“In my opinion, the Draw module is one of the most significant and useful components of RISC OS. For the uninitiated, it provides a set of routines for calculating, transforming and rendering lines, polygons, bezier curves, sprites, and text. The Draw application has been bundled with every version of RISC OS and the draw file format is a defacto standard for almost every RISC OS application that incorporates graphics, and then some. In this article I hope to demonstrate some of the flexibility that Draw and the RISC OS desktop can provide.”
Our busses here (Valence, France) have a pseudo-tv system (used to be teletext-like, now much webpage-like) seems to run RiscOS as I saw one booting the other day
RiscOS is mainly used for such special purposes, and does it well. However, for a desktop OS, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
One example is that they had to raise 1000GBP just to get Firefox working on RiscOS. ( http://www.riscos.info/unix/firefox/ )
The fact that its closed source doesnt help either.
…simple
We are paying for a coder to do the port
& as for a desktop OS not going anywhere it is because *it doesn’t really have to*
RISC OS is known for its GUI
& yes before I get flamed I know there could be improvements made but hey isnt that the same for all OSes?
Actually I saw one booting yesterday, it’s running 3.7. It even stopped on the desktop, likely they screwed up the startup sequence
The !Draw thing seems to be a little bit behind other vector drawing applications but it is nice that is so embedded on the OS to the point that you can practically export vector art from anything and combine it with content produced on other applications. Think OpenDoc or OLE/DDE but easier to grasp.
It's sad that RISC OS is limited to very limited and expensive hardware and seems to be going the way of the dodo.