Official Pandora Magazine

[jottt]

...and traditionally the January-magazine is issued around March....and might be delayed a bit further...not to mention the printer-strike, the big paper factory fire and of course the totally strange breakdown of most vehicels caused by spontaneous electromagnetic disturbances from outer space.

No...probably a magazine for the Pandora is doomed.

 

[Pleng]

No I mean more like a big .ZIP file you extract to the root of the SD card and its got everything ready to roll .. heck, I'd even consider subscribing to such a service and paying for it, to be honest ..

A few guys could set up a dropbox to maintain the image. A torrent could be created with all the apps packaged up into a zip and a link to that torrent could be placed inside the dropbox's public directory. So whenever people want to update they point to the same url each time which will give them the latest torrent.

 

[Wootson]

I edited the opening post a tiny bit, so that it isn't so much focused on a paper version of a potential magazine. As that would possibly be a too high goal for a starting magazine.

Also, a digital magazine has the overall advantage that it can be read by far more people. Something which will eventually serve the community in the long run. You also have the possibility to setup a Torrent or something like that which includes all the new software, videos and so on.

 

[torpor]

A few guys could set up a dropbox to maintain the image. A torrent could be created with all the apps packaged up into a zip and a link to that torrent could be placed inside the dropbox's public directory. So whenever people want to update they point to the same url each time which will give them the latest torrent.

I like this idea a lot, and I'd also like to see an example implementation to see how well it would work .. I wonder if its worth doing for the Wiz, perhaps?

 

[Wootson]

A few guys could set up a dropbox to maintain the image. A torrent could be created with all the apps packaged up into a zip and a link to that torrent could be placed inside the dropbox's public directory. So whenever people want to update they point to the same url each time which will give them the latest torrent.

I like this idea a lot, and I'd also like to see an example implementation to see how well it would work .. I wonder if its worth doing for the Wiz, perhaps?

Well you could also focus on the community as a whole. By that I mean every other open source handheld device as well. Broadens the audience.

There's literally tons of stuff to write about.

 

[jottt]

The more I think about it the more I enjoy the thought of it.

Especially for people like me. I can't browse all Forums/Blogs/other pages and look for interesting stuff everyday so I would welcome a regular source of compressed, presorted information that keeps me informed about:

New software, mods, problems, tweaks, hacks, archievements, all kind of stuff that might be interesting.

I would limit it mostly to "Pandora and related", to not loose the focus. There is no sense in having a magazine that tries to cover everything, yet lacks details.

I never understood those "C64, Amiga, PC, Atari"-Magazines. Most of their stuff never interested me, while what I enjoyed to read was quite short...so I bought Amiga-Only-Mags instead. I could nto afford having all those Systems at home and if I could, I would have bought another specialized magazine instead of one for all I guess.

If you do that monthly there will probably still be a lot to write. Especially if you cover "related" stuff as well (say: Stuff about Emulators and their games, etc.


Let's call it...

The Pandorist
Rooftop Review

...no ideas anymore

But you could write a column called "Rooftop Ramblings..."

 

[Fzero]

I only ever really got into MEAN MACHINES Magazine, i collected all of those, other console mags didnt compare imo, and i got a few old PS1/2 mags that had freebie cover discs

However, i love this idea!!!

Dont any of you read iGIZMO? - Its a great tech magazine, online zine, and looks just like a printed publication, you can zoom into articles, turn pages one at a time etc....
check what i mean here:

http://issue.igizmo.co.uk/1E4bc8748094776012.cde

Something like that?
I think thats the best thing to do, and just email everyone the link when you got a new issue out.

I hope this happens, i would really like to see interviews from the developers, and of course from OPT, and would like to see a 'readers mailbag' section.

game reviews, app reviews, this would be nice for informing us.

tips section would be great!

