If you are looking for a last minute RISC OS gift, or something interesting to dip into over the festive period, the latest edition of the long-running Drag'N'Drop magazine is now available. You can also buy all the back issues on a USB stick. The magazine is supplied as a PDF which you can read on any device.
 
This edition is 30 pages of news, reviews and technical articles and always reminds me of the Acorn magazines of yesteryear. Here are some highlights...
 
Licht is an interesting program to type in which takes its inspiration from the work of Roy Lichtenstein, adding dotted fill patterns to draw shapes. It is written in BASIC and also a nice exploration of manipulating draw files directly.
 
if you need to copy files from your Android phone to RISC OS there is a nice tutorial using !FTPc and other free software.
 
A short machine code utility (VMG) will turn sound samples into voice modules for easy use in your own code.
 
The first part of a new series on Fonts delves into how RISC OS fonts work and how the file format is stored, complete with a BASIC utility to examine the font data.
 
We have also reached part 3 of the tutorial on RSDP, and we are now writing real programs to generate music using the free software.
 
For the adventurous, there is also an article on writing your own filings system.
 
Finally Draw Stroke shows how to draw sophisticated lines with complex styles easily in your BASIC code.
 
The Magazine is available from the website and you can also buy a version with the listing.