“RISCOS Ltd gets fired at from all sides, it seems. There are those who have RISC OS 5 and are fed up with RISCOS Ltd saying: “Yes, we want to do RISC OS Select on Iyonix, but…” Then there are those who have subscribed to ROL’s Select scheme, but the features they want have not been implemented or they are frustrated by a lack of progress. It is fair to say ROL has made a large number of improvements to the OS over the years and many of these are ‘under the hood’ that are not always immediately obvious to users. There have been a few obvious user-facing improvements since the release of RISC OS 6, as part of Select 5, so let’s take a look at these.”
The new wave of ARM based netbooks should run RiscOS.
I remember Acorn A3000 machine booting to a usable desktop within 2 seconds. A ROM based OS would be great for simple netbook use and protected from OS corruption/viruses …
RiscOS has usable browsers and some common apps have been ported to it.
Or a ROM based operating system where one can update it but can only be done through going into a firmware configuration menu driven interface – software isn’t bug free and will require updates as required. Coupled with a either a flash or traditional hard disk where all the user files can be stored – it would be awesome.
What RISCOS would need is Flash, WMV, WMA, h264, AAC and other formats supported out of the box. If an end user can sit down and navigate websites without having to worry about installing plugins or codecs – and there are simple note taking word processor; sell it at a cheap price, it would fly off the shelves. Heck, I’d be happy to purchase one
What would be the advantage of RISCOS over linux? Linux already works on more hardware, and supports more software and is cheaper and more free.
It seems to me that they are not exactly aiming for the mainstream user, but more of a niche, which doesn´t necessarily need all these fancy multimedia features.
If they where to aim for the mainstream, i would agree that it would be a necessity to include support for that. I think many would agree that when introducing a non’dows OS to any regular user, the first showstopper is always that it of course can´t to the most common things like printing and viewing youtube
But then again, focusing on the mainstream consumer would also include them changing a lot more in so many other aspects of their bussiness.
I’m a bit divided on the window textures.
On the one hand, all it needs is an animated woodpecker opening a letter-box and it would be someone’s personal website from 1995. On the other hand, it’s completely unique to RiscOS and I have a sneaking affection for it.
It’s what RISC OS is, Stoney. Like XP is like something from Fisher Price, and OS X is, well like OS X.
Out of the two RISC OS Streams, Version 5 in my opinion looks the most attractive, there’s an article on it here: http://home.freeuk.com/richardhallas/iyonix/
And like most OS’s these days you can always theme them:
http://www.drobe.co.uk/article.php?id=2237
Well, at least that guy’s ‘homepage’ matches the outdated feel of RISC. Was the guy who did the timecube’s design unavailable?
The use of textures & gradients in UI elements is something that has always made me cringe when looking at RiscOS (and Amiga OS) screenshots. Reminds me of the fake wood-grain panels on 70s station wagons.
That’s one of the reason why the UIs of NextSTEP, MacOS 8/9 and BeOS still (IMO) stand up well today – the designers adhered to the “KISS” principle. Rather than trying to use their UI as a tech demo for the capabilities of the window manager.
Use of italic fonts everywhere throughout the system definitely looks unprofessional and causes eye strain.
Italic means emphasis and now suddenly every single important and not important word is emphasized and your head runs astray.
Edited 2009-04-22 16:02 UTC
makes you wonder how heavily slanted actual italics are.
That is a customisation by the guy who wrote the article. No company in their right mind would use an Italic font across the whole desktop.
“makes you wonder how heavily slanted actual italics are.”
That is the font using italics!
Edited 2009-04-22 18:37 UTC