FLOSS Manuals: The OTHER FM for PDFs

Some writers truly hate Adobe Acrobat and any tool that can do the job better is worth a shot, particularly if it’s open source and easily navigated. Flossmanuals.net introduces FLOSS which does a lot of the single desktop Acrobat Pro’s job - collaboratively and open source.

Could FLOSS be the new Acrobat Pro killer?

FLOSS could bridge the gaps between Subject Matter Expert (SME) authoring of content and true documentation. For the specific purpose of supporting open source collaborative efforts this is heaven sent. Most open-source dev teams are simply not able to have those wonderful team meetings for doc review either for financial or time management purposes.

Update: Anne Gentle’s site talks about an event called a Booksprint that FlossManuals.net is doing for technical writers in support of open source programs.

I’ve been reading Janet Swisher’s review of FLOSS Manuals. She examines the pros and cons of Wiki briefly and explains the problem / solution of FLOSS definitively:

Read the rest of this entry »

Great article by Michael Hughes, PhD in Instructional Technology.

User books died; if they had value in that form, companies would still print them and users would buy them. Yet PDFs still hang around like pathetic home town sports fans after the team has moved to the West Coast.

Quintus in The Gladiator says “A people ought to know when they’ve been defeated.”

PDFs should get the wake-up call.

Of course the good doctor began his article stating it’s not every single PDF he hates:

Not all PDFs; that would be over the top. I just hate user manuals that are distributed as PDFs. From User Assistance: Why I Hate PDFs

Hat tip to Char James-Tanny’s Helpstuff blog where Char posts many well written tips on PDF user manuals:

If you’re going to distribute an online PDF as a user’s manual instead of one of the many appropriate online formats, then at least make it easy for your users.

Australia’s Learning Object Debate

Are flash based Learning Objects dead?  They sure are expensive - since 2001 the Teaching & Learning Federation (TLF) has used “AUD$123 million ….. divided by 6300 curriculum items.

That’s close to AUD$20,000 for each single (eg, Flash) TLF curriculum item,” observed Stephen Loosley

One of the comments had this to say in defense of the cost:

Using a purely economic argument in this discussion is flawed from the start because the real cost of the digital content produced by The Learning Federation is shared by the 3 million plus school children across Australia (using 2007 census data).

A $20,000 Learning Object if only ever used only once by one third of this population equates to a one-off cost of less than 2 cents per student. The reality is that the best of these objects will have a much greater rate of use and for some a longer shelf-life.

Sales of tools such as Adobe Captivate / eHelp RoboDemo brought the cost down for learning objects. Before that it was Flash programming for hours and hours. My question is one of usage. How would anyone know what the value of the content is if they can’t chart the usage statistics properly?

Sounds like a client for Articulate Online or some other LMS. What a case study. Actually, this might be a good time for the administrators to release some usage data justifying the cost of these presentations / learning objects.

It’s midnight and I’m craving an In-N-Out burger.

Totally CRAVING In-N-Out

And no, this isn’t some 420 sort of thing. I’m not that kind of guy. Kids are asleep. and there’s no chance for me to get out and get one because I’m a single dad on duty.

Blast.

Those of you not located in the roughly 500 mile radius of the In-N-Out restaurant chain centered around Southern California, just have no idea. Sonic comes close to being the same phenomenon in the Midwest, White Castle on the eastern seaboard.

Once again this is not Harold and Kumar driven. More like blogwriter driven.

If you come to Disneyland, Sea World, or a myriad of Hollywood mecca type locations, you must at least once try the burger.

Quality matters

All ingredients California grown. French fries (which I’ve mostly shunned for going on eight years) so fresh the potato was still whole less than ten minutes prior to your eating it. Coke which is NEVER on the wrong syrup mix. Never wrong, ever ever too much soda water or too much syrup. And the shakes…

It’s been around for sixty years. Hopefully so will I even after eating my favorite 4×4 combo once every six weeks.

I’ve been resisting the urge for days now

DAYS. About ten to be exact. I almost feel like an Al-Anon working towards a thirty day pin or something except that I’m not really fighting my weight. It’s just mind over matter.

It’s been about 18 years since I had my first one.

Recently on a stop through Central California I heard about Animal Style fries. You wouldn’t believe my shock, that after 18 years there was something new I didn’t know. Animal Style fries are practically all the super artery clogging toppings of the burger but on the fries.

I haven’t had or even heard of anything like that since trying Gravy Fries in a Brooklyn diner at 3am. In, like, 1993. Then again, Central Cali is our version of Texas and Missouri.

