Hi folks...

Developer News 03/02/97

Dates of my Absence Finalised
-----------------------------
I now have the legally-binding completion date for my house (the 26th of
this month), so I'll be out of the office and generally out of contact from
close of business on Feb 14th until March 3rd. The deadline isn't so much
getting into the new house as getting out of the current one, so I decided
to take the time off in this fashion to give myself an ample window to pack
and tidy up; I can unpack (and re-network) at my new place at my own pace!

Developers in the Cambridgeshire area or who otherwise register their
interest may also get housewarming invitations at some point... conservative
estimates place the date of the housewarming(s) around the end of April /
start of May.

A Bit Of New Policy
-------------------
Following the annual appraisal last week, my job responsibilities have
changed a bit. I am now able to shake off the extra workload which end user,
dealera and Centre of Technology support has placed on me, and devote far
more of my time to Developer, VAR and Technology Partner support. With any
luck, this means that the ISVQuery mail queue will start emptying, more
documents and examples will be written and some NetStation docs will finally
get released (although this latter point is governed more by releasability
checking than raw progress in authoring). 

I'm also now able to turn my telephone off completely from 09:00 until
10:30, so please be aware of these revised times; the way our phone system
works, *nobody* will be able to call me or put calls through to me until
10:30 (although as I know a good few of you habitually hack until the small
hours, I figure you won't be particularly awake until 10:30 anyway :-) )

A Word from our Technology Marketing People...
----------------------------------------------
> Acorn is currently very interested in licensing ROM-able variants of the
> following applications for use within Network Computer, digital set-top-box
> and Internet applicance devices.

> VT320 emulator
> AS400 emulator
> spreadsheet - Microsoft Excel, Lotus compatible

> Developers should declare their interests as soon as possible
> as well as presenting any other potentially desirable applications
> that they may currently or plan to have in their portfolios.
If you have or plan to develop such software, drop a line to ISVQuery with
details; I (or Neil, if I'm away) will sort you out regarding communications
with the appropriate people in Technology Marketing. 

Most of the capability to turn C apps into module code suitable for
committing to ROM is provided by s.modulewrap inside RISC_OSLib; I know that
this isn't present in the version of RISC_OSLib on the Developer site, but
I'll sort things so that this and other support materials can be supplied to
developers who need to create ROM-based variants of their software.

NetStation
----------
The first units hit the warehouse on Friday of last week, so with a bit of
luck we should start shipping units today to those of you who ordered them.
The server-side docs are still in very early version and being vetted, so
release won't happen for a little while yet; also a small issue of copyright
(whoops) means that the boot sequence archive on the Developer site has been
temporarily locked off pending update. This problem should be sorted by
mid-week once we have integrated some different footage; anyone who
downloaded the archive must delete it please (mea maxima culpa).

New Price List
--------------
A new Developer Price List should be online by the end of today; check
http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/docs/sales/prices.txt

Cheers,

Dave