Coffee shop available to all

... not just iPad owners

The release of the sixth issue of the online computer magazine “i” coincided with an important event in the life of our publishing house. We launched a full-fledged journal portal iZine.ru , which is an analogue of a magazine kiosk, you just do not need to pay for magazines. For the new year, our booth was replenished not only with new numbers already familiar to many - Degustate.me , MANIERE de vivre , “i” , but also with two absolutely new editions: about health - taSante and about cars - Best Motor . You can learn more about our innovations under the cut.

In which direction are we moving? At the moment, our main task is to prepare a single portal for all magazines, where readers, depending on their tastes and preferences, will be able to choose their topic of interest and not only read about it, but also participate in some kind of action that each magazine offers.

Also, the portal is designed to teach readers, in fact, to read electronic journals - it's not as easy as it sounds! We know that often people don’t understand that they need to scroll through pages, but instead they find hot spots and click on them, while others, on the contrary, scroll through pages, but they can’t understand what is hidden inside each spread is a lot of interesting things. Layout elements with the inscription “Click”, although they spoil the magazine layout, are not just necessary to attract the attention of users: “Click on the button and find out even more!”.
')
You can talk a lot about usability of interfaces and the fact that the concepts of magazines released on modern tablets are intuitive, but no one has conducted extensive research, and this may well be just an impression that develops during the viewing of the demo, and an example of a pilot Russian Cosmopolitan'a it clearly shows (Has anyone tested? I - yes). It is much more difficult to ensure the usability of a real periodical. We faced this in full growth. The “Help” button was invented in Ruseltat, which has a single look and functionality for all magazines. Clicking opens a menu that allows you to get a hint on the spread, share interesting material with friends, subscribe to the magazine, view the archive of numbers, and join us on popular social networks.



Also, much work has been done on the unification of interactive elements and information in all our magazines. But here it is not without curiosities. Each magazine still strives to give its distinctive style to these elements, and if you overdo it, even the user already familiar with our magazines may not understand that "this arrow is not just a page decoration."



A separate interesting layer of research is cross-platform. No, it’s not even about software shells that can work consistently on the web under Android and iOS, but about the fundamental difference between interfaces and usability principles for the web, where mouse controls, including using the left click, and on touch panels under Windows controls and tablet devices, where all controls are built on the touch and multi-touch, and the context menu is invoked by long holding your finger on the element. Our magazines are optimized for the web and, despite the fact that they open on the Galaxy Tab, although they require some optimization and the rejection of the combination of many multimedia and interactive elements in a single turn due to the insufficient power of the processors in these devices, their viewing associated with difficulties of a different kind. It is necessary to make universal the principles of page turning, zooming in, selecting a page fragment for notes or sending to a friend. Ways to solve these problems are severely limited by the fact that the operation of familiar controls will lead to collisions with the browser functionality (for example, when assigning the zoom function to the mouse scroll wheel), or with the touch interface of the device at the OS level.



But back, actually to the new issue of the journal "i"



Everything is in motion, and I would not be surprised if in the future people become the most “immovable” creatures, and digital equipment and gadgets will do everything for us. This idea was pushed by the news from a foreign IT resource. Sydney scientists, instead of the need for a professorial work, started an interesting project - they taught robots to dance. You can find videos with the dances of Sydney scientists, as well as reviews of new products from the world of high technologies in the new issue of IT-news .



I advise you to look for interesting news of science and digital technologies on ACM TechNews . For those who do not perfectly know popular science English, we create a selection of the most interesting, in our opinion, news in Russian.



Well, now I suggest we return to the main theme of the issue - the announcement of the sixth family of Radeon video cards.



For those who missed the announcement on habrahabr.ru once again I post a link to our "video review" . If everything is clear with the AMD Radeon HD6870 / HD6850, now the main interest is focused on the generation's flagship AMD Radeon HD6970.

The first impression, personally mine, about AMD updates is a failure. The cover of the current issue clearly demonstrates my attitude to the new items released. In fact, the current situation is expected. The leadership between AMD and NVIDIA is constantly changing and is caused by the following: technologies are developed for a couple of years in advance, and it is often difficult to bet on the right trends. First, they were chasing the video memory capacity, then the memory bus width, then the number of texture units, and now the tessellation has become a stumbling block. Yes, the sixth line is faster than the fifth in the DX11, but the GTX580 still turned out to be faster. But AMD bribes users price. Time will tell who will win in the current confrontation of price and performance. Well, next week we will prepare for you a Crossfire test with 1, 2, 3 and 4 cards.



Probably, it is not a secret to anyone that we have a “small hobby” - overclocking. But this time I would like to draw your attention to a modding project called Thermaltake Logo Fan. It would seem an ordinary fan, but the content and possibilities of its modification are simply amazing!



Well, we will entertain these men this time with the help of a striptease in the Japanese subway. IqTest - test yourself on the knowledge of high technology! Enjoy reading!