You know, where the belt sizes expand about ten inches larger than SoCal glitzy nip/tuck or NorCal organic vegan averages. Where they would of course totally order, four or five people in a row, the Animal style fries, with cheese, sauce, grilled onions all on top of the fries. Wow.

That plus a Double-double is a heap-load of bad stuff barreling through your system. I’m too old to press my luck with that; I might like it far too much.

In-N-Out Even Has Secret Codes

I’m not kidding. You can stack your patties as high as you want just by saying the number of patties and cheese. Get grilled onions by ordering “Animal Style”. Go bunless by ordering “Protein Style”.

Regarding secret codes, this site has it rolling, even in color pictures.

The friendly employees of In-N-Out Burger will take your special order without question, if you use the right terminology. The printed receipt will have your special request typed on it just as we said it.

All of us have our vices. I just have to fight my urge every two months or so to sit a half an hour in a drive-thru line in order to satisfy a compulsion that hits me just about as often as KFC hits this guy:

It’s been a while. Kicking off today with the impact of Web 2.0 on investigative reporting.

Web 2.0 Online Collaborative Takedown: Beijing’s Gymnasts

It seems that the Chinese Olympic gymnast age issue has some new online forensic evidence that points irrefutably to the Streisand effect taking place to rewrite history within the Chinese Gymnastics statistics.

Mike Walker broke the story about He Kexin while operating under the pseudonym Stryde Hax and had this to say:

This story now is really about Internet censorship, the act of removing evidence while at the same time claiming that the evidence is wrong. For the first time I watched search records shift under my feet like sand, facts draining down a hole in the Internet.

Will this stand?

Apparently not when half the literate world researches and screen prints the cached stats…

News agencies AP and FoxNews were quick to verify the source and interview Mike Walker.

Scriptorium Launches Content-Rich Wiki

Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium / Palimpsest did several interesting and enlightened things. First, she gave away about thirty copies of her very cool book which I have recommended for some time. Then she commenced to launch their wiki, with a tremendous amount of content available for research, comments, and modification.

Today, we are launching wiki.scriptorium.com. Our new wiki currently includes the training content from our FM 101 (unstructured/accelerated introduction) and FM 201 (structured/introduction to authoring).

We will also add the content of our other three FrameMaker workbooks as soon as possible. Our workbook content is for FrameMaker version 7, which means that about 90 percent of it is accurate for version 8.

Articulate: Working On Releases | Revising Content

As I find the time this busy week I’ve been testing out the Articulate Online software. It appears to be a good SaaS for LMS tracking without the overhead cost, similar to the model MadCap Software has taken with their Feedback Service.

I’ll write a review later after my evaluation. As it stands, Articulate Online’s a KISS type of tool and very intuitive. I like the graphics and intuitive UX / workflow.

Cross-functional Dynamic Duo: Technical Communicators and Instructional Designers

One of Articulate’s contributors Tom Kuhlmann asks the question Is Google Making Our E-Learning Stupid?

For me, this article touches on the key requirement for revising old content to make it more relevant with the changes in reading habits we have. This is something that all of us Technical Communicators really needs to do but just can’t seem to find the time, or the budget approval in time.

This just in… Authoring Tools Still Draw Blood

In fact, just this week Bill Swallow and Tom Johnson had a key debate regarding tool usage, focusing on time savings from tools versus time spent on content. From Tom’s post:

The latest poll, “Which Authoring Tool Is Best for You?” has received nearly 600 votes from people around the world, and was discussed at length on the HATT listserv. In all this discussion, I’ve realized one thing: technical writers are passionate about the tools they use.

Bill answers within the comments and on the HATT list.

… And Back To The Rapid eLearning Dynamic Duo

My opinion is that Tom Kuhlmann has touched on one of the key reasons content needs to have a shelf life; if users are no longer understanding the dry, PDF print-based format, it’s going to cost the corporation or blended learning teams more time and money.

Therefore it seems that both the Technical Writing departments and the Online Training departments would benefit from more cross-functional workflow. A well-supported wiki or an online tool like MadCap’s Feedback Service would allow feedback at any time for changes that Instructional Designers might like to see. Of course this would be best behind the firewall and content notes safely tucked away for reasonable update cycles.

I avoid saying add team meetings for a reason; I hate them and they suck up everyone’s time. If you are having a cross-functional Dynamic Duo meeting, chief among the first topics should be updating the styles for a better flow.

Going at it the other way, I’m sure the online help files would benefit from having updated tutorials and case studies hyperlinked into them. Additionally, blog content might benefit from dissection of a case study for team-based discussion, distance learning, etc.

Articulate’s Rapid eLearning Tom Kuhlmann states:

The main point is that just because you do a course online, doesn’t mean you can’t blend the course content with offline activities.

