Joe Taylor, the programmer behind the AppBasic development environment, visited us to show how easy it is to write multitasking desktop applications using the system. Based around the Toolbox, AppBasic provides a modular structure through which to access the facilities available from within a BASIC program. The clever bit is the ease with which simple utilities can be realised – to anyone who has tried wrestling with the more conventional RISC OS development tools in the past, Joe’s presentation must have seemed like a breath of fresh air!