Foundation RISCWorld
RISCWorld has changed, Aaron explains why...
You may have noticed a change to this issue of RISCWorld. If you haven't then may I suggest you take a quick look at the RISCWorld title logo at the top of this article. It's different. But why? Well as you can see the logo now includes the word Foundation. What does this mean? Well to put it simply RISCWorld and the Foundation RISC User magazine, as formerly published by RISCOS Ltd, have merged.
Why the change?
The idea to merge the two magazines came about some time ago. After all RW (RISCWorld) and FRU (Foundation RISC User) have more similarities than differences. They are both published on CD only, rather than being printed like the other RISC OS magazines. Both include software on each issue and neither are monthly. RISCWorld is bimonthly and FRU was published quarterly. FRU was, until recently edited by Richard Hallas who had a lot of experience with RISC OS magazine having previously edited RISC User and written for most of the others, including Qercus and Archive. Richard decided to leave to pursue other interests last year and since then RISCOS Ltd has been looking for a new editor, without success.
As you can imagine not having a regular appointed editor has meant that FRU has been missing its publication dates and is now a couple of issues behind. There was also the issue of the declining RISC OS market meaning that FRU was reaching the point where a small drop in subscribers would have had a large impact. Merging RU and RISCWorld, to create Foundation RISCWorld seemed, to all of us, to be a sensible solution.
What's the benefit?
There are a number of benefits. Firstly FRW gets more subscribers. More subscribers means I get a bigger budget for each issue. A bugger budget means that subscribers gets more articles to read. Well, that's the plan. It also means that we now have access to the thousands of articles published in RISC User and FRU over nearly 20 years. I will be cherry picking some interesting and related articles and re-printing them over time. In particular I hope to be taking a historical snapshot of things as they were both 20 and 10 years ago. This will make for an interesting comparison.
Another benefit is that we now have access to all the applications published by RISC User over the years. These have only previously been available on the RISC user Nutshells CD, but if there is something that relates to the content of a particular issue we will be publishing it.
We also hope to be including some of the FRU regular series into FRW in the near future. These changes will happen gradually, as an example this issue had already been planned some time before the merger took place. This is because I tend to work 3 issues ahead. So even though I am writing this in early May, I am already working on the content for the next two issues.
I would be very interested to read any feedback readers have on the alterations we are making and on the merger of the two magazines. We would also be interested to hear from any authors who used to write for RISC User, or Foundation RISC Users and who would be interested in joining the Foundation RISCworld team. In the meantime I hope you enjoy this issue. Now head over to my editorial for some good old fashioned whinging...
Aaron