Jonathan Duddington, author of the RISC OS e-mail client Pluto, has announced that as of now, Pluto is available for free. The project has been open-sourced, enabling other developers to take over maintenance of the software. Jonathan has also updated the program for ARMv7 compatibility, enabling it to run on the most modern hardware.
 
Pluto is written in C and lets users to manage their e-mails and usenet (newsgroup) subscriptions. It has a fast and consistent user interface with many options for sorting and organising articles, a built in editor for composing e-mails or news postings, and a search facility amongst other features. Thanks to Jonathan for his generosity. The lack of a powerful and free Mail user agent was one of the platform's shortfalls.
 
Jonathan also announced an update for his eSpeak text-to-audio speech synthesizer, enabling it to run on modern ARMv7 hardware.
 

Version 2.5 of web browser NetSurf is set to be unveiled at this year's Wakefield show - but its developers warn this could be the last release for the platform. The new version has a rewritten CSS engine to improve its ability to display web pages correctly, should be faster at processing web pages, and boasts big improvements to the way the freely available software caches pages and uses the computer's memory.
 
But as the developers of the open source browser no longer have the time to maintain the RISC OS port of NetSurf, it's likely that future improvements to the program will not make it into the RISC OS port - and automatically generated builds of the software are expected to stop if these new enhancements break the RISC OS-specific source enough to stop it compiling.
 

RISC OS users may be left without updates to NetSurf unless a suitable programmer can be found to continue development.
 
Although the RISC OS version of the web browser has more features than other platforms it has not been actively maintained for over two and a half years. Many of the features which were specific to the RISC OS version are now being moved to the multi-platform core which is being actively worked on.
 
NetSurf contributor Michael Drake told The Icon Bar that it was "a big shame ... no-one really wants to drop RISC OS support but there's no-one to actually keep it working at the moment." The team has made an urgent appeal for a C developer with knowledge of the WIMP to get involved.
 
The open source project began in 2002 and the first major release was in 2007. NetSurf was voted "Best non-commercial software" four times in Drobe's annual RISC OS awards. It has been ported to Linux, BeOS and AmigaOS, and the team are participating in Google's Summer of Code.
 
Link: NetSurf
 

Back at the start of this month I decided to take a break from debugging some code and have a quick de-stressing blast on Team Fortress 2. As I loaded the Steam client, the "updates" window popped up what seemed to be a bargain - Fallout 3, half price just for that weekend! That'll be fun, thinks I, and cheap too!
 
It really didn't turn out that way.
 

Anyone reading this will have seen it by now, but just in case you gave up hope (but, erm, kept coming back to us for updates), Drobe has - after a few sparks of life recently - now relaunched.
 
There has been some criticism of the new design; visually, I think it looks great, but then I've always enjoyed websites that are clean and simple and uncluttered. My biggest complaints with the old design were that the masthead looked too busy, and there wasn't enough white space; both of these issues have now been addressed. (Although can we have the logo back in colour? Pretty please?)
 

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.

RISC OS has seen the release of several MSN Messenger clients over the years; two free clients (Natter and Messenger) and R-Comp's commercial product, Grapevine. A few years ago all of these clients fell foul of an upgrade to the MSN protocol which stopped RISC OS users from being able to connect to the chat network. To many users' dismay, RISC OS was left without a free MSN Messenger client, as only Grapevine was upgraded to support the new protocol.

Happily, this distressing situation has, at last, been rectified with the release of Parmesan. In this article I'll take a look at Parmesan describe my experience of it. Finally, as a Grapevine owner, I will compare Parmesan with the commercial Grapevine application.

 

Yeah, that whole "updating a website" thing. We're quite shit at it, aren't we?
 
We do have some good stuff coming up, though. In the meantime, if you've not seen it, I recommend watching Hyperland - a 1990 Douglas Adams documentary. To say much more would spoil it, but it's fascinating stuff, especially considering when it was made.
 
Pity about the snipe at Filthy, Rich & Catflap at the start, mind you. (Indeed, the snipes at telly are pretty misjudged as a whole.) It's utterly wonderful, and I recommend you buy the DVD if you haven't seen it. At £6.99, what is there to lose? Well, apart from £6.99, of course.
 

In this article we look at some of the programs and projects - some obvious, others less so - that influenced the history of the RISC OS platform and its users. These are our suggestions, not a top ten and certainly not in any particular order. What other applications would you add to the list?