Drag'n'Drop magazine is now back into a regular publishing schedule. The latest edition was released at the recent South-West Show and reviewed here.
If you are not familiar with Drag'n'Drop it is a quarterly RISC OS magazine published as a PDF file. It reminds me of the 90s style Acorn magazines and is a mixture of news, reviews, listing, and tutorials. The listing are also available to save you typing.
The magazine tries to appeal to new users as well as die hard RISC OS users and there is always a beginners page and plenty of tips and hints.
The magazine always starts with an editorial, and it is interesting to see a number of changes introduced in production of this edition. Chris is now using an ArmBook as his main machine (which was on his stand at the Show) and the magazine is now produced on Impression Style in preference to EasiWriter. Chris comments on how easy and intuitive it was to switch back to Impression after a decade away!
There are two pages of news with lots of updates on both free and commercial software. One of the big advantages of the magazine in PDF format is the live links which take you straight to the downloads.
The magazine includes a Review of the ArmBook with details. I would personally like to have more of Chris's impressions of the machine and I hope he will give us updates in future editions.
There is also a review of the Star Mine game from Amcog Games. Clearly the reviewer enjoyed it!
If it inspires you to write your own, there is an introductory tutorial from the Amcog Games author on 3D graphics with a short BASIC listing to try.
The ongoing tutorial on Schema2 has reached part3, and we learn about Matrices and circular references. There is also a detailed worked example of creating a contour map from spreadsheet data (with lots of screenshots).
There is a BBC BASIC listing for an Application called TSV2Draw application. As will all the listings, there is lots of explanation of the code, and you can buy the code already typed in.
Another useful BASIC utility is also included to create Round Boxes (to just about any specification) as Draw files.
I enjoyed reading the latest edition of Drag'n'Drop and look forward for the Spring edition. You can get your copy from here, and also purchase a USB drive with all the previous issues.
Drag'n'Drop website
