Apple iPhone: Welcome to the Mobile Applications Party!

June 30, 2007 Blog 1 Comment

By Scott G. Silk, president and CEO of Action Engine As the head of a company that’s pioneered the mobile application and on-device portal space for the past seven years, I’d like to welcome the Apple iPhone to the party. Sure, it arrived late, but the iPhone arrived in style. One look at the mobile data features of the iPhone reveals that Apple took many of its usability cues from the On-Device Portal (ODP) companies that have been optimizing mobile application usability for years. The first thing users see when Read the full article…

[Free Book Offer] Technical Illustrations: New Efficient Ways to Visualise Your Product

June 29, 2007 Blog 1 Comment

Tedopres International, has produced a useful new resource, Technical Illustrations: New Efficient Ways to Visualise Your Product, a free, 113 page booklet designed to teach you on how to save cost on your translations and technical publications by using new and more efficient methods to create technical illustrations. It’s a high quality publication, packed with useful tips and tricks. Every technical communication professional should have a copy on their bookshelf. Order yours today!

[Web 2.0] Jott Helps You Remember Stuff You’re Likely To Forget Otherwise

June 28, 2007 Blog 2 Comments

Here at TheContentWrangler.com, we’re big on productivity. We often receive email messages from readers asking how on earth we find time to do all the things we do. Here’s our secret: work-minimization. That’s it in a nutshell. We look for ways to reduce the amount of work it takes to do almost any task imaginable. We are often able to find a better way to do just about anything. And, increasingly, it’s free Web 2.0 tools that we are finding offer the most promise in the time-saving and waste-reduction arenas. Read the full article…

CM Scribe Makes Web Content Management A Snap: Interview With Heidi Merscher of NetReach

June 26, 2007 Blog No Comments

TCW: Thanks for agreeing to chat with us today. For our readers who may not be familiar with you and your firm, please tell us a little about yourself and the company you work for. HM: Yes, thanks for the invitation! NetReach started in 1994 as a web development and hosting company delivering highly dynamic sites, like the site for the Philadelphia Eagles with it’s associated e-commerce components or Togo’s online lunch ordering services. Being in that space—delivering these large complex sites—our clients, the people who owned the sites, needed Read the full article…

DITA Users Helps Tech Writers Learn To Master Topic-Based Authoring

June 25, 2007 Blog No Comments

By Bob Doyle, Special to TheContentWrangler.com Launched in January 2007, DITA Users is a 200 member organization for technical communicators just getting started with topic-based structured authoring. Members from sixteen countries around the world participate in various online learning opportunities designed to teach them “DITA from A to B”. “DITA from A to B” means that members can get direct experience from authoring to building their own DITA documentation sets. Their deliverables appear on the web in personalized workspace folders. Members can publish links to their projects and easily show Read the full article…

Web Content 2007 Chicago A Success; 2008 Event Scheduled

June 21, 2007 Blog No Comments

The folks at DUO Consulting just completed a very successful conference, Web Content 2007, held in downtown Chicago at UBS Tower. The event attracted over 100 attendees and presenters from some of the biggest names in web content—AOL, Career Builder, 37 signals, The Rockley Group, Yahoo!, and many more. Attendees are currently rating speakers (and the overall event) at the popular conference services website, Confabb. A photostream is also available on Flickr. Due to an illness that prevents travel, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, was unable to attend the event, Read the full article…

[Book Excerpt] The Editorial Gestalt – Subtleties of Scientific Style

June 17, 2007 Blog No Comments

By Matthew Stevens, excerpted with permission from Subtleties of Scientific Style To do an effective job requires you to immerse yourself in the story. You need to spread your attention across all levels of the document, from word meaning to sentence meaning to overall meaning, aiming to see all levels simultaneously rather than switching between them. You need to learn and understand the story being told, and view it as a whole composed of its parts. If the parts are discordant with the whole, you will then see this. This Read the full article…

Acrobat Plugs In To FedEx Kinkos; Users Get Long Awaited New Features And 3D Interaction

June 16, 2007 Blog No Comments

Adobe Systems has announced “a major upgrade” to its Adobe Acrobat product line. Perhaps the most exciting is Acrobat 3D, software that enables CAD, CAM, and CAE application users to convert virtually any CAD file to a highly compressed, more secure Adobe PDF file for CAD data interoperability, collaboration, and visualization. What’s really cool about the product is that it allows the recipients of your PDF to see, zoom, rotate, measure and interact with the images, and view, sort, and search through comments and Product Manufacturing Data embedded in the Read the full article…

Are You Linked In? If Not, You Should Be

June 15, 2007 Blog 1 Comment

We’ve been busy building a network of professional communication and content management contacts with the help of a great social networking tool called Linked In. For the uninitiated, Linked In is an online network of more than 11 million professionals that provides services designed to help you: Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended by others Be found for business opportunities Search for great jobs Post and distribute job listings Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals Get introduced to Read the full article…

DITA-izing Your Documents: Five Issues To Think About When Converting Your Legacy Docs To DITA

June 13, 2007 Blog 1 Comment

Data Conversion Laboratory has published several useful and very informative articles on issues impacting the conversion of legacy document collections when making a move to XML and/or DITA. Mark Gross identifies five issues that you will likely have to face as you pour existing documentation into DITA. In the same issue of DCL News Diane Wieland interviews Ann Rockley and Steve Manning of The Rockley Group about DITA, XML, and legacy content conversion and issues of critical importance to those organizations considering a move to dynamic personalized content delivery and Read the full article…

It’s Time To Get Professional: Using Metrics To Select Software And Make Smart Business Decisions

June 12, 2007 Blog 3 Comments

In a blog post on MonkeyPi—RoboHelp 6