Words Are Important

Back in the 80s, when I worked in radio, I remember very vividly the words of Andre Codrescu, a writer and commentator on NPR, the U.S. national public radio network. Codrescu came to the U.S. escaping Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. In one commentary, he was recalling some event involving either protest, writing, or both. I no longer recall what the event was, but I remember this sentence:

In Romania, words have power. You can go to jail for them.

Continue reading “Words Are Important”

The Evolution of oXygen 17

For the last few weeks, I’ve had a chance to play with the beta of oXygen 17, which has just been released by publisher SyncRO Soft. In keeping with my previous post, I’m going to focus on how the software is evolving. However, since there are a good 80 new features in this release, I can’t avoid doing a bit of feature listing

My previous look at oXygen 14.2 also served as a general product review. Since then, this top class XML Editor has continued to evolve toward the non-specialist user in two ways. It makes XML editing easier for people who don’t know anything about XML and don’t want or need to, and it also provides easier access to the XML structure for those who do.

Not only that, this new release goes a long way toward making the job of developers who want to customize oXygen much easier, while retaining the features that make it popular with geeks and specialists. Continue reading “The Evolution of oXygen 17”

How the Humanist Nerd Approaches Software Tools

The Humanist Nerd explains how he approaches posts about software for technical communication, especially when he has a relationship with the company that publishes it.

In the last while, I have occasionally written something that resembles a review of technical communication editing tools. As we enter a new string of product releases, I’d like to take a moment to explain where I’m coming from, and why I do these the way I do. Continue reading “How the Humanist Nerd Approaches Software Tools”