I don’t really get excited by new technology, however, the modern magazine editor would be a fool to bury their head in the sand and pretend there isn’t a world of publishing outside of printed paper. They would also be out of business. At Wargames Illustrated we already embrace Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, online flip-books, and digitally downloadable PDFs as a way of ‘pushing’ the magazine, but I am painfully aware that to ride the tide of where most people do their reading – via a screen – we need to provide Wi readers with a version of the magazine that they can fit in their pocket, view easily, and access constantly, vis-à-vis, on their phone. To that end, later this year we will be launching Wi Mobile. The mobile/cell phone screen friendly version of Wargames Illustrated magazine. PDFs are fine for reading on a PC screen, but far from ideal for reading on a mobile, so it isn’t good enough to expect Wi subscribers to struggle to read a PDF article on a phone screen, with all the zooming in and out that entails - we had to come up with something better - so we have. When you first ‘load’ Wi Mobile on a smartphone it looks very much like a PDF copy of the magazine, but once you press the magic ‘Article view’ button it springs into life as a easily-readable, mobile-friendly article, just like reading an article on Wikipedia, or the BBC or CNN websites (on a mobile/cell). A picture is worth a thousand words, so see for yourself below how Wi articles appear in ‘Article view’ on a mobile. Pretty good hey? I can even read the article to you, ‘Audible style’. But what’s all this got to do with Editors and Exploits? Well, Myself and Wi media guy Joe have been working hard on perfecting Wi Mobile over the last few weeks, so genuinely, this has been my most recent exploit, and not just a thinly veiled advert for our forthcoming service (… although two things can be true at the same time). I’m really excited (and a bit nervous) to see how Wi Mobile will be received by our subscribers when we launch later this year. For myself and many of our readers the paper version of Wi will continue to be our standard bearer, but having an on-screen pocket version of ‘the world’s foremost wargames magazine’ has got to be a welcome string to our bow.