 

[Monk]

Personally, I'd rather see something a bit more electronics-based than a print magazine "but on the computer". I haven't seen a lot of experimention in this area, but I have seen one comic-type publication some time in the last 5 years that quite impressed, as it was designed for a screen format (landscape) and reasonable resolution, and was to some degree interactive. It took advantage of what computers and Internet offered and did its best not to rely on what print offers.

The downside was, any attempt to print it out wasn't worth a darn. But interesting, IMHO. Wish I could remember where it was/what it was called, now, but surely "interactive screen based" has got to be better than "printout based but on a Pandora screen"?

 

[Fzero]

iGizmo is an interactive online zine Monk, but every issue has been portrait, so my guess is you seen another one, probably uses the same scripts though, to make it work?

thats the way to go imo, and if someone wants to print each issue out and keep them on their coffee table, they can.

Also i think the pages of the zine [on iGizmo site] is essentially just one large image, loaded into flash content or something, so if 'The Pandorist' [or whatever it shall be named] had multiple writers out on the field, each could create their own page using photoshop or something, and then submit it to the main man, who would then put the pages/images together and upload to the host svr

if this happens, id be happy to pay a reasonable subs for it, for peoples time and effort

id also contribute to a domain name and web hosting cost






i used to collect so many mags back in the day, from 2000AD to Mean Machines to TOXIC, now i get one publication that comes out once every 2 months --- I need another regular read please

 

[Monk]

Apologies, I hadn't seen iGizmo and didn't follow your link - yes, that is very much along the lines of my thoughts, though it should be better suited to an average (or Pandora) screen layout than portrait... and of course a "download to view offline" option would be crucial IMHO. some good use of interactivivity there, with zoom in and out as well as (more importantly?) context hotspots, but my usual niggle with flash - you can't copy and paste the text, as it's an image

 

[Wootson]

The content matters more to me than the presentation of the content. So an überly fancy hipster magazine with bells and whistles would not be my personal choice. Making something like that iGizmo magazine is also a LOT of work. They probably have a very large team to set that up. They also use external services such as YouTube to some extent. When you want to create something that could also be read 25 years from now, that is certainly NOT the way to go. These external services might die, and then your content also died. So if you would want to include videos and that sort of things, I would rather create downloadable files (Torrents are best probably, because of data sharing), or provide people with a bunch of discs or something.

So, no external services, only the magazine and the digital content which is all separate from outer sources. A sort of encyclopedia to some extent.

 

[Fzero]

yeah i guess you on point there

i wouldnt include youtube embeds and that, as pandora probably couldnt play them back anyway [not without loading them seperatly using some plug-in mod?]

but dont think its that over complicated really, iGizmo have added fancy bells n whistles, yes, but it doesnt need to be, i have even used a book template [flash] before for a photo gallery website i done once, that was as simple as creating the page in an image format [jpg/png] and thats it, done, you just add that image file name into the placeholder in the template, and its done.

there are loads of types, and all are simple to use, but i guess even having this 'turn page' effect is a bit fancy, and not essential, if you want just interested in getting the content

these type templates i mean

http://www.flashmint.com/show-category-flipbook.html



either way though, it was just an idea as we were talking about an online mag, personally i would be just as happy if it was a plain old PDF to d/l --- the content within the pages is whats going to be important eh

 

[Monk]

Definately no offsite linked storage - a downloadable copy for offsite usage/archiving is essential IMHO. Yes, it can be a lot of work to include hotspots, zooming, video etc. - but don't ignore the amount of work that goes into a printable magazine either.

I suspect that PDF files can include videos, but I'm not sure what kind of authoring software that would require. I think for the Mac soemthing cheap like "Comic Life" can ambed videos into a PDF, but don't quote me. I also suspect that it would be more of a standard pain than it would be worth do put videos and/or audio into a PDF file.

An all-out gonzo tech-fest of "Wow look we can do this" would probably be as garish as those "My First Desktop-Publishing Effort" type documents - you know, 15 fonts per page with garish colours/patterns and so forth. Just as it's possible not to overdo paper documents by putting too many "zing" type elements in, it ought to be possible to keep the tone down on a more interactive document.

