Stands
The exhibitors were generally upbeat, despite a 5am fire alarm at the hotel.
 
User groups were well represented with stands from Southampton, London and Bristol showing off projects and publicising their upcoming events.
 
Adrian Lees was demonstrating Aemulor and a new version of Geminus he has just started working on for new machines.
 
Sine Nomine were showing off the new map packs and also had their full range of software to discuss.
 
Drag'N'Drop were selling the new edition of the magazine (will be available next week) and had their range of fonts and books.
 
R-Comp had their usual selection of monitors, machines and software (see their talk).
 
Richard Brown (when not on door duties or making announcements) was showing off his very nice widescreen monitor and talking about Orpheus Internet services (I use them for work and home and can heartily recommend them).
 
Martin Wurthner was back at the show showing off the 2017 release of !ArtWorks and his other range of products.
 
Likewise, the Organizer stand was showing off their latest version and taking ideas for new features. They have now fixed the annoying broken line which used to appear on their website.
 
Jim Nagel was promising a release of Archive magazine once the show reports are added in. He was also offering back copies of previous editions.
 
AmCog games were showing off their games (and very nice new RISC OS desktop theme) and talking code.
 
RISC OS Bits had their range of interesting named storage devices and cases. They have not run out of puns yet....
 
John Norris had his bell ringing rig setup and RISC OS software to help you to practise. He shared a stand with Tasty Treats (who had the most inviting hardware purchases of the show!).
 
Ident Computer had their old and new range of cases (with Tom doing a talk about the changes and future plans).
 
Vince was providing sound support for the theatre and also promoting Bristol RISC OS group and his range of software. He also had a range of Vibe graphics demos running, updated for new machines.
 
Chris Hall was selling !FamTree and demoing his GPS hardware and software. He also did a talk.
 
Steve Fryatt had his range of software on show including the almost completed CashBook 1.40
 
Richard Keefe was showing off his work with Impression and talking about his priorities for future development. He gave a very full interview in Iconbar about his plans at Christmas.
 
Lastly the charity stand was raising money from secondhand software and hardware. Always worth a rummage....
 
The talks
 
There were three talks at the Show. All were filmed and will hopefully appear on youtube in the near future.
 
Tom Williamson
 
Tom told us about his background in media and broadcast. He is still actively involved in several projects and he told us about his WiFi sheep technology show.
 
His computer journey had started as a preservation and education project and demand for his homemade computer cases had led him into production. MicroOne was first product and the current release is mk4 - the last few were on sale at show at a special discount.
 
This is being replaced by a 'range' of CE machines which allows Ident to provide a RISC OS solution and and also target Linux and Retro gamers (2 much bigger markets).
 
Ident has its own version of RISC OS 5 (licensed from Castle) which includes some extra applications, has been reskinned to be more appealing to his target markets and nicely setup to use with a simple application to access BBC BASIC and a set of emulators. This is supplied with the RISC OS versions only.
 
Taking inspiration from the RISC PC, there is a two slice version, which Tom demoed with one slice running Linux and the other running RISC OS, viewing the Linux side via !Avalanche.
 
It all looked very impressive, and Tom has invested in some 3D printers to allow him to product several of his products.
 
Andrew Rawnsley
 
Andrew started with R-Comp updates.
 
The big recent software release is Netfetch5 with improvements for security and ssl. Lots of testing has been taking place in Germany. It also allows multiple servers - needed for spf which many Internet providers use to eliminate spam
 
The R-Comp hardware has received recent software updates. ARMX6 has new colour modes, and hardware floating point support (which your BBC BASIC code will be able to use). There was also an experimental build to allow developers to start experimenting with multi-core support. TiMachine has dual head support allowing it to display higher resolution screens on a suitable monitor.
 
A new Quake release allows the game to run on modern hardware and also provide higher resolution on machines which handle handle it.
 
Lastly Andrew, showed off the R-Comp ultra portable Windows solution to run RISC OS.
 
As ROOL were unable to attend, Andrew also provided a brief update on developments (and had some ROOL software available to buy on his stand). The big development will be RISC OS 5.24 (hopefully for Wakefield). Andrew was genuinely enthusiastic about the current developments for RISC OS.
 
With his RISC OS developments hat on, Andrew reported that they had been working with ROOL and had provided funding for bounties to improve the RISC OS networking.
 
Lastly, he provided a quick demo of the new version of Geminus Adrian Lees working to speed up window redrawing on the latest machines.
 
Chris Hall
 
Chris started with a demo of his new !FamTree software, showing how easy it is to create and edit family trees. These can then be dropped into other applications for further use or processing. The software can produce some fairly large A0 page and Chris recommended trying some print bureaux (who will generally charge more for the postage than the printing itself).
 
Chris also brought along his GPS software/hardware and showed it seamlessly integrating with Sine Nomine's mapping software. The talk turned into really nice demo of the software and its features (hopefully the videos will be out on youtube in the near future).
 
Next year
Richard and Andrew have been discussing some ideas about changing the venue or date to make the show more accessible. I am sure they would welcome any feedback from the Community.
 
Final thoughts
Personally, I thought it was a really upbeat and interesting show - well worth my early start and trek from Kent.
 
The show seemed to have just the right level of 'busy-ness' - I got to talk to everyone I wanted after a small wait. Lots of the developers have some really interesting ideas for future features and products. There was a good selection of stands, and we even received a free slice of cake...
 
The show in pictures