APDL software

Clares Micro Supplies was founded in 1981 and published many of the biggest software titles for RISC OS until 2002, when APDL and ProAction bought the rights to publish their back catalogue.

In early 2004, I was employed to produce 32-bit compatible versions of two Clares applications: Schema 2 and ProArtisan 24. I had to reverse-engineer the C source code for parts that had been lost. I also updated the user interfaces, resolved various incompatibilities with modern OS versions and fixed some longstanding bugs. In late 2005 I did the same for WimpBasic, with the additional complication I had to rewrite the code to link programs with the runtime library.

Those titles have been commercially unavailable since the death of David Holden of ADPL in 2015. As such, they could be reasonably described as abandonware. In addition, being exclusive to RISC OS makes them technologically obsolete with little commercial value.

In line with the stated desire of Aaron Timbrell and David Bradforth "to make all of the APDL software titles available free of charge to single users", I am making them available here without warranty of any kind. If the copyright holders wish to assert their rights then they should email me at the address at the bottom of the page.

The title and icon of each program are linked to the relevant Zip archive for download. On RISC OS computers Zip archives may be opened using SparkPlug, SparkFS (commercial) or Infozip.

PCA resource

Description

!PCARes is a resource for the PCA system. You should place it in a directory where it will be 'seen' by the filer before any PCA applications are seen or run. (I suggest !Boot.Resources)

Applications should not include a copy of the PCA support module. Instead, provide a skeleton copy of !PCARes so that there is only ever one copy of the module on the user's system at one time.

Author

Rob Davison

Latest version

0.35 (04 Mar 2003)

ProArtisan 24

Description

ProArtisan 24 is a 24-bit art and painting program which features many different palettes, filters, effects and drawing tools but only one level of undo. As a curiosity, it also supports Kodak's proprietary Photo CD technology.

This application requires the PCA support module.

Author

Jon Warmisham & Frank Dart

Frank Dart was a full-time maths teacher at Sale Grammar School at the time ProArtisan was being developed. We shared a staff room for a short time when Frank was testing aspects of the program including an intended 3D effect module. Too many of my colleagues couldn't cross their eyes sufficiently so that idea was dropped.

The late Jon Warmisham was the artist. He taught my daughter at South Trafford College. I've not seen the art term 'Frisket' used in any other painting program. All I've encountered use 'Mask'. Jon always referred to 'Frisket' in teaching 'wet paint' art. Jon was an excellent teacher and an all-round great bloke. Much missed.

— John Cartmell

Latest version

1.26 (Oct 2017)

Changes in version 1.20

First 32-bit compatible version, with the exception of the 'Thingi' utility used for PNG loading (don't have source code).
General minor syntactic changes to allow compilation with Norcroft RISC OS ARM C version 5.54 rather than Easy C.
The !Boot file no longer defines spurious system variables RESOURCE$DIR and RESOURCEs$DIR
Changed the system variable ProArt24FSI$Options to ProArt24$FSIOptions, since according to RISC OS 3 PRM appendix H only variable names starting with App$ may be considered registered.
Rewrote the RISC OS 3.5 detection for CompressJPEG to use a ProArt$-prefixed system variable rather than 'rov' (again, this usage was presumably illicit).
A valid system-wide choices directory is now required before ProArt24 will run.
The PCA support module is now loaded from the shared !PCARes resource application, rather than from inside !ProArt24.
Likewise, the PhotoCD module (if available) is now loaded from !System rather than from inside !ProArt24; the version supplied with Acorn's 'Universal' RISC OS 3 !Boot is newer, and the included version wasn't 32-bit compatible anyhow.
Tidied up the window templates, including allowance of room for wider-than-system-font text (outline fonts) and conformance to norms for labels and '3D' style buttons.
User choices are no longer saved inside the application directory; instead the system-wide location for choices is used. This should allow the application to be run from read-only media. The internal files 'brushes', 'VMData' and the contents of the directory 'Palettes' are now default settings that should never be overwritten.
Created a proper low-res version of the application icon for !Sprites
Removed low resolution 3D 'radioon', 'radiooff', 'opton' & 'optoff' icons from !ProArt24.Sprites, because not needed on OS 3.5+.
Created new high resolution 'ic_proart24' iconised window icon for !Sprites22 in a similar style to the original.
Because initialisation takes a couple of seconds even on a StrongARM machine (presumably more on slower computers), display the hourglass.
Various other functions that access files have been updated to display the hourglass, with a percentage display where appropriate.
Fixed defective error messages when a file cannot be opened.
Corrected the description of our palette file format given in !ProArt24.Palettes.Format. We had been claiming that the description could be up to 12 characters, but in fact at least one trailing space is required.
The startup banner is now centred on screen and the duration for which it is shown has been reduced from 10 to 4 seconds.

