Welcome to RISC OS

This alpha distribution of RISC OS is completely self-contained, occupying 255Mbytes of storage on the SD card (including the ROM) leaving some 1625Mbytes free. It will start up with a working network if the network cable is connected to one.

The RISC OS desktop you see here is blank (apart from this window) - this is your working area. The iconbar across the bottom of the screen shows the resources available to you - on the left such things as storage devices and on the right applications which allow you to do things.

If you click over the icon marked 'SD' with the text ':0' below it, a window will open showing the contents of the SD card partition reserved for RISC OS. If you click over the icon 'Apps' and then double-click over the icons '!Help' (which will place its own icon on the right hand side of the icon bar, an 'i' inside a blue box) and '!Paint' (its icon is a paintbrush over a rainbow palette) you will get the screen below:

What you should see after clicking over the 'SD' icon and running !Paint and !Help

The '!Paint' and '!Help' icons have joined those already on the icon bar - the blue circle is for Netsurf, the browser. Thus you can see all the running applications - by their icons on the icon bar - whether or not they have any windows open. If you want to know a little more about anything then more technical detail may be obtained by clicking 'more' wherever it appears. Click 'less' to return to a less technical page. The technical bits appear on a yellow background. Less.

Each icon bar icon will produce a menu of selections if you click 'MENU' (the middle mouse button) including an option to quit. After making a selection from the menu, it will disappear. If you make the selection using 'ADJUST' then the menu remains for another selection (if the selection changes the menu contents, the menu will be updated). Click elsewhere to close the menu if no further selections are required. The monitor icon allows you to change the display resolution and colour depth (currently a fixed size in alpha version). You will note that some running applications have open windows (the filer showing the SD card contents and the Wimp showing those applications from various places on the disc and in the rom nominated for inclusion in the machine configuration). Closing the windows they own does not stop the application - to quit a running application is a separate operation.

You can play with dragging windows around - with the one on top staying on top if you use the ADJUST button to drag them. Less.

The active window (the one with 'input focus' and a yellow title bar) does not pop to the top when it becomes active. Each window has a 'back' icon which forces it to the back (i.e. behind all other windows except the icon bar). When you drag a file out of an application to save it, you need the destination directory window open (or stuck to the desktop) already unless you want to type the full directory name into the 'save' window yourself. You will find the 'save' dialogue is available as a sub menu in the application - instead of a list of selections you get a 'save' window with a file icon to drag where you want to store it.

In the screenshot above you can see that the interactive Help application is explaining that the mouse is pointing to the 'close' icon of the Apps window. This Help is provided by the application and explains the function of any icon or option in the window. If you click the centre button of the mouse (called 'MENU') you will get a context-sensitive menu with options. Note other systems use the right button for this purpose: on RISC OS the right hand mouse button is called 'ADJUST' and usually performs a similar role to the left hand button (called 'SELECT') with subtle differences. For example dragging a window around with SELECT also brings it to the top. Dragging it around with ADJUST keeps it at the same level so it may move underneath other windows if they are 'higher' than it on the desktop. The Help application will explain what each selection from the menu does as well.

Applications

Ordinary directories appear in a filer window as a folder icon (which shows as an open folder if it has been opened to show what is inside it). Files appear as an icon indicating their contents (a text file appears as a pen with lines of writing). Inside the Apps folder are some slightly different icons - with names starting with a "!". If you double click on these, an application will start. These are application directories. Less.

Normally a drectory will open to show its contents if you double-click on it. If you double click on a file it will find a suitable application that can deal with it and cause that to run or load it. Directories with names that begin with a '!' are slightly special - firstly they appear as a picture rather than a folder. If you double-click on this type of directory (called an application directory) then the application will run. All of the files that are needed by the application are stored inside the directory and you do not normally need to look at them. To see the contents of such a directory you need to hold down the SHIFT key whilst double-clicking.

Application directories will contain some particular files such as '!Run' (which tells it how to execute itself) and possibly '!Help' (which tells you how it works) - see below for an example:

Contents of a couple of application directories

The icon bar

The icon to the far right of the iconbar is the 'switcher' icon. If you click over this icon with SELECT, you will see a list of running applications with the memory space they occupy. As each application is given a chance to 'do its thing' it is paged into memory at a fixed point, offered the chance to do some processing, and it hands control back to the system when it has done its next operation (whatever that is). If it is a time-consuming operation it will display an hourglass indicating that it is hogging the system.