MadCap’s Mimic 2.0 - Silverlight

MadCap released Mimic 2.0 a few months ago. Among other modifications Mimic 2.0 now allows both Flash and Silverlight output. I’ve covered Silverlight previously in this blog as an emerging technology. Even with few external feature updates I think introducing Silverlight is a strong first step for MadCap into the eLearning / LMS space. However I’m still waiting for the Mimic Product Manager’s blog…

DITA

Check out Anne Gentle’s Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) reading list. Great information about structured writing and questions about implementation of DITA.

And Finally… I’d Rather Be Writing - Or Maybe Not!

Tom Johnson heads for the hills for a bit of peace and quiet amidst the musing on the Utopias and Dystopias of Communication:

The more you blog, the more people you attract through Google. The more search-engine-optimized your posts are, the more people find you. The more tweets you send, the more people follow you. The more social networks you join, the more people add themselves to your page. The better posts you write, the more people subscribe to your RSS feed.

The more content you generate – in whatever form and media – the more trackbacks and links people generate about you. The more you produce, the more emails and questions you get. You become like a content cloud – attracting Google searches.

Once again Tom’s analysis nails the issue precisely.

His post about his coworker mirrors my feelings regarding Twitter and why I’ve stayed away from Facebook, Plaxo, MySpace, and YouTube. I’m a reluctant technophobe when it comes to my own transparency online.

But the up side is so rewarding. Again, from Tom’s post Too Connected – Utopias and Dystopias of Communication:

Having a public space to write and publish my thoughts — where people actually read what I write and respond with comments or email or trackbacks — it’s motivating. My words no longer live solely in Word documents on an old hard drive, intended to be published in an obscure literary journal after months of slush pile dormancy.

My writing freely propagates around the Internet.

It freely connects with others.

Finding balance is one of those struggles that we all have in life. As you can tell from my blog, my postings are sporadic. That’s only one of the struggles I have.

As a follow-up to my earlier India study I thought we could discuss BusinessWeek’s article summarizing innovation in India:

Not all analysts are convinced Indian R&D operations are ready to assume the lead in innovation, however.

Martin Kenney, a University of California at Davis economist who has studied offshore R&D in India and China, agrees the trend is still growing in India and that its workforce is becoming more experienced and innovative. Since 2000, he notes, U.S. patents awarded to inventors filing from India rose more than fivefold, to around 550 a year.

But the number of India patents remains very small in the scheme of things: Last year the U.S. issued nearly 94,000 patents. And Kenney suspects the vast bulk of India’s engineering hordes still is far too green to do complex design and innovation work.

“Bangalore is not like Silicon Valley, where in a couple of weeks you can round up 10 people who have already designed chips at three different startups,” he says. “We don’t really yet know much about the true quality of the work done there. There are company anecdotes going both ways. Some of it may not be what it is cracked up to be.”

A ratio of 550 : 94,000 is pretty compelling. Development of those 94k patents is another issue altogether. It still seems that there’s not enough competition within India to create that stress that true innovation requires. Stress is good; it makes for the best environment for change and that means innovation.

There is, notably, plenty of stress within Pakistan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Curious about what the background characters mean in the Olympics? Pick up one of these kits and teach yourself Chinese in a weekend.

Lazy me, I was doing a LinkedIn search reconnecting to old acquaintances from old squadrons I’ve been in (Shamrocks) and ran across the profile for this product.

I’ve been meaning to find a quick way to pick up kanji style languages and this looks perfect. These small word magnets are really cool. This is also going to be my hot Christmas gift this year as well since the price is only $20.

Learn Chinese Faster with IdeoLingo Word Magnets. Better Than Flashcards!

IdeoLingo® - Better Than Flashcards

IdeoLingo® is a Southern California-based company that develops fun and innovative study aids for students learning languages whose words and concepts are represented by ideograms.

These languages include but are not limited to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Localizing For Dummies: Use MadCap Lingo

Of course MadCap Software has put a focus out for their localization services and their program Lingo has accolades for Chinese localization through XML.

With a strong Asian customer base, GPRO makes its technology solutions—along with the supporting documentation—available in English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese versions. Since April 2008, GPRO has used the MadCap Lingo integrated content authoring and translation memory system together with MadCap Flare for content authoring and multi-channel delivery.

Where it once took up to six months to deliver a documentation project, GPRO now uses MadCap Lingo and Flare to complete the project in just one month.

Clearly Technical Communicators don’t have to learn Chinese in order to do documentation, however it’s just SO COOL that I recommend it. My philosophy is to pick up any bits of language that you can. When you’re done, IdeoLingo would even look cool on your fridge.