What we probably need though is someone who WANTS to run such a magazine first, and then see what technologies and techniques THEY want to employ. That might be more helpful than saying what we want to read with no-one to pull it together? (NB I haven't read... well, most of the thread, alas. Just throwing some comments out there).

 

[Wootson]

Monk has a good point there. If nobody is going to pull the cart, there won't happen very much.

Hereby I would like to say that I would love to write for such a magazine. Things like reviews for old/new video games, and items about the old days of gaming.

On a steady basis, of course. Not some one-time action.

 

[Fzero]

yeah thats true - should really let the person who is going to do this, decide how they like to work


i would spend time putting this together, in an electonic format [I dont have first clue about printed publishing]
my problem however is I wouldnt know about actual content myself, but if others have interviews/reviews/tips/stuff-for-the-mag, id be happy to put it all together and put it online for all to view or d/l

you might not have guessed it ... but i have a fair amount of free time on my hands fairly often lol

 

[Prometheus]

I've just been catching up on the thread, and I have a question for the Brits out there: Do any of you remember Digitiser, on Channel 4's teletext service, and am I the only one being reminded of it right now?

(For those who don't know it, it was a games "magazine" that was published every day of the week but Sunday. There's some information on it here. Due to the technology behind it, it really had to put content first, and it very often shone.)

 

[Fzero]

nope, but i only ever used teletext for finding out what was on the local cinema - and that was a nightmare, having to go through all the alphabet to get to the town i was checking for

 

[WhiteFalcon]

I like this "pandazine" idea too, in digital form, besides news it could also include old game reviews, like the thread Skeezix started here some time ago. I bet I am not the only one who likes reading reviews of old time classics for various platforms, screenshot comparisons of various platforms the game was released for etc. Some sort of a mix of news and a retromag.

 

[Jourdy288]

Apologies, I hadn't seen iGizmo and didn't follow your link - yes, that is very much along the lines of my thoughts, though it should be better suited to an average (or Pandora) screen layout than portrait... and of course a "download to view offline" option would be crucial IMHO. some good use of interactivivity there, with zoom in and out as well as (more importantly?) context hotspots, but my usual niggle with flash - you can't copy and paste the text, as it's an image

You can save the Flash images, though. Aside from that...

Maybe not a full-blown magazine, but definitely a web-based 'zine would be great .. one thing thats always irked me about this scene is the lack of cohesive information about news and exciting things .. well, certainly the "View New Content" button on these forums delivers a handfuls of granules daily, but if there were a more pro-active publication that really delivered interesting articles and news items around the edges of the scene, I think it could do well.

Another thing I think we as a community need is an effort to put together really well-packaged full-blown SD card images for 'plug and play' style gaming .. and I don't mean the grey-market ROMS and all that stuff, but legit apps that are meant to be spread far and wide. Plus if someone put together a list of free/PD/copy'able ROMs for each emulator, then we could have the situation where a big fat Emu disk could be made, containing everything properly set up and in order, and then just add ROMs to it as we find them. But imagine if there was a real group activity set up to build nice plug-'n-play SD card images for easy-to-use gaming ..

I know, this is what .PNDs are for, but I really look forward to a .PND-building group forming somewhere around the edges, making regular releases. This would be another good thing for a publication dedicated to the Pandora scene to support .. sorta like the way many PC mags in the UK go to the effort (or used to) of making CD's for the cover ..

I think you've got this down. It would be awesome to have all the projects around OP, like games, programs, etc., organized together like in the file archive, but included would be some information about the project, latest news, latest release, etc, that would be downloaded with the 'magazine', so it would just be a matter of opening the already donwloaded .PND and the game/program/whatever being worked on could be evaluated by the end user.

 

[Pleng]

I can provide hosting as well as developing a website which will allow the creators to upload and present their zines.