ROOL has recently updated the DDE (which provides all the tools and documentation you need to write programs for RISC OS) with DDE31b and DDE31c.

PhotoDesk was updated at the South-West Show and is now available as a chargeable upgrade for existing customers.

If you are using the Iris browser, there is a nifty new utility called IrisRAM to speed up the software.

We've mentioned before the work of the Acorn Preservation Team to archive and preserve BBC Micro and Acorn software before it's lost to time and bit rot. As part of this effort, there will be a Software Preservation stand at this weekend's ROUGOL show which will offer a software preservation service. This is possible thanks to a generous offer of time and expertise from Paul Emerton (who you may remember from his excellent demonstration on BBC TV graphics and Acorn machines at the Centre for Computing History).
 
The idea is that you can bring along your BBC Micro or Archimedes floppy discs and if it's not already in the Acorn Preservation Team's archive, Paul will take an image of the disc while you wait and give the original back to you. If you take along a USB stick or SD card, a copy of the resulting disc image will be provided back to you (although be aware that the images of a single floppy disc can be up to around 85MB).
 
Imaging the discs will be made possible thanks to Paul bringing along his Greaseweazle - a small device that reads and stores the raw magnetic flux readings from the floppy disc (hence the large size of the resulting images). The advantage of imaging the discs this way is that it preserves the content exactly, including any special copy protection tracks from the original disc.
 
Even if you can't bring your own discs along, Paul will be available at the stand to chat and give advice on how best to store and avoid damage to both discs and drives to help preserve the life of both.

Archimedes emulator Arculator has been updated to version 2.1 with some very nice new features. The emulator can now emulate an A4 laptop or the A500 prototype and can also emulate more podules, including the Aleph One 386 and 486 podule, meaning you can now run DOS and Windows in the emulator.
 
Other podules now supported include Acorn ROM podules, MIDI podules, Oak SCSI interfaces and Computer Concepts' ColourCard. Support for disc images in the .hfe format is also now included.
 
  
 
Head over to the Arculator website to download the new version.

There have been several VNC clients for RISC OS, but my favourite has always been !Avanlanche. It always felt the most polished to me and it had lots of useful features like a fullscreen mode, scaling and lots of choices.

A couple of months ago, we told you about the Acorn Preservation Team, who are working to preserve the data from old discs before the data's gone forever.
 
Chris Evans and Phil Pemberton have written an in-depth look at how they were able to recover the data from some damaged discs that were otherwise unreadable using more traditional methods.
 
The post is an interesting look at how even when it appears the disc may be unrecoverable, with the right tools there can still be hope of recovering the data using more analogue methods at the magnetic flux level (and sometimes drawing peaks on a waveform manually!).
 
Also, as we noted in the previous article, the Acorn Preservation Team are still looking to help preserve any unique, rare, interesting and potentially historic discs anyone may have tucked away in the back of their cupboards before it's too late. They're not only working on BBC Micro discs, but discs for other formats and systems, too.
 
Links:
Recovering "lost" treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope - Chris Evans' blog