Technology news and views http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1209.html A bit later than I was hoping, but nevertheless it's now time for Building the Dream 2. This time I'll be looking at the RISC OS sound system - everything from the terminology used, to what makes a sound, how the RISC OS sound system works, and how you can write your own sample player. http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1171.html http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1166.html Well it's that time of year again. It hardly seems like a full year since we last wished all our readers a very Merry Christmas. Yet again, most of you are probably too busy downing the bottle of whatever-it-is that you found in the back of the cupboard, and stuffing yourself with mince pies to notice this post, but I'm still going to say it anyway. http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1165.html A guilty secret: limited though they were, I used to love working with early Palm and Psion PDAs. Neal Stephonson wrote in his novel Cryptonomicon... http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1164.html Parmesan is a new client for the popular MSN Messenger network, developed by Christian Ludlam. Released as freeware, the software brings new features to instant messaging on RISC OS. Chief among these are display pictures and nudges. The software also doubles as a versatile viewer for arbitrary XML files. http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1162.html Hello and welcome to the Building the Dream, a new series of (regular!) articles at The Icon Bar in which I will be educating you in how to turn your programming dreams into reality. First off, let's get one thing clear - this isn't a beginner's course to programming, or a tutorial in a specific language. http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1163.html Hugh Robinson has contacted us to let us know that he's converted classic Acorn platformer Asylum to C, using the SDL library. With full support of original author Andy Southgate, Hugh's source code has now been released under the GPL, and is available to download from the SVN repository on the SourceForge project page. http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1161.html What a day - the Wakefield RISC OS show AND Doctor Who. It doesn't get more exciting than that. Here's my report. http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1160.html "VirtualAcorn are delighted to announce that as part of our beta product testing scheme a limited number of VirtualRPC-AdjustSA products suitable for use on G4 and G5 PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers are now available." http://www.iconbar.com/comments/rss/news1159.html It's seemingly mostly doom and gloom these days in the increasingly small world of RISC OS, with the glaring deficiencies in the platform still unresolved and the latest releases from the OS developers having received an underwhelming response. However, it's always easier to concentrate on the dark side, and possible to overlook the fact that there's nice stuff happening too.