Changes in version 1.21

Widespread tidying up of window templates to conform to stylistic norms. Pop-up menu buttons and writable fields now set the appropriate pointer shape, option/radio buttons are now 44 OS units high, display/writable fields are now 52 OS units high, menu buttons are now 44 by 44 OS units, adjuster arrows are now 32 by 32 OS units...
Added a mask to a sprite used for the banner and 'About this program' window, to allow the window texture to show through.
Removed the send-to-back tool from the 'Display' window template because this window is only ever opened as transient and/or as a menu leaf.
Removed elipsis from 'Edit brush...', 'Grid...' and 'Print...' menu entries, because clicking them doesn't bring up any dialogue box. Also changed the keyboard shortcut for the latter from 'Print Scrn' to 'PRINT' so that the Wimp can recognise and right-align it. The 'Edit brush' shortcut wasn't being aligned either because it was run onto the elipsis!
Completely rewrote ugly & longwinded error handling code for saving compressed files. In particular, we no longer assume that an error pointer returned by _kernel_last_oserror() is relevant unless we have also received a failure indication from some shared C library function.
Fixed a minor bug where, for the initial call to Squash_Compress, flags bit 1 was being set if the reported maximum output size was greater than the size of our buffer. Yet the PRM defines this flag as 'More input after this', which would imply we were holding back some of the input data (untrue).
Fixed a bug where toggling the savebox's 'Squashed' option with the ADJUST mouse button failed to update the filetype icon above.
Fixed a bug where 'Squashed' option button could be dragged from the savebox as though it were the file icon!
Fixed a bug introduced by me which prevented the interactive grey shift graph being drawn.
Open the brush dialogue box in persistent mode when the 'Edit brush' menu entry is clicked. Hence also reinstated ellipsis on this menu item.
Fixed a bug introduced by me which caused a blank title for the canvas window and mucked up the Show and Remove submenus on the iconbar menu.

