With great timing, Cloverleaf have announced a whole load of interesting developments. We will be reviewing all in detail in further articles, but here are the key details.

First off, we have a new German Territory created by Raik Fischer and can be downloaded here. This has been tested on 5.27, 5.28 and 5.29. This should provide a much better experience for German RISC OS users. There are plans for more improvements for other languages. Any encouragement for non-English RISC OS users is to be warmly welcomed.
 
Secondly, they have a new version of the Filer GUI. This is still in alpha and not all features are implemented yet. The folder tree view is working nicely. Features to be added include drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, file search, thumbnails for graphics, and lots of other features. It also has some interesting novel features planned such as a timeline of files. An alpha version will be available from the Cloverleaf website and the full version can be pre-ordered for 19 Euros.
 
Finally, the Cloverleaf RISC OS distribution will also be available in three versions (Standard, Plus and Art). These contain a lot of additional software. They also include commercial software, so there will be a cost for each.
 
All versions are based on the standard RISC OS release but with a lot of additional free (including JASSP and GCC 10.2) and also bundled commercial software. Cloverleaf are targeting these at newcomers to RISC OS with a carefully curated and complete set of packages.
 
The additional commercial software included in each version is:-
Standard - !SparkFS, !CloverTool, !NetPrintDriver, !MessengerPro, !DataPower Home, !PDFMaker & !Doom.
Plus also includes !FireWorkz Pro and !SafeStore.
Art also includes !Artworks
 
Prices are
Cloverleaf Distro Standard 39 Euro / £28 / 39 USD
Cloverleaf Distro Plus 69 Euro / £49 / 69 USD
Cloverleaf Distro Art 168 Euro/ £142 / 168 USD
*prices in Euro include VAT, prices in £ and USD exclude VAT
 
All of these represent a big discount on buying just the commercial software and the Art package looks especially interesting.
 
The software can be bought from the Cloverleaf website and will be sent as a download. We will be comparing the distros with the other versions already available (Chris Hall has already done some comparisons in Archive magazine).
 
More details are on the Cloverleaf website and the distros can be preordered now from their shop.