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So, all the cool kids these days have iPads and other tablety things are taking off and selling like pancakes. I actually don't own one myself, but I do have an iPod Touch which is just a mini iPad nowadays...

But, anyone think it would be cool to have an interactive wargameing magazine? Focusing on all worthwhile army men games, not just GW stuff.. talking about news and new releases, with other stuff like battle reports, modeling & painting articles & tutorials, videos, reviews, etc, all in an interactive PDF that can be viewed on all those fun devices, or just regular computers too... I don't mean a print magazine saved as a PDF, but a high quality mixed media thing, an interactive fun-zine!

I've been kicking around ideas in my head for something like this, I know how to make PDFs like that and do the design work and I own all the software you need (I do design stuff for a living), but I know I'd never be able to handle all the content myself... so I dunno where to begin.

How do you mean interactive? Also, are you familiar with the one Warseer puts out? I think it's called Firebase.

It sounds like it could be a cool project. Perhaps you could recruit some people from other 40k article type sites? Though, I honestly don't have much experience with the whole 40k magazine scene. I mostly just read forums.





Posted from my iPad

I thought Firebase was gone?

But anyway, maybe interactive wasn't the right word.. more like mixed media kind of thing with news articles to read, but, for instance, instead of a photo of a new product in the article, you have a video of someone talking about it or even just a 360 degree view of it spinning around. Instead of flipping to the next page to read more, you just swipe across your screen and the text scrolls in the same place.. or say you're reading an article about all the new Warmachine models released this month, you can have photo galleries showing all the new products and just swipe across the screen to see the next pic, stuff like that.

I work for a travel company for my day job, lots of the magazines we advertise with are moving to formats like this. Lots of really cool things you can do, all in one PDF so you don't need to be a programmer and design special apps anymore.

It is? Oh man, that's what I get for being as distractable as a kitten.

This sounds like a good idea. I'm sure you could find some like minded people on one of these wargamey forums and put something together.

It's not impossible to embed video footage into a pdf (wasn't even as far back as Adobe 5.0) and you can even put fillable forms into them.

I need to learn more about Adobe (I just use it to tidy up pdfs - and discover how little GW lock theirs up).

yeah PDFs can to tons of cool things now and with tablets becoming so popular they're gonna be adding more and more features to em. A lot of the cool new bells & whistles are built into InDesign.. it does a lot more than just generic desktop publishing now.

But even locked PDFs are easy to unlock, there's lots of little programs out there you can get to unlock em. I have one on my mac at work, we get locked pdfs all the time where we have to get an image or something out of it, and it's quicker to unlock it and do it myself than email the guy half way across the globe to get the password from them.

I'd want to look into ebook distribution too, I dunno how interactive those kinds of files can be though.