Changes in version 1.22

Linked with a version of RISCOSLib that supports solid icon drags from saveboxes.
Allow slider positions and other draggable controls to be set by a single click (rather than having to wait for drag start, as before),
Allow ADJUST clicks on adjuster arrows to do the opposite of SELECT.
Fixed a longstanding slider bug, which was that if a slider drag starts at the same mouse X coordinate as a previous drag finished (even if a completely different slider) then it will be ignored.
Increased the bounding box for slider drags so that no longer have to use the adjuster arrows in order to reach beyond 99 to 100.
Fixed a longstanding bug where use of the bottom set of adjuster arrows in the 'Edit Brush' dialogue box would set the opaqueness value dependent on the position of last slider to be dragged (i.e. not necessarily the relevant one).
Fixed four longstanding bugs with HSV sliders:
1. If a slider drag started at the same mouse X coordinate as a previous drag finished (even if one of the other 2 sliders) then it would be ignored.
2. Every time one of the adjuster arrows was clicked the 'S' label icon would be needlessly redrawn.
3. It became impossible to increase the 'hue' value beyond 256 using the adjuster arrows, whereas the slider goes up to 360.
4. The bounding box for slider drags limited mouse movement such that it was impossible to reach the highest values without resorting to use of the adjuster arrows.
ADJUST click on a colour in the Grid dialogue box no longer duplicates the action of SELECT (see style guide).
Whereas ADJUST clicks on the arrows for scale and rotation previously changed these values in units of larger size (undocumented), this is now accessed by holding down the Shift key in conjunction with SELECT or ADJUST.
Reduced unnecessary redraw on repeated radio button clicks.
Fixed a very nasty longstanding bug in crop-to-window, which had been poking a window handle through an uninitialised pointer and then passing this pointer to Wimp_GetWindowOutline to fill in an indeterminate block of memory.
Added high and low resolution variants of 'ptr_menu' sprite to !Sprites and !Sprites22, for machines that don't have this in ROM (e.g. RISC OS 3.1).
Created '4Sprites' file containing 256 colour versions of the iconised window sprite & application icon. These are the same as the 16 colour versions but with subtle shading. These icons are added to the Wimp pool instead of '!Sprites' if the !Boot file detects RISC OS 4 or later.
Added small versions of the application icon for the hi-res sprite sets.
Fixed an icon validation string in the 'warp' dialogue box template, which was previously r5;sdown,pdoxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. The adjuster arrow to reduce the number of control lines did not invert properly when clicked. Has been like this as least as far back as version 1.11, probably earlier.
Fixed a longstanding bug where clicking ADJUST on any icon in the 'Colour shift' filter dialogue box would apply the current settings.
Changed input focus colour of 'path' dialogue box to grey because this window is always transient (see style guide).
Fixed a longstanding bug where any unknown wimp messages received caused the palette window to vanish!
Ensure that caret is not positioned off the end of the palette name when we cycle through the palettes, in place of old code which annoyingly simply gave up the input focus. Got rid of the irritating behaviour of forcing the caret to the start of the text whenever the user clicked on this writeable icon.
Avoid unnecessary redraws when already at the first/last item in the path dialogue box.
Read the text of the path name from the dialogue box prior to changing which path is displayed, thus preserving the effects of any editing done by the user.
Fixed a longstanding bug where adding a path with no width or height (for example a horizontal or vertical line) would result in a fatal 'divide by zero' error upon the next attempt to redraw the path dialogue box.
Preserve the effects of any user editing of the displayed palette name, which was previously forgotten when the window was closed or the palettes saved.
Fixed a longstanding bug in where a redraw (i.e. dragging another window across the palette or pool window) caused the name of the displayed palette or sprite to be restored to what it was before any user editing took place.
Preserve the effects of any user editing of the palette name when the user toggles between the picker and current palette, and to ensure it is the displayed name that is saved for any subsequent undo operation when loading a palette or ADJUST dragging to create a colour span.
Changed icon validation strings in the palette and path window templates so that the user can see buttons invert upon use. Also changed button types from click/drag to click, so that they get coloured & shaded under RISC OS Select and don't revert before mouse button release.
Allow the palette window's undo and colour picker buttons to work on ADJUST as well as SELECT clicks.
Standardised dimensions of the icons that make up our custom style mini number range selectors. This means that some dialogue boxes that used to truncate three digit numbers due to malsized icons should be fixed.
Fixed a longstanding redraw bug in the 'Multiple Brush' dialogue box where the contents of icon 0 could spill out over the rest of the window if a large diameter brush were selected.
Prevented problems where there is no valid preceeding mouse position when editing a brush (for example at the very start of a drag).
Open the brush dialogue box in persistent mode when the 'Edit brush' menu entry is clicked. Also reinstated ellipsis on this menu item and added a key shortcut hint.
Changed all instances where system() had been used to invoke Star Commands, to instead use _kernel_oscli(). (system() has a lot of side effects which are not wanted or needed.)
All slider well icons have had their 'sprite' flag set (most already did) because this seems the only way to defeat the imposition of rounded borders when the Wimp has been configured to draw them.
Reduced height of 'OK' buttons in 'grey' and 'pattern' dialogue box templates to the standard 52 OS units so that they get coloured & shaded under RISC OS Select.
Fixed a longstanding bug where the display was not redrawn when the last sprite in the pool was deleted.
Fixed a longstanding bug where normal mouse button clicks on the pool window were treated as the start of a SELECT drag (only evident with clicks on slider), when in frisket editing mode.

Changes in version 1.23

Fixed a longstanding bug where changing the brush values in the 'Path' dialogue box also causes the 'Edit Brush' dialogue box to updated if open, but only when a redraw is forced (e.g. by dragging a window across it).
Ameliorated a longstanding issue where successive blend pastes (i.e. put sprite with less than 100% opacity) would gradually darken the canvas. For example, writing a colour component of value 255 through a blank frisket would lose 0.39% of its brightness in translation. Changing divisor to 255 slows things down unacceptably, so I instead 'fixed' the most obvious instance of this problem by putting special case checks for a frisket pixel being 255 (transparent) or 0 (opaque). This also speeds up any masked operations where significant areas of the canvas are either fully masked or not at all.
Fixed a longstanding bug where pressing the cursor up key whilst the 'Path' dialogue box had focus caused the caret to move to the large path display icon, whilst pressing cursor down caused it to disappear. In either case 'Input focus not found' errors from the Wimp followed.
Removed all instances I could find of unnecessary capitalisation of words in a message or menu text (i.e. should be 'Add water' rather than 'Add Water').

