We continue with Part 4 of Andrew Rawnsley's RISC OS interview.

Any surprises or dates to tease us with?

Southwest RISC OS show on Saturday 24th Feb 2024?

More in a later Part! :)

Apart from TIB (obviously) what are your favourite websites?

My daily sites are Iconbar, of course, and ROOL forums.  I also spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest hardware and IT news, with sites like hothardware, the register, club386, anandtech and so on (several others have closed in the last 12-18 months - signs of the times?).  The  BBC of course, and I like to stay on top of computer game news on Eurogamer and RPGwatch.

And the odd Lego site :)

What are your interests beyond RISC OS?

I love computer hardware in general, and also home cinema / AV tech. Since we don't go to the cinema any more (COVID, cost etc) we like to enjoy movies at home.  I also enjoy story-driven games, (video/computer/board) so that ties into the AV setup too.

I enjoy music (as mentioned previously), and building models - lego and airfix-type (although the latter has been a bit usurped by the former recently).

Steph and I are both into sci fi and thrillers, so you'll see quite a lot of references to Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Dr Who and detective things (Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie etc) around the house.

As usual, there's never enough time for any of them.

If someone hired you for a month to develop RISC OS software, what would you create?

(looks at the last month...) Not as much as I'd like!

But, being serious, I'd like to have more time to develop application software.  I'd love to do a simple photo storage/retouch program akin to Google's old "Picasa" software because it was so easy to use and I think fits a lot of people's needs - acting as both a catalogue of their pictures and as a way to make simple edits.  Indeed, I really don't know why Google abandoned it, because it was a lovely bit of software.

It probably sounds silly, but with so many super-talented assembler coders (and highly-skilled C developers) in the community, I often feel quite workman-like, so prefer to collaborate with others on larger projects.  I get things done, but really have to thank the guys I work with for so much.    (Editor: Oscars acceptance speech redacted!)

I think, if I'm honest, I'd rather someone *didn't* hire *me* for a month, but instead let me put that money towards hiring one (or several) of the super-talented RISC OS coders out there to really work magic on RISC OS or apps.  I'll happily project-manage it, but I think some of those other guys would do amazing things, far more so than I.

Thinking about it, that's the mission statement of ROD in a nutshell...so more on that in a later interview, too!

To Be continued...

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