More Information on Arachne Software

Arachne Software was an Acorn Registered Developer until the end. We have been developing software for the Acorn platform for many years, and under the name of Arachne Software since around 1991.

I set up Arachne Software when we realised that the software we were developing required us to become Acorn Registered Developers, and we have been Registered Developers ever since. At the time, we were working on an animation utility to produce animations of molecules rotating. The molecules were drawn using a DOS program running under the PC emulator. Our utility controlled the PC emulator to capture frames, then saved a free-standing animation.

The animations were shown at a Royal Society of Chemistry meeting at Winchester School, at about the time when Acorn released the A5000. It was immediately clear that there would be a great deal of interest in a native molecular modeller for the Acorn platform, so Molecular Modeller became our first product.

The Molecular Modeller was improved extensively over the next few years, and marketed on a very tight budget. It is still available, and there is an upgrade elsewhere on this site which makes it StrongARM-compatible.

Arachne was then approached by TAG developments, who had heard of our Molecular Modeller from Acorn Computers. TAG put our Molecular Modeller in their Secondary Education catalogue, and sold a lot more copies for us!

Later, TAG were looking for someone to convert HyperStudio to the Acorn, approached Arachne, and I am very pleased that we eventually got the contract!

Other software by Arachne has included:

Accounts

A simple, if rather unorthodox, in-house accounts package which has been used to manage Arachne's accounts for years!

Arachne Interactive Books

An extremely simple multimedia-authoring system I designed to allow someone to produce simple electronic 'books' with sound, graphics and text (including HyperText links to other pages). Sadly, none of the books were ever finished, but the AIBL system was used with the Molecular Modeller.

BookBase2

a new version of a database for encouraging pupils to write book reviews which I had written a few years earlier; this is available as a finished, documented product if anyone else is interested, although it was really written for a specific school.

Molecular Raytracer

A raytracer, which we still haven't released, which interfaces with the Molecular Modeller to produce beautiful ray-traced molecules.

Quaero

An application which works in conjunction with the Pineapple Video Digitiser to identify moving objects from a video camera and record their movement.

RiscOopLib

An object-oriented C++ library; for more details click here

HyperStudio

The the first versions of HyperStudio for RISC OS were produced by Arachne working on a contract basis for TAG Developments Ltd, it soon became obvious that I would need to work full-time on the project. I spent two years working at TAG Developments on new versions of HyperStudio; the original project turned out to be far-larger than anyone had really expected, and continual development to the Macintosh version meant that there was plenty of work to do.

HyperStudio is described here .

Although I have now left TAG Developments Ltd, support for HyperStudio will continue from Arachne on a consultancy basis, as it began.

Tim Barrett's SampleManager (see below) is used in HyperStudio (and is significantly better than what we used before).

RiscOopLib, which is written by Tim and myself, is still under development. HyperStudio is written using it.

New products:

SampleMan

A licensable module which plays back sound samples better than anything else I know; for more details, click here.

Patient Profiler

This application allows a GP to record all the information necessary to produce the statistics required by the government in the various audits of health care which have recently been introduced. It has been designed to allow the information to be collected, and the reports produced, with the minimum interruption to the Doctor's more useful work of looking after his/her patients. It is Year 2000 Compliant.

Patient Profiler will run on any Acorn computer running at least RISC OS 3.1 with 4MB memory and a hard disk (minimum recommended screen resolution is 800x600).

Patient Profiler has been used for about 18 months by a single-handed Doctor with about 1600 patients.It is being used on an old A4 with an external monitor.

Arachne hasn't been as active as it used to be over the last few years, but we still have plans:

Installer Builder

Our Installer (for installing applications from floppy disc or CD onto a user's hard disk) was used for all of TAG's installed Acorn products while I worked there. We also wrote an Installer Builder, which automatically builds disk images (including the installer) ready for copying onto floppies. This saved TAG a lot of time, and made the process of creating installation disk sets much easier and more reliable. For more information, click here. When I get a chance, I'll make it available as a free download.

Java Molecular Viewer

A few years ago we started work on a Java Molecular Viewer, using some of the technologies from our Acorn Molecular Modeller. We plan to add this to our website.

Many people have been involved with Arachne since it was set up, and I am grateful to them all. It would be difficult to choose people, so I will just list a few who spring to mind.

Jim Cameron - involved in the Chemistry-related bits of the Molecular Modeller (predicting the shapes of molecules, etc.), and more recently in the HyperStudio cross-platform support code

Andrew Powell - for all his encouragement with Molecular Modeller

Mark Vevers - for introducing me to the 'Archimedes'

Tim Barrett - The RayTracer, RiscOopLib, HyperStudio, SampleManager

David Parker, Rachel Boxall etc. - your invaluable marketing of Molecular Modeller in the beginning

John Newton - I am asked to write, 'bottomless thanks go do my dear friend, and ex-housemate Mr John Newton for his peerless renditions of spiders and webs and things!'. Guess who drew that spider?