Netbeans Day is happening at Moscone and walking by San Francisco I had a chance to interview Leonardo Galvão - the magazine's editor. On board of a Star Bucks Cafe, Leonardo gave some tips about the new online resource for the Netbeans users.

What is Netbeans Magazine ? Netbeans Magazine is an online technical publication about Netbeans Platform and also about projects and technologies that adopt the Open Source IDE in order to improve its productivity and quality goals. It is a PDF document available at http://www.netbeans.org/community/magazine. Despite the virtual nature of the magazine, I believe it is very important people to have a chance to print the magazine in a high-quality format, so the document layout was designed to provide a high quality printable PDF document. The magazine is published every three or four months - the periodicity is not fixed because the priority is the quality of the contents and sometimes is better to postpone few weeks for synchronizing the magazine with big events like JavaONE. Who is behind the magazine ? I and Osvaldo Doederlein as editors and the PH Design as the company responsible for the illustration and page layout. The sponsorship is granted by SUN/Netbeans and the business model includes open opportunities for international partnership in a near future. The magazine is also a personal project after several years as Editor-in-chief of Java Magazine, a printed Brazilian magazine distributed for more than thirty thousand readers.

Who writes for the magazine ?

The contents are collected from several countries, and we always try to identify the core Netbeans users and also the companies adopting the tool in large commercial projects. The writes are basically the Netbeans community, and everyone interested in to contribute should send a mail with a brief description about the prospective article. The Netbeans and SUN also give us some support in order to guide the content selection. The last issue is a good example about the diversity of writers, it is a 80 pages publication including articles from USA, South Africa, Germany, Brazil and Italy.

What is the preferable subjects ?

Everything related to Netbeans: special tricks to enhance the productivity through the features of Netbeans, script languages, interoperability with Open Office and eal world usage of Netbeans Platform.

The magazine is a community effort or a commercial initiative?

The magazine is a commercial initiative in symbiosis with the community. The board responsible to publish and elaborate the magazine is doing it through a professional business model but with low cost and giving priority to the contents quality and the community demand. People don't earn too much money through the magazine, but we believe a minimum budget is required in order to guarantee the quality of our work.

Are you attending Netbeans Day ?

For sure :), I will have a chance to keep in touch with a lot of people today at Moscone pavilion. I am looking for a snapshot of the Netbeans community that will be very important during the next magazine's releases - see you there.