Drag'n'Drog or Archive

I have made the mad decision to present TWimp to the ROUGOL meeting on January 20th. I’ve never presented before so this is first for me.

It is a module that helps you create Wimp applications in a new and different way for any language that supports calling SWIs using nothing but numbers and text to say what you want to happen. I have an application that runs in BASIC, Python and Lua. I started Lua today and already have a Wimp application running.

In planning this presentation for ROUGOL, I am realising that this is something significantly much bigger to present that I first realised.

Perhaps a series in a magazine may help on top of the ROUGOL presentation, and the ROUGOL would be an introduction.

If I was to ask what level of programmers subscribe to Drag’n’drop and Archive magazines, what would you say? I would not want to write the same article for both but would be willing to write for both. Are there any other publications that may be of interest? I am aware of the WROCC magazine. What else is published?

I’ll mostly leave it for others to judge, but I will say that I suspect Archive is traditionally seen as a fairly formal RISC OS magazine, interspersed with beginner-friendly material. We do have a lot of programming-related articles, and have covered everything from WIMP programming to Python to BASIC to C, and ARM assembly, over the years, and we’d be delighted to cover T-Wimp. And I’ve no doubt that Drag n Drop would too. Such articles are usually a multi-part affair.

Publish yourself on the Internet, and give explicit allowance for republishing (and possibly translation – thinking of GAG News atm), so publishers could just use it as they see fit? It surely sounds interesting enough that it would be a shame to hide it in one magazine.

No solution is going to make you rich! The Icon Bar would appreciate some content, too, I expect.

That said, supporting RO media is a good thing, too.

It surely sounds interesting enough that it would be a shame to hide it in one magazine.

Time and effort is taken by the writers, myself, and the proofreaders, to make sure subscribers feel they are reading something of quality. It’s not easy being an old-fashioned printed RISC OS publication in 2024. I appreciate every single word that someone takes the time to write for Archive. On the flipside, I agree that the content doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be, locked away. It is nicety for any publication to have some sort of exclusivity for 2 or 3 months, but then I really think it’s a good thing to share the content on the writer’s website or some other online site, and I encourage that to happen. It’s a win-win for everyone.

On a related note, it’s my intention to “open source” old issues of Archive, starting from the first volume. There’s no point in keeping it locked away, and there is a huge amount of valuable content in there. I want to get to a point that when an issue reaches a certain age it is automatically freely available to all on the web.

It’s not easy being an old-fashioned printed RISC OS publication in 2024. I appreciate every single word that someone takes the time to write for Archive. On the flipside, I agree that the content doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be, locked away. It is nicety for any publication to have some sort of exclusivity for 2 or 3 months, but then I really think it’s a good thing to share the content on the writer’s website or some other online site, and I encourage that to happen.

I have, in the cave stash, a collection of old CDs which include Archive CDs. How financially viable these were at the time I don’t know – the problem being that they were effectively a batch production at a guess at market size.
Modernising a little, we have USB memory sticks; could that be a means of adding to the income with annual releases of printed magazine content?
Unless people feel that straight to web publication is the way to go.