4]------------------ 3]EDITOR'S TWO CENTS 3]By Richard Ramella 4]------------------ 3]FIFTH ANNIVERSARY This is the 60th consecutive monthly issue of JUMPDISK -- five full years. I'm proud. There's no reason not to continue publication. The subscriber base and retail sales are at a comfortable level. We continue to be able to pay all our expenses promptly. Of late I have begun to consider what I might face if JUMPDISK survives another five years. It causes me a bit of apprehension. My greatest fear is the publication will suffer from hardening of the arteries. I've seen it happen to magazines. I propose to look for ways in JUMPDISK's sixth year to refresh its outlook and content. If I succeed, you'll be reading the sixth-anniversary message a year from now. After grumbling about the possibility of taking off a month, I have decided there will no break in the monthly continuity of JUMPDISK. Instead, I may make the August issue a tongue-in-cheek "Editor's Vacation Special," in which the disk is filled with easily edited activities. Maybe less tech, but more fun, pictures and light matter. I won't stint in seeking good material. If such an issue is not poorly received, it could become an annual tradition. Finally, I will resist the temptation to take on additional projects. My most important job is publishing issues of JUMPDISK, every month, on time, and filled with the best material I can find. I must overcome the Cloud Cuckoo Land syndrome of "Wouldn't it be great if we . . ." published another bookdisk? distributed some European games? added a second PDQ disk? did a special disk for children? distributed another disk magazine? offered a low-cost image-digitizing service? conducted another contest requiring days of preparation and days of record keeping and judging? cataloged and offered the 200-disk PD collection of the Mars User Group? This is not to say we won't be coming at you with additional ideas. In the past year we successfully launched PDQ, took on Newsflash distribution, published PowerPacker Professional, and managed JUMPDISK through its evolutionary changes. I think in the next year we will seek some ways to startle you. This may produce a few dud ideas and some mildly excessive behavior on our part. It will also help keep the juices flowing and avoid hardened arteries. Finally, I want to once again admit that JUMPDISK World Headquarters is located in the garage of my home. More importantly, it is located in the creative minds of contributors from around the world. Their talents make JUMPDISK the best in its field. The very best. While JUMPDISK is solely owned by me, I have thousands of bosses -- you. Keep telling me what to do and I will weigh your requests against those of others. 3]OOPSIE! The June 1991 issue of .info Magazine incorrectly reported that I had filed a civil suit against a Wiconsin firm which is selling copies of copyright Amiga software, I have not filed any suit and have never stated I had or would. I believe the error occurred due to a sentence I wrote in a letter to more than 100 Amiga developers and Amiga-specific magazines. In that letter I passed along facts I had gathered concerning the activities of the firm in question, Disks & Docs, operated by Richard A. Zeman of La Crosse, WI. The sentence that possibly led to the error in reporting: "I also wish to provide you with the name of an attorney who is currently preparing a civil action in concert with and on the behalf of several firms whose Amiga-specific products are apparently being sold by the firm." And I went on to name the attorney and give his address. This inclusion was at the request of the attorney, whom I had contacted only to give him information, not to seek his legal representation. I neither stated nor inferred JUMPDISK was one of the parties working on possible litigation. In months to come I hope to report a resolution to the situation. 3]HONEY, THEY SHRUNK THE AMIGAWORLD AmigaWorld Magazine, which used to brag it was so special it had to be wider than other magazines, did a shrink job on itself with the June 1991 issue. It went from 9 by 10-7/8 inches to 8 by 10-3/4 inches. I grabbed my pica stick, did a comparison of the two transition issues and made an interesting discovery. Here's how they stack up: ISSUE TOTAL PAGES SQUARE INCHES AD PAGES EDITORIAL PAGES ------ ----------- ------------- -------- --------------- Apr 91 116 11,353 57 59 May 91 100 9,787 61 39 The clever reader will note the magazine not only reduced its dimensions, it dropped by 16 pages and ran four MORE pages of advertising than the month before. What was to be done to make up for all this cutting? Why, that was simple. They took it out of editorial space. The issue had only 39 pages of editorial material -- 20 fewer pages than the month before. By contrast, the 72-page May 1991 issue of INFO managed 43 editorial pages, and the 100-page May 1991 Amazing Computing gave its readers 69 pages of editorial matter. In fairness to AmigaWorld, it is more tightly edited than Amazing, so an argument may be made that AmigaWorld's editorial compression left the wheat while letting the chaff blow away in the wind. 3]DENVER DEVCON I'm looking forward to the annual U.S. Amiga Developers Conference set for Sept. 3-7 in Denver, CO. It will be an opportunity to find out what Commodore plans (within limits of what they will release to the press), to see what companies and developers are up to, and to renew acquaintances. 3]RIPPING OUT PAGE ONE In a drawer labelled CORRECTION you will find the POWERPACKER.LIBRARY file which was required to correctly run the animations in the June issue. The subscriber version of that issue shipped without that file. It didn't matter for 95 percent of the subscribers; they already had the file copied to their Workbenches from the November 1990 issue. The error eluded me because my Workbench had the needed library and the PPANIM program does not announce it's seeking the file unless it can't find it. I discovered the error the morning several thousand retail copies were due to be shipped -- a Friday. Through the weekend, with the help of family members, every JUMPDISK was cut out of its plastic envelope, recopied, verified, and replaced. The shipment went out on schedule Monday morning. The lesson I learned: I will never again check the archive copy of a given issue with anything other than an unchanged copy of Workbench. That way, and that way only, any calls to unusual libraries or files will be revealed. 4]END OF TEXT