The Reader's Feedback

Robert Lock and Readers

Our best article vote will take a one month sabbatical. Now that we're monthly, we're adding an extra month for vote gathering.

Why We're Here

The Reader's Feedback serves several purposes. The principal one is self-explanatory. I read every Editor's Feedback card that comes in, and your comments help me in defining/refining the direction and goals of the magazine.

We use the feedback as a means of showing authors and potential authors what kinds of material we're looking for. Frequently you as a reader, or as a group of readers, are quite precise at defining needs.

The Feedback cards are also a means of cluing me in on problems with vendors, problems with hardware and software, and specifically problems with any of our advertisers. Although we can't look into every possible problem, we do use the Feedback cards to show us potential problem areas. Our measure of this is generally quantity of responses.

Keep writing, and we'll keep reading. Thanks for your continued support. From our end we'll try to remain the best resource magazine around.

And Now Our Readers

I am a high school science teacher. I am a novice Apple Computer programmer. I would appreciate COMPUTE! articles designed to enhance the programming ability of novice Apple programmers ... In-depth articles of Apple Poking, Peeking and Calls would be very helpful ...

We are constantly looking for good material oriented at beginning and intermediate programmers. Tutorial articles are especially welcomed. I know there are experienced Apple programmers out there that could write the kinds of articles, short programming notes, and such that our reader above is talking about. Well group?

I'd like to see more articles on larger OSI Systems.

As with the Apple reader above, we're always looking for good OSI material. Educational and business users should remember that their applications articles can help other readers, even if they don't share a common machine. An article describing the method of developing a specific applications program can be of as much use to others as the specific program itself.

I have had an Atari for six months and if it wasn 't for the computer magazines I would still be trying to count votes, etc. or measure a bicycle wheel... I bought a computer to expand knowledge and not play games. Why don't the software people realize this — if it wasn't for your writers I would feel I had a white elephant with 1 leg.

We try to present a mix of material in every issue that will be of use to our broad range of consumers of computers. Thus, an article on Player Missile Graphics, while immediately relevant to its title, is relevant to programmers developing applications programs that can become more useful by implementing these concepts. Atari is slowly releasing a business oriented applications library, and other vendors are getting involved as well. We would certainly like to see more applications programs submitted here.

A Call For Generality

In reflecting on the now final mix of this issue, I realize (as always) a few things to change next time around. The article on the line-oriented text editor is discussed for both Apple and PET. The program presented is for PET, with the author comment that the Apple version requires only I/O changes. The article wasn't supplied to us with those changes, and by the time I realized it, it was too late to get them... or to hold the article back. If you send us an article that's applicable to more than one 6502 machine (and that's the kind of article we dearly love to get), please make sure you include the versions for the various machines.

If you translate a program written for one machine in COMPUTE! so that it will run on your (different) machine, send it in. It helps make the magazine more useful for all readers. We don't have the programming staff here to do it automatically, but with thousands of programmers out there reading the magazine, I'm sure some of you must be translating.

Until next time ...