Changes in version 1.24

Fixed a longstanding bug where use of the 'FX' brush prior to having opened the dialogue box for the first time would cause unexpected effects.
Fixed an apparent problem with unresponsiveness of the the 'FX' brush dialogue box since I switched to the RISCOSLib dialogue box functions in the previous version.
Use of the 'Generic effects' dialogue box no longer affects the FX brush upon return to painting mode.

Changes in version 1.25

Built for RISCOS Ltd's generic C library stubs for improved compatibility with machines that would otherwise need to load new FPEmulator, SharedCLibrary and CallASWI modules.

Changes in version 1.26

Rebuilt with -memaccess -L22-S22-L41 for the ARMv6 mis-aligned data access behavioural change.
Removed a hack in code which works out the style that was selected from a font menu, because it is nonsense without an equivalent hack that breaks RISCOSLib for normal applications (such as Schema 2).
Removed all user registration code.

Schema 2 application

Description

Schema 2 is a spreadsheet application which features a macro language and the ability to draw graphs such as pie charts, line plots and histograms.

Author

Andrew Colin & Robert Hawking

Latest version

1.24 (28-Feb-2021)

Changes since last release

Fixed several null pointer dereferences.
Fixed an invalid pointer dereference (address 2) when removing or replacing a submenu.
Fixed a bug where implicitly setting the workspace directory (by loading or saving a workspace file) could cause an 'illegal window handle' error (returned by Wimp_CreateMenu when called with -1 to close the tree), corrupted menus, and/or a crash. This was fixed by closing any current menu tree before reloading menu resources.
The manual describes loading menu resources upon loading a workspace file, but not upon saving a workspace. The latter action has therefore been disabled to allow the savebox to stay open in response to an ADJUST-click on the save button.
Canonicalization of file paths has been made more robust: previously, simply mistyping a file path in a savebox could terminate the application with an error like "Disc drive not known".

Schema 2 tutorials

Description

A collection of Schema 2 spreadsheet files which are intended as tutorials. Also includes a vector graphics file.

Author

CRM Ltd

Latest version

28 Jan 1994

Schema 2 examples

Description

A few Schema 2 spreadsheet files which are intended as examples, two of which are linked into a saved workspace. Also includes a large collection of vector graphics files.

Author

CRM Ltd

Latest version

12 Apr 1994

Schema 2 converters

Description

Schema 2 can import (and in some cases export) data in various file formats. This requires support from external applications which communicate with the main application using a message protocol. This approach of farming out file format conversions reduces the memory requirements of the main program whilst making it more modular and extensible.

The following converters are included:

WK1 (Lotus 1-2-3) to Schema 2 (Acorn Advance)
SID (Software-independent data) to Schema 2 (Acorn Advance)
Schema 1 to Schema 2 (Acorn Advance)
Schema 2 (Acorn Advance) to WK1 (Lotus 1-2-3)
Schema 2 (Acorn Advance) to HTML
Excel XML to Schema 2 (Acorn Advance)

Author

CRM Ltd and APDL-ProAction

Latest version

16 Jun 2012

Schema 2 macro editor

Description

Schema macros are stored in text files with file type SheetMc (&aed). The Schema 2 application cannot load these files directly; if one is dragged to its icon on the iconbar then it will automatically invoke the Macro Editor application in order to compile the macros before loading them.

The Macro Editor is a standalone text editor dedicated to the purpose of editing Schema macros. It incorporates a compiler which generates object files of type SMacro (&c0c) in the same directory as the source files.

Author

CRM Ltd

Latest version

12 Jun 2012

Schema 2 macros

Description

Sources for the macros which produce the standard set of graph types provided with Schema 2.

"The code is far from perfect, but these programs have two solid merits: they work, and they define a lower level of acceptability which you can improve on."

