RISC OS - so long and thanks for all the fish.
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Well, it's a sad day indeed. Far from being a toy OS
as many will claim (never actually having used it,
of course) it should be alive and well, with two new
machines being launched in the last couple of tears or
so, and  both forks of the OS (yes, that's right, TWO
forks) being updated, and one them in the process of
being open-sourced. The future should be bright, the
future should be green.

So why drop it then?
--------------------
Well, part of  the reason is the clue above. Two forks
of the OS for a minority platform? It's difficult to
believe that such silliness could even start, never
mind carry on. The simmering "dispute" (for want of a
better word) between the two camps has been going on
for several years and was just a bit of a side-show
until I bought an A9Home for the business. Ok, so I
was aware the OS was "a bit beta", but I wasn't expecting
it to be unable to rememebr half of it's configuration
settings, or be lacking pre-installed printer drivers,
or crashing losing data to often for comfort. Though
those points are irritating in the extreme, well, never
mind, they can be over-come - the real killers are these
two issues.
In the eight months or so that I've had the A9, and
despite all the known bugs and problems there have been
precisely NO updates at all. That may not matter to your
average hobbyist but it is a disaster for someone wanting
to use the machine "for real".
The other issue, not un-realted, came about when I bought
the C/C++ complier, for use on the A9 and the Risc PC to
32-bit the apps I have written that use !Prophet to help
run the business, to release them, and to develop them
further. I happily installed it and..... it didn't work.
One is supposed to get personalised copy of the actual
compiler from the Iyonix site, which I did. Following
the insturctions to ready it for use it failed miserably -
the protection was still in place (set it "absolute" and
then run it do this). Never mind, at only 50ukp the money
wasted this time was not a patch on the 650ukp wasted on
the A9. I'd cpould simply go back to the old version,
couldn't I?. Except the files had been deleted from the
hard drive by the installer - including the copies in the
back-up !boot  directory. Now panicking as I had no way
of keeping my software up-to-date, there followed an
exchange of e-mails the Iyonix people, which still resulted
in no working complier. I did get it to run once, but the
hard drive then died and guess which file DisckNight couldn't
recover! Not that it mattered really, in less time than it
had taken to try to sort this one issue out I had got Ubuntu
Linux, with ROX, up and running on one of the PC's - with
a working complier and Quasar accounts. More on this later.
The galling thing about this was really the fact that when
I mentioned that I intended to run the compiler on the A9,
the chap at Iyonix though it was amusing - clearly not
a problem. I wish I could treat my customers like that!
This was, of  course, on top of the petty bickering and
short sightedness of thosewho have appointed themselves
as the Keepers Of The Knowledge. I know exactly what they
will say as well, the same tired arguments will get trotted
out again, and doubtless it will ever more be so until the
only audience is themselves. The problem is they are wrong -
demonstrably. Is the ROS user base increasing or decreasing?
OK, so FireFox is wonderful (though NetSurf is far sllicker),
but whether the Keepers like it or not, the vast majority of
users consider Flash, video, etc to be part of the browser -
donning teflon shoulder pads and saying "not my problem" is
simply burying you head in the sand. Trumpeting FireFox,
omittingto mentiom the lack of video etc will have a negative
ettect rather than a positive one. Can it actually do
anything that NetSurf or Fresco can't? In effect no, apart
from getting the layout nicer sometimes. Is that going to impress
someone used to another platform? Like hell. They'll try to go
to YouTube or whateve and just return to wherever they came
from. So that's the "home" market scuppered.
What ROS needs is the dull, boring, stuff to get into markets
where such things are not required, even deprecated. Accounts,
drivers for devices like the Dymo label printers, Point Of Sale
software (we had that, and very good it was too, but users have
to be able to integrate into their accounts and stock control
for it to be of real use - no one these days is going to bother
printing out end of day stuff and then re-enter it into their
accounts software - and not everyone uses bar codes in a shop).
This is where the ROS could score well, it's UI is far easier
to use than others, and the lack of video streaming etc could
be viewed as a plus in the "work" market.
The real danger to ROS from not having these things is not
their abscence per se though. As mentioned above, the compiler
and A9 debacles pushed me into actually installing Linux. I
didn't want to, but I had to - I've needed a modern multi-user
accounts system for a long time now, but I've desperetley
battled on with ROS and !Prophet for far longer than is
sensible (bear in mind we are talking *serious* use here,
use that can make or break a company, not mucking about with
something in the evening out of a sense of loyalty or seeing
if it can do this or that). The complier fiasco was the last
straw, and so the deed was done.  Like, I strongly suspect,
so many other ex-ROS users, the experience was an eye opener.
It's a different  world out there - just one example will
suffice to show why ROS is not now an option. My web site
generator program used to take 9 hours to generate the site.
The same code, ported to Linux, does it in roughly 50 SECONDS.
It's not just speed either. There are those who bang on about
Zap etc (I used to too) - well, I have three editors installed,
two of which do most of what  Zap does, and one (part of the
Anjuta project suite) that does far more. Draw? I though there
was nothing like it, but Xara Xtreme (apart from the duff name)
does it all and more (except import Draw files, which is a bit
of a bummer). It (the Linux version) is even directly supported
by Computer Conepts now. The only application I'm missing to
date is Impression, but then I haven't really looked yet.
Even IglooFTP is very nearly as easy top use as FTPc.

So will I miss ROS?
-------------------
Yes. Big Time. It's very hard to give up something you've
supported come hell or high water for so long, but with ROX
providing (with a few very irritating exceptions) a ROS like
desktop, I'll survive.
What I won't miss is being told my future by the Keepers, who
do a very good impression of completely failing to uderstand
the difference between those who use a computer to do various
tasks because the *have* to, and those who do so because they
either want to or just see it as a hobby. Fiddling while
Rome burns and all that....

The reposses will an amalgum of:

"Developers know best....."
"You don't understand....."
"Zap can do......."
"I run my buisiness (with only half a dozen transactions a
day rather than hundreds)......."
etc etc.

which all just ignore three simple facts - you've lost
*another* user and failed to ask yourselves why, you've also
lost your most visible user to the outside world, and I
*do* understand (you might not like it, but it's true), that's
why I've been forced to move.
Not one will ask the only questions that really need to be
asked - what can we do to retain, or even gain, users? Which
market(s) can we address bearing in mind the technical
limitations of the hardware?

But that's ok, hey, who needs users when making clever
points about the semantics of someones news post is so
much mor fun!

Richard