The January ROUGOL meeting was a hybrid event with RISC OS Developments (Richard Brown was in person and Andrew Rawnsley was online). About a quarter of the audience was in the pub and the rest online.

Richard did the first half of the talk. Organisation wise, RISC OS developments has gained a third director (Marcus Simmons) to help in the last 18 months.
 
Richard dived into the TCP/IP stack first which has been a lot of hard work and now a stable release. Richard uses it himself at Orpheus and all his working machines are running the stack. It all just works without problems. This includes several servers running his databases and client software. Tested on a wide range of machines including PineBook Pro, Forte, Pi 4, Pi 3, etc. Uses a NAS to share files (so personally keen to get updates for LanMan98). Work ongoing on wifi support and IPv6 is working nicely.
 
Iris update next. Lots of polish added in last few versions (bookmarks and favourites). Richard uses Iris to access the web front end on his databases. Aim is to release Iris this year.
 
Andrew did a demo of some sites on Iris (starting with the BBC). Running Iris from RAM helps performance as Webkit assumes cached filing system such as Mac/PC/Linux. Application has a very RISC OS feel to it. Nearly there but Andrew wants to add some additional features and ensure solid as will be many users first experience of RISC OS. Andrew showed the rather neat Inspector which is built into Iris and allows you to see HTML/CSS/load times/network activity/etc.
 
Some general discussion on some problem sites (Currys) which do odd things with authentication.
 
Next Andrew showed PinBoard 2.0, which modernises the Desktop and adds features familiar to users of other systems, such as saving files to desktop. It has all the original Filer functionality and adds lots of new features. Images are now scaled to the whole screen and transparency can be controlled for the Icon Bar. Pins are much clearer. Stickies are notes which can be placed on the desktop. Watermark allows Draw files to appear on the screen. General release pending...
 
Andrew updated us on ideas for 64 bit support for RISC OS. Issue of application support as well. May be a 2 stack solution with some emulation as a short-term solution with a more general move to 64bit.
 
SW Show is on Saturday 25th February in Bristol.
 
As usual there was time for questions afterwards.
 
Many thanks to Andrew and Richard for a very informative and entertaining session.
 
The next 2 ROUGOL meetings will be a remote only on Zoom with a pub only meeting in April. As usual, details on the Rougol website.