Wakefield's July speakers were Peter Richmond and Chris Hughes

"Things to do with Draw"

Peter was first with his look at Draw .... Peter has been using Draw for over 25 years and still finding new things his talk was full of useful tips.

He started with a recap on keyboard shortcuts including F9 for redo (we all know that don't we). The grid is very helpful for making sure straight lines are horizontal/vertical. Works nicely for circles and text as well. Transform lets you scale on both X and Y axis and minus values let you mirror.

Group with Justify is useful for aligning objects - middle with different sized circles gives you concentric circles. 

If you are not good at drawing, Peter showed importing and tweaking existing clip art.

Peter is no good at drawing flowers (who is?) so he showed us how Draw grid/lock/duplicate and other features makes this easy. 

Peter showed saving a PDF file as a Draw file in RISC OS so it was then easy to edit the contents.

JPEGs cannot be rotated inDraw. Would need to be converted to a Sprite first.

If you are looking for other useful ideas, the user guide is recommended. 

ROD software

Chris was looking at various software offerings from ROD, starting with PinBoard 2.04 This is the latest release which was sent to beta testers last week (Chris did find a bug in his demo). This replaces the built-in PinBoard with lots of extra goodies. Chris looked at the Configuration window to show all the extra features. There are lots of options.

A nice enhancement for backdrops is that you can have a selection of alternating images for the backdrop. In 2.04 the IconBar can be totally transparent.

Stickies give you savable post-it notes on the desktop.

Next Chris showed the ROD stack running wifi. This is still in development but works well and includes some nifty features such as profiles and a firewall.

Chris is a beta tester so able to show us all the latest features!

All ROD software is free from their website.

Both talks were well researched and informative - I learnt a lot of new things!

As usual, the talk was on Zoom with an audience from all over 'greater' Wakefield. Talk was recorded if you missed it.

Details on all meetings (and email address to ask for a Zoom link) can be found on the WROCC website