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.
SHARE
In search of the right topic
Earlier today one of my team came to me with a problem. It wasn’t a show stopper but it was slowing his productivity. He is currently working on a set of RoboHelp project source files for a product he is unfamiliar with. The product uses a merged output approach across six RoboHelp projects. His problem was that he had a set of updates to make to certain topics but he had no idea in which project they were. How on earth could he determine where to look for them?
SHARE
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?
SHARE
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.
SHARE
Capturing Images in RoboHelp
Way, way back in the days when RoboHelp was under the Blue Sky Software brand, a separate application called RoboScreenCapture could be purchased from the same stable. As the name suggests, it is essentially a screen capture tool, but it also had some useful editing facilities thrown in.
SHARE