To quit an application, select MENU over its icon on the iconbar and select the option 'Quit'. This allows the application to remind you if you have not saved a file you were editing before terminating. Less.

An application may also be forced to quit by selecting 'Quit' from the filer menu over its entry in the memory display from the switcher icon. A task that has 'frozen' locking up the system may be forced to quit by pressing ALT-BREAK which presents each running application in turn starting with the most active one and offering the chance to force it to terminate.

Dragging & opening files

With a directory window open on the desktop you can drag a file (or directory) onto the desktop and it will 'stick' there. Clicking over it then has the same effect as if clicking over it in the directory window. A double-click on a file (or dragging it onto an empty part of the iconbar) causes it to be 'run' using the application which normally loads a file of that type, starting it up if it is not already running. This 'drag and drop' method is different from other systems. Less.

Drag & drop: if you start an application it does not open a window and take the initiative, asking you to select the file you want to load (in fact there is no 'load' dialogue within the application). When you double click the file you want to load, running applications are first asked whether they can deal with the type of file concerned and if none claim this ability, the default application for that file type is started up. This means several text editors may exist on the system but when you double click a text file it will load into whichever editor is already running. If you drag it to a particular editor then it will open in that application.

Another method is to drag a file icon from one window to another window. The file is then 'processed' by the receiving application. This is a familiar method for copying a file from one directory to another. Where the receiving application is not the filer, then it is equivalent to loading the file from within the application. This 'drag and drop' method is useful and intuitive.

A 'zip' file is an example of a file that contains a package of other files. Under RISC OS such 'image filing systems' work very simply: double click over them and you just get a filer window showing what is inside, exactly as if it was a directory on a disc. SparkFS works in this way - the bundled version is read only so it will prevent any changes being made to files in the zip archive but a full version is available.

Files stored on different storage devices are differentiated by filesystem and by the device on that filesystem. This replaces the arbitrary allocation of drive letters seen on some systems. The title bar of a filer window shows the full pathname and will be something like:
SDFS::Disc0.$.Directory.File or
CDFS::THISCD.$.Directory.File/xtn
When referencing files this is the preferred (full) form used by the Wimp. Less.

Note that '.' separates directories (other systems use '/') and '/' precedes a file extension (other systems use '.') and as the file type is explicitly stored on RISC OS file systems, the file extension is ignored except when importing files from a system where filetypes are inferred from the extension. Importing and exporting files to different systems is a complex subject covered in detail in the RISC OS Guide.

You can take shortcuts for example:
:0.$.fred.jim
:Disc0.fred.jim
@.jim
jim
are all equivalent if the current filesystem is SDFS: and the curently selected directory is :Disc0.fred and drive 0 on the SDFS is named 'Disc0'.

Each drive on a filesystem may be named but otherwise will be numbered from zero upwards. Reserved characters should be avoided in filenames as they have special meaning:

Input focus

With several application windows open on the desktop only one will have the 'input focus' allowing you to type information into it. To indicate this its title bar will be pale yellow with the others being pale grey. Only if the application has a text input capability can it be active in this way. Quite separately the windows are stacked so that the one on top covers any underneath. Any application (whether or not it is 'active' in terms of having the input focus) will provide a context-sensitive menu anywhere in any window it owns: hence wherever you are on the desktop or iconbar an appropriate menu of choices will be offered for selection. Menus therefore do not drop down from a window's title bar.

Configuring the machine

If you double-click over !Boot it will offer you a choice of different aspects of the computer to configure. Such things as keyboard repeat rate, what to include in the 'Apps' folder etc. may be chosen. These changes will either be applied immediately or after the next re-boot.

Last but not least RISC OS displays text on screen using anti-aliasing. This is a device to make text readable when displayed on a medium with less resolution than would be required to show the shapes exactly. It makes small text on screen readable by using a range of shades for each pixel. An example below illustrates this using the CloseUp application (and an even further magnified image)

What that readable text actually looks like when magnified