Dialog fails grammar test
Earlier today I had to install a Windows application. It all installed perfectly without any issues, but this dialog displayed whilst the application configured my PC annoyed me. OK I know this makes me VERY sad, but saying I had to wait for “1 minutes” just isn’t good enough. It is tardy, lazy and unprofessional.
According to Mark Southee (@marksou) this is because “minutes” is a string. As such the dialog can not differentiate between a string value that is 1 or more than 1. It is this reason he always uses a percentage calculator to indicate progress.
I know that the algorithm used in any progress bar is open to interpretation but I have to agree with him. What do you think?
The lessons of Encyclopedia Britannica for technical communication
The announcement this week that Encyclopedia Britannica are ceasing production of a printed version is a sad day. Those of us who remember as children pulling a volume off the bookshelf to spend many hours flicking through their pages look back on this brand with much empathy. However even online they still are highly educational to an inquisitive mind. As a company they’ve had to move with the times. The move to CD-Rom and then online output was inevitable. It also offers a cold, hard lesson for the technical communication industry.
If Technical Writers worked in Marketing
The big news in the technology world this week was the release of Apple’s iPad. Or should that be iPad 3? Yes I know there’s been a lot of buzz about Apple’s naming convention. Andrew Brooke has some fun over at Tech Writer’s World blog. In it he manages to sum up precisely what is wrong about this decision from the user’s perspective. God knows what was going on in Apple’s mind when they made their decision, but I bet they weren’t thinking of the poor users. If only they’d asked a Technical Writer for their perspective.
The localisation tug of war
Yesterday I presented in the localisation strand – maybe that should be localization 
– of the Content Strategy Applied Conference held in Richmond, London. I was a last minute replacement for someone that had to drop out. As a result I spent a frantic evening the night before putting together a 45 minute presentation. There’s nothing like a bit of pressure to focus the mind! Having committed to talk, all I had to do was what to talk about?
Providing online documentation across “secure” borders
Earlier today Lieve Weymeis (@lilybiri) tweeted about her difficulty in helping someone with an Adobe Captivate query. The problem was not that Lieve couldn’t answer the question. She is one of the world’s experts on this application after all. The problem was with localised internet security. To be more precise, the user in question was based in China. This represented a huge problem for Lieve in delivering her solution as they were unable to access her blog. Several suggestions were offered on Twitter, including using cloud services like Acrobat.com, but at the end of the day if a country decides to block access to key sites or user services there is little that ordinary people like you and me can do.
