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Can anyone suggest or recommend development tools or documentation for writing graphical applications on the Acorn RISC OS on the Raspberry PI? This OS is newly supported on the Raspberry PI computer, and I would like to be able to write graphical applications for that OS. It is however quite hard to identify working tools for the version on PI, given the long history of RISC OS, the (multiple) incompatible revisions of the OS, and relatively scant resources for RISC OS on PI.

One set of development tools bundled on the official RISC OS SD card image is the Charm high level programming language.

There is an implementation of the Lua scripting language available too, with extensions to integrate with the WIMP GUI environment.

grrussel
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The RISC OS Programmers reference manuals provide details of the available SWI's (API's).

If your happy with using the inbuilt BBC BASIC and / or ARM assemblers, open a text editor of your choosing (I used to like Zap) and simply Google for BBC BASIC wimp and pick a tutorial e.g. Beginners Guide to WIMP Programming OR Wimp Programming on RISC OS

If you wish to play in something other than BBC Basic or ARM assembler, RISC OS open sell a USB stick with assorted compilers and a set of DDE (Desktop Dev Environment) tools, which I assume are PI compatible. Unfortunately the few high level GUI based development tools, such as Helix Basic won't work on the PI.

arober11
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Raspberry Pi RISC OS System Programming Revealed by Bruce Smith looks pretty good covering BBC BASIC, ARM Assembly and some C. It includes some WIMP development.

Also, check out the Documents folder on the Raspberry Pi RISC OS release. There should be a subfolder to do with programming which contains an introduction to BBC BASIC and the developer's guide to WIMP programming mentioned in @arober11's answer above. I think there are a couple of sample programs included as well.

BWHazel
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