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• Latest Intel chips still can't match ARM for power saving - Intel issued a "correction" Thursday regarding comments one of its executives made earlier this week slamming the iPhone as incapable of working correctly with the internet.
  Among other things, the executives accused ARM chips of being unable to "handle the internet" and singled out the iPhone as an example of a smart phone that could be really great if it used one of Intel's low-power x86 architecture processors, known as Atom.
• Major new RISC OS application in development - Long-term RISC OS devotee Paul Vigay has recently announced a new application he's currently working on. With a development version to be demonstrated at the forthcoming RISC OS SE Show, WebAnim8r is a powerful and comprehensive application for creating animations and graphics suitable for including on websites and presentations.
  A flexible built-in scripting language allows the user to create complex designs with the aid of simple keywords, or fall back on the intuitive user interface.

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Drobe

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• Interesting new Application Launcher for RISC OS - There is a new twitter user called @RISCOSOnGitHub which is showing some very interesting developments for RISC OS.
• No October Rougol talk on monday - There is no longer a meeting on Monday 18th October, as had previously been advertised. So you have the night off if you were planning to attend.
• Rougol London Shows returns this month - The long-running London Show is back in person after a couple of years being online only. It is running 11am - 5pm and tickets remain a pre-Covid fiver on the door (free to under 16s).
• CodeCraft #4 voting open - The submission period for the CodeCraft #4 demo coding competition has now closed, which means now comes the part that every one can get involved with: Voting!
• PinBoard 2.0 reaches Alpha9 - The replacement PinBoard module (designed to be a backwards compatible repalacement for the existing module but also add lots of new features) has now reached version alpha9. I have been running previous versions on my Titanium for some time, so updated to the latest version.

MyRISCOS

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RISC OS Open

• ROOL recognised in annual RISC OS awards - All of us at RISC OS Open are very proud and thankful to everyone who voted in the RISC OS Awards. In keeping with the delay of a year to these awards, its taken us a while to spot the fact we’d actually been both nominated and had some success!Thanks also to Vince Hudd / Soft Rock Software for organising this event.ROOL’s resultsBest new developmentAnd the winner, with 44% of the vote, is: RISC OS 5.28, from RISC OS Open Ltd and contributors.
• Ping! Another one fully cooked - Portable Network Graphics, with file extension PNG and often pronounced Ping, is a common bitmap graphics format which offers lossless compression for faster transfer over the internet. PNG sits somewhere between Sprite, which is uncompressed, and JPEG used for photos, which uses lossy compression (throwing some information away) to shrink the file even smaller.What do we gain?There are two aspects to the new PNG support:Being able to save directly from Paint as a PNG graphicBeing able to convert anything ChangeFSI can open and write it out as a PNG graphicUnderneath this there’s a new support module, called CompressPNG, which does the real work and which other applications will be able to make use of.If you are a developer and you’d like to add PNG export to one of your own applications it’s simply a case of making a few system calls from whatever language you prefer to use. It’s very similar to the CompressJPEG module which has shipped since RISC OS 3.60, so much so that Paint has also gained the ability to save out as JPEG via that same approach.
• Going round in circles, quickly - There are a few areas where the potential for speed-ups are huge yet to date RISC OS has been unable to harness them. One such area is where the more complicated floating point mathematical operations are used, like sine and cosine, rather than simple add/subtract/multiply/divide – but that has all changed in our nightly RISC OS 5 ROMs from July 2021 onwards.
• Bounties earn 10 year merit badge but want 3 more - It’s hard to believe, but the RISC OS Open bounty scheme was launched in ten years ago and in that time has delivered £39,249.91 of improvements to the OS, with a further £13,990.72 currently work in progress.How does it all work in practice?You can see how we select bounties and what the current status of those running are at any time by clicking on the ‘More information’ link beneath the totaliser.Each of the currently active bounties also include an overview of what they are trying to achieve, as well as a guide target amount. The target is based on costing a rough project plan as a way of comparing one with another; so a high target is more work than a low one, rather than a guarantee that a developer claims it the moment it reaches 100%.
• ObjAsm becomes self-aware in latest DDE update - The assembler tool, one of the cornerstones of the Desktop Development Environment (DDE), has taken on a life of its own in the latest update which was made available to eligible developers today. The main changes include:The addition of support for instructions from ARMv8.0 to the very latest ARMv8.6Support for the IEEE half-precision floating point instructions in the VFP instruction setA new data type for BFloat16More thorough rules checking around ‘IT’ blocksA number of bug fixes and improvements to warning and error textThe table of known CPUs to target has been updated, right up to the Cortex-X1Extra built-in variables to allow conditional assembly for a given target