It’s been 15 years since I moved out of Paris, and three and a half since I stopped going there regularly to work. And still, I find myself feeling that the recent assault in the French capital was an assault on “my” city. It was also an assault on human dignity.
As I think about it, and grieve, I am also struck by how much this issue hinges on questions of communication.
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.
Continue reading “Adobe FrameMaker 2015: Traditional Future”
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”
In June and September your Humanist Nerd spoke at four different conferences. In this post, I’ll tell you about UA Europe, Congility, and TCUK. I’ll save a separate post for EuroIA.
UA Europe has always struck me as different from other tech comm conferences in Europe. I’m not totally sure why, but the audience seems a bit different – perhaps with more of a traditional tech WRITING orientation. This is not to say that they aren’t interested in new aspects of tech comm practice, just that they may be more preoccupied with the specific writing aspects.
Continue reading “Summerfall Conference Season”
oXygen’s new release is part of the company’s policy of regularly (every three or four months) releasing “incremental” upgrades. I use quotes because Syncro Soft, the publisher of oXygen, regularly includes major new features in these free, “incremental” upgrades. This was especially the case with release 14.1 that included forms based editing of XML attributes – about which more in a moment.
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.
————————————–
I’ve had a number of emails, tweets, and other requests for information on how to get slides or recordings of the webinar series I just finished for Adobe.
First off, I need to thank all of you who attended, asked questions, passed me feedback and food for thought.
Thanks also to Adobe for giving me the space and the freedom to present these ideas, and promote the research we are starting to do in The Transformation Society. I’ll be blogging about that more in the near future.
Slides are posted as pdf files to Slideshare. You are welcome to use, but not modify, these slide decks, with attribution.
Recordings of the webinars are on the Adobe site – you need to have an adobe.com account to get to them. This will not hurt, I promise 😉 You can get the account for free, and there’s no obligation attached to it.
When you click the links to the webinar recordings, you’ll arrive at the webinar description page. Click the “register” button, then fill out the form. You’ll be sent a link that will activate watching. The user experience is less than stellar, but don’t worry about it – just plod through, you’ll end up at the recording, just as we promised 😉
Session 1: Users Become Learners
Session 2: Empowering User/Learners Through Cognitive Development
Session 3: Integrated Learning: Building Customer Loyalty
I’ve tested the links, and as of this writing, they all work as advertised.
Enjoy!
Update: Links to all session slides and recordings are grouped here.
I’ve been a technical communicator for nigh on 20 years. I teach technical communications. I theorize about technical communications. And for all this time, I have steadfastly held to the great rule that you do not mix concepts with tasks.
DITA has three major topic types. Two of them are Concept and Task. Why? To keep them separate, of course – everyone knows that!
And yet – and yet – and yet – here I am, telling you that “everything we know is wrong.” Continue reading “Let’s Break a Tech Comm Rule”
Rant of a Humanist Nerd 