—'Introduction to Schema 2 Macros', Andrew Colin and Robert Hawking

Author

CRM Ltd

Latest version

31 Mar 2000

WimpBasic application

Description

Wimp Basic is a programming language and integrated application development environment for RISC OS. The authoring application incorporates window and menu editors as well as a source code editor. Other resources such as sprites can be associated with a project but not edited directly.

When saving a user application, its source code is compiled either to an intermediate tokenised form or directly to executable ARM code (when creating a so-called 'optimized' application). In both cases the resultant object code is loaded by a completely generic loader program which links it to a runtime library. The loader also converts the program from its tokenised form into ARM code, if necessary.

The runtime library must be installed on every end-user's machine and easily locatable, so it is distributed in the form of a relocatable module wrapped in another application named WBModules. (This is equivalent to programs compiled by Acorn's C compiler requiring the shared C library module distributed in the !System application.)

Author

Höskuldur Hermannsson

Latest version

2.14 (06-Jan-2018)

Changes in version 2.13

Reduced the amount of flickery redraw in the IDE's scrolling list windows.
Better support for new-format sprite types (including CMYK and 64 thousand colours).
Fixed handling of pop-up menu clicks in the 'Setup window data' dialogue box.
Fixed abuse of the standard C library function memcpy by calling it with overlapping address ranges.
Fixed the editor to allow selection of the first word on a line.
Fixed bugs in the editor's undo mechanism which could lead to crashes or incorrect edits.
Fixed bug where the IDE got stuck in 'Can't rename/delete a window which you are editing' state after closing an editing window
Applications created via the 'Save optimized' menu entry should now be 32-bit compatible.
Fixed several memory leaks.
Fixed a crash if the user Adjust-clicks on 'Close window' in the 'Win Designer' menu
Fixed unpredictable behaviour after Adjust-clicking 'Update' in the 'Edit group' dialogue box and then continuing to use it.
Fixed a bug where renaming a variable to another name in the same group caused it to disappear (and leak) if the new name immediately preceded the old name.
Fixed bugs where deleting a variable or renaming a group in the scrolling list didn't update the editor's 'Variables' menu.
Fixed a bug where renaming a variable in the scrolling list caused both old and new names to appear in the editor's 'Variables' menu.
Fixed bugs where deleting or renaming a window in the scrolling list didn't update the editor's 'Variables' menu.
Fixed a bug where the savebox for exporting sprites never closed automatically.
The IDE no longer sends trailing garbage when saving a subset of sprites to an application that supports RAM transfer.
Removed 'Wimp sprites' from the 'Iconbar sprite' menu because there is no reliable way to enumerate the content of the Wimp sprite pool. (Previously used SWI Wimp_BaseOfSprites, with unpredictable results.) The iconbar sprite name can now be entered from a dialogue box.
Saving sprites no longer marks the design as modified.

Changes in version 2.14

Updated the version of WBmodule required by the !Run file of generated applications to 2.16.
Removed outdated an URI from the error message in the !Run file.
Linked with an updated RISCOSLib that doesn't include a hack for ProArt24 in the event__menu_process function

WimpBasic manual

Description

A user guide for the WimpBasic application, in the form of a hyperlinked StrongHelp manual.

Author

APDL-ProAction & H. Hermannsson

Latest version

24 Apr 2003

WimpBasic tutorials

Description

A collection of WimpBasic project files which are intended as tutorials. Also includes a small collection of 16-colour sprites.

Author

Höskuldur Hermannsson

Latest version

10 Sep 1997

WimpBasic extras

Description

Five extra WimpBasic project files which are intended to demonstrate some of the features that were new in WimpBasic 2.

Author

Höskuldur Hermannsson

Latest version

01 Jul 1998

WBModules

Description

This archive contains 32-bit compatible versions of the WimpBasic module (the dynamic linker and runtime library) and WBLinker (a loader found inside every application created using Wimp Basic). An accompanying text file (also available online) describes the SWI interface of the WimpBasic module and lists changes in versions 2.10 to 2.16 of that module.

Author

Höskuldur Hermannsson

Latest version

2.16 (15 Oct 2017)

Changes since last release

Fixed bugs where client programs with no sprites file caused illegal reads from zero page in memory. If those memory accesses did not cause a data abort then they typically resulted in the program claiming an excessive amount of memory.

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