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Techsmith are currently offering version 3 of Camtasia free of charge. Simply download the demo version of Camtasia Studio 3 and request a registration key. The current paid for version is version 5, so the free version doesn't have all the features you'd expect in Captivate or Mimic . You can upgrade the free version to version 5 for half price.

http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe

Adobe to launch a new Help browser?

At yesterday's Ticad conference Adobe's Mark Wheeler (MD Northern Europe) spent time in his presentation talking about Adobe Air. Mark suggested it could be used as a new Help (or document) viewer technology.

Air enables anyone to build a simple desktop application. Used a Help browser, it can integrate content residing on the PC with other content residing on the Web. User comments/annotations could be displayed at the bottom of the page. Air also offers the abilty to embed two way audio , call up an extract of a video, and include Flash files, PDFs and HTML.

Air is currently in beta and is available from labs.adobe.com

He also talked about Acrobat files that can be "turned off" should you wish users no longer to view the file.

And RoboHelp? Mark said very briefly it remains a core product, but didn't say anything more about it.

"The smartest people work for someone else"

Here's some extracts from an article by Forbes' Rich Karlgaard:

" 'No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.'

Say again? What organizational leader will admit he can't hire the smartest people in the world? This provocative statement was first made by Sun Microsystems' Bill Joy in 1990... It's better, Joy said, to create an ecology that gets all the world's smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on your own employees, you'll never solve all your customers' needs.

What Joy said in 1990 is unimaginably truer and more powerful in 2007... Your job, as a leader of an organization, is to tap into this mass of innovators, investors and consumers. Your job is to enlist as many smart people as you can to pull your company in the direction you want it to go. Your job is to learn and adapt as fast as the digital networks will let you. Can you?... It is not the wisdom of crowds. It is finding one smart person on the outside. If collective wisdom is what you want, Joy's Law covers that, too."

Interesting stuff.

Podcast on Cherryleaf and Technical Communication

Ellis was interviewed yesterday for one of the "ITauthor" podcasts. To listen to the conversation, visit http://www.itauthor.com/wordpress/2007/11/14/itauthor-podcast-12-november-14th-2007-ellis-pratt-cherryleaf/

What will 2008 bring?

What will 2008 bring for you? Perhaps you fancy spending it living in the South of France, sun on your back and 8 weeks holiday entitlement, or amongst the seven hills of Sheffield. If you check our list of current technical author vacancies then we could help you do that.

We've also got vacancies in historic Tunbridge Wells and arguably the greatest city - London. Failing that, there's always the bohemian delights of Hemel Hempstead.

Microsoft to develop document translator for blind

Tue Nov 13, 4:44 AM ET

Reuters - Microsoft and the DAISY digital talking books consortium are to work together on a tool for the blind and otherwise print-disabled that translates Microsoft Word documents into a digital audio standard.

The two organizations said on Tuesday the collaboration was aimed at producing a free, downloadable plug-in that would translate documents based on Open XML -- the default file-saving format in Microsoft Office 2007 -- into DAISY XML.

The DAISY XML file can then be processed to produce digital audio and other formats.
The plug-in is expected to be available in early 2008.

The not-for-profit DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) consortium, based in Zurich, Switzerland, was formed in 1996 by talking-book libraries to help the transition from analogue to digital talking books, and has adopted open standards based on Internet file formats.
Its members include the U.S. National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, the Spanish National Organisation of the Blind and the Korean Braille Library.

Microsoft is campaigning to have its Open XML document format approved as an international standard, which would help it gain wider adoption by public-sector organizations.

The secrets of effective technical authors

In early 2007, Cherryleaf carried out a survey to find out the challenges technical authors face. We looked at satisfaction levels, the status of authors and what was holding them back, if anything. We also looked at other research on what makes a good writer. We received nearly 500 responses, and we presented our conclusions at the Online Help Conference Europe 2007.

Our objective was to identify areas where there might be opportunities for new training courses and consider publishing a report on what makes a successful technical author.

In general, we found that authors were confident in their own capabilities and the quality of the work they delivered. However, when we asked “What is holding you back?” some fascinating themes came out.

We categorised these as:

(1) office politics (in other words, “nobody loves us”)
(2) project management and
(3) time management.

A key theme coming out from the responses boiled down to authors complaining that their work colleagues didn’t know their value.

When we mentioned our findings to Anne-Florence Dujardin, one of the tutors in Technical Communication at Sheffield Hallam University, she pointed us towards some research carried out by one of her former students in 2002.

This student, Deborah Shapiro, had looked at the personality traits of success in technical authors. In her preliminary study of 223 software technical authors, she had found that effective technical authors had high “openness” and “agreeableness” (defined as “trust of others” and “likeability”), when their personality was measured on the OCEAN personality and PEI effectiveness profiling systems. One of her conclusions was that technical authors should negotiate more, and be more assertive, while maintaining good work relationships. In her words, “skills, language and technical knowledge are sometimes not enough to be an effective technical writer”.

Shapiro’s findings concurred in many ways with our own experiences. It seemed that the solution to being a successful technical author lay not only in being a good writer, but also in being good at positioning, promotion and project management.

What will be the documentation equivalent to Google's OpenSocial?

Google's OpenSocial project is causing quite a buzz at the moment. According to the New York Times, "Its initiative, which it calls OpenSocial, is an appeal to software developers and Web sites to cooperate in adopting a single set of software standards for the little software widgets that can add a social-networking layer to all Web sites. Agreement on a standard would save users from the aggravation of joining multiple networks and save developers from the aggravation of writing code that works only with specific sites. Unlike Facebook’s programming requirements, Google’s use nonproprietary programming languages." It's a move that promises to change social networks like MySpace and Bebo from islands into universal communities. It's not a question of "Will they open up?", but "How much more will they open up?".

See

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/technology/04digi.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

There is little technology in OpenSocial that I can see would relate to the documentation community. It's more the mindset in play - whether technical communication will move away from the "island" approach we adopt today.