Adobe – Rant of a Humanist Nerd

The Latest From Our Research

Here’s the latest update on “Probing Our Future,” the current research project conducted by The Transformation Society with the collaboration and support of Adobe Technical Communication:

Our Guest Blog Post, “Blazing the Future TechComm Trail” by Ray Gallon and Neus Lorenzo is on line at TechComm Central by Adobe. It provides a first reflection on the other activities in the project, “not to research new technologies, tools, or delivery channels, but to understand how the evolution and ongoing use of these things affects our practice, our needs, and the needs of our users, so we can better understand our path.”

Recording of the Webinar “Probing Our Future” from October 4, 2016 on Adobe Events

Webinar slides “Probing Our Future” on SlideShare

Storify transcript from the live Twitter chat on October 6, 2016

Earlier post on this blog about the project

Watch for our white paper, coming soon.

Enjoy!

Probing Our Future

For some time, I’ve been mentioning The Transformation Society, a new organisation I co-founded with Dr. Neus Lorenzo. We are very excited about a project we will be doing at this year’s TCUK conference.

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Adobe FrameMaker 2015: Traditional Future

Adobe’s newest suite of technical communication products, TCS 6, has just appeared, all new and squeaky clean, with its lead products rebranded as “2015 Releases.” I’ll write again later about the suite as a whole, but this post is specifically about FrameMaker.

FrameMaker is arguably the lead product in this suite, and its 2015 incarnation is one that finds inspiration in its original roots – going back to the source – and in a firm vision of a multichannel, multiscreen, multimodal future.

It seems to be the year for abundance of new and genuinely useful features in tech comm editors, and FrameMaker boasts its share of ’em. I’m sure lots of other bloggers and reviewers will enumerate them for you, and evaluate their implementation or their overall utility. I’m interested in writing about the impact of some of these new features, and what that means for two futures – a future in our profession that is a quickly moving target full of unknowns, and a future for the application itself that might be surprising.

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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”

Transformation Society Collaborations with Adobe: Comprehensive Links

Update, 17 September 2015: Adobe has a new platform for its recorded webinars. Links to the recordings are now updated and will work correctly.

It is important to follow the Instructions for viewing them, which is also updated.

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As Promised, here is a full set of links to the materials for two series of collaborations between The Transformation Society and Adobe Technical Communications Division. Enjoy! Logo_transformationSociety_Small

2013: Crossing Boundaries: Implications for the Content Industries
2014: Tech Challenges: Surfing and Diving Deep

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The Transformation Society

For some time now, some of you have heard me speak of The Transformation Society. The idea came when we were talking about The Information Society, and realized that what was needed was not more information, but transformation! Transformation of information into useful knowledge, transformation from aggregation (a collector’s mentality) to diffusion (a community sharing mentality). Transformation from immobility to dynamic flexibility; from habit to exploration; from fixed diplomas to lifelong learning.

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TCS 5: Adobe’s Bold Move

At the beginning of 2014 Adobe released Technical Communication Suite 5, with new versions of all its key software elements.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve been asked to blog on a lot of subjects. This is one. I’m not going to review TCS 5, or enumerate the new features, many competent people have done that already long ago. I am going to talk about what I think is a major move by Adobe in this release. It’s a good move, in my view, and one that is not without risk to the company.

Full Disclosure

I work with Adobe, and they asked me to review their software, to which they give me access without charge. No one in my position is going to write a negative review and publish it. However, if I did not have positive things to say about this software, I would simply not write about it at all. In any case, this is not a review, and the opinions in this post are my own, and are not influenced by Adobe or anyone else. As always, I reserve the right to my own independent opinion, and that’s what you’re getting here.

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