A Little Sight Recognition Goes A Long Way

While in the Navy, flash cards weren’t portable enough for me and my retention could have been better. Even so, while running around Hong Kong during Christmas 1994, my friends were (easily) impressed with how I was the first to find the subway, never got lost, and always found good food and cool stuff. After I got out of the Navy, sitting at the computer and crunching through exercises just didn’t fit into my time schedule. 

And then there’s my cautionary overseas travel tale… Now everyone can see how I got to be such a fan of eLearning software - cuts down on the travel hell.

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How much money do you need to pay to make quality PDFs? According to Tom Johnson, the I’d Rather Be Writing author, zero.

Free PDF Generation

Tom opens by talking about that irritating little release updater that Adobe runs in the background. Speaking about PDF functionality that exists in Word 2007 Tom states:

…you can download the Save as PDF or XPS add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 for free. It’s less than 1 megabyte to download, and it quickly and flawlessly converts Word docs to PDF, even with hyperlinks. If you have non-Word documents to convert, Primo PDF (another free PDF alternative) will do it absolutely free.

I keep wondering why Microsoft wasn’t able to package this add-in with their updates, or initially with the product.

After reading my PDF summary from January you’ll know my position on this necessary but often overused documentation format. Yes, I use it. Yes, it is a standard. But not worth $700 if you don’t have to spend it.

Help Authoring Tool War - Now Led By MadCap?

What brought me to the IRBW site this evening was the poll that Sharon mentioned. Surfing over to IRBW I checked it out - here’s the Authoring Tool voting stats listed as of today.

I’m not surprised. This is what happens when you lose confidence in the software manufacturer who takes over a popular product such as RoboHelp and loses touch with the market.

Adobe, Adobe… Is AIR going to ‘Help’ you?

AIR seems to get some traction for ADBE however. The stock is still trading near 52-week high levels and has been climbing since it’s low around March of this year.

I’ll have to do a follow-up to my 2007 prediction of stock value for Adobe (NASD: ADBE) dropping this year. After all, Microsoft (NASD: MSFT) isn’t releasing Vista and ADBE’s forced upgrade tactic isn’t as relevant.

We’ll have to see how things go at the end of the fiscal year… They could prove me wrong.

Am I First to Coin The Term AIRHelp?

Then again, last month Ben Minson’s two part review of the RoboHelp Packager for AIR public beta raised some solid questions about the functionality of the software for the end user.

I’m not sold on .air taking over the world of WWW just yet. I agree with most of this take from Ben Minson on ADBE AIR:

Adobe seems to be following a good line of thinking here with AIR help. But remember, users want simplicity. Having to install each help system as an application is asking too much of everyday users.

This use case for AIRHelp would tend to put us back to the .chm days with a distributable file that needed to be on every system running it. eHelp introduced WebHelp as a way to get away from that back in 2002. 

ADBE’s RoboHelp… Innovative A Year Too Late To Be Innovative

Doing something like Web 2.0 two release cycles behind your competition is not innovative. It’s keeping up with the market that’s trying to leave you behind. AuthorIT and MadCap Flare been-there and done-that already.

I reviewed MadCap’s Web 2.0 functionality last year as the Feedback Service. It doesn’t require installation on the client side of anything special and works cross-platform. It’s been pointed out that it can run on any IIS server on your network, even your desktop in your office.

From MadCap Mike’s Musings - Comparing Documentation Server Software - MadCap Feedback Server and RoboHelp Server:

Web 2.0 - The MadCap Feedback Server support for Web 2.0 community technologies is a complete turnkey system. Once installed there is nothing that your developers or programmers need to do to make this work. All that is required is for you to select the appropriate options while publishing your Flare projects to turn these capabilities on.

In contrast, the few similar options that Adobe has introduced are limited to the Air output only (not available in the more popular WebHelp) and even then require either programmer/developer hours or Rube Goldberg-esque scenarios where data files have to be emailed back and forth between users.

Ben’s review points out the obvious flaw; why make end users download and install something special rather than transparently do the Web 2.0 on the server side? Additionally, having an attachment-based data output for the actual server doesn’t make much sense either.

Related Posts:

• Friday Comments Review: RoboHelp vs. Flare
• Ten Faces of Innovation
• Technical Communication – Teamwork and Workflow as a Disruptive Technology
• PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• RoboHelp 6 finally arrives, and it’s craptastic
• Adobe & MadCap’s Cold War: Market Share
• Web 2.0 - MadCap Feedback Review Part 2
• Web 2.0 - MadCap Feedback is the KISS principle at work…
• Comparing Documentation Server Software - MadCap Feedback Server and RoboHelp Server