked the ability to make your own groups. So it soon fell into disuse.
Nutshell had the potential to be great. It had a simple program you could run on your computer which would perform a web search on their site to list a program the user wanted.
Great! A user wanting to know where to get a piece of software can look it via its name.
The trouble is, most of us don’t know that vital piece of information.
So Nutshell failed due to it not having a decent keyword lookup database IMHO.
Software on these types of sites should be listed in order of what it can do rather than they all do just now.
So that the person wanting to make a GIF file for example, can get a list of software that can do this.
If I need to crop a photo image, I don’t know what it is called so most of these databases can’t help me.
Likewise if a user has a problem with their harddrive and wants to check it for errors. They quite often don’t know what the name of the program is or which group it lies in. So why not have a category for FAQs?
Its amazing the number of users who don’t visit USENET or Google…
I think RISC OS would be so much more useful if every user had a program in the Apps resources that enabled them to quickly type in a query and get via the Internet a decent answer to software and maintenance querys.
It looks like the ‘The RISC OS File Repository’ isn’t doing anything new to help in this area and is just doing what all the other failed RISC OS software databases did. Perhaps the author of site would like to correct me?
One glimmer of hope is that this site uses XML, so someone could write a program that looks at the version number of a program in my computer and compares it to the one on the web via this XML lookup and then offers to download it?
But at present the site doesn’t list which version of the OS the application is valid for.
Nice try lads. But I can’t see it being used 2 years from now.
If RiscOS fans can’t find a decent software respository, maybe someone wants to contact Eugenia and fund her cloning Gnomefiles for RiscOS. I’ve only done surface coding with Gnomefiles so I’m not sure how much work it would take to port the entire thing to support it, but I KNOW it could be done.
On top of that, we’ve been working to optimize Gnomefiles performance lately and it seems to be hanging in there pretty well.
The difference with this repository is that it is 99% automatic when it finds and indexes new software. The way RISC OS applications are structured makes this extremely easy to do, requiring only minor work to categorize them.
There’s over 10,000 Applications in the database so far. All of them are downloaded – *NONE* of them have broken links. This is another differene between prowl.org and previous efforts.
Also, we’re going at this like we go at news articles on drobe. We *will* be the best out there.
10,000? I only count 60 from the catagories on the left…
I think the difference is between the number of programs the spider has found (currently 10020) and the number that have been categorized by a human (only around 200 odd now).
You can click on the “Categorize” link to see some of those that still need information adding.
Its a shame it is such an expensive platform to get into. To bad it wasn’t a little more open.
If you’re buying new gear, then it starts at about 500 UKP, so a bit pricey compared to PC & Mac, but second hand, you can get something decent for sub 100 UKP like a RiscPC.
Are there any RiscOS-based Hardware distributors in the good ol’ USA?
Not as far as I’m aware (with the vast majority of RISC OS development being based in the UK). However, all of the major companies involved will ship to the US to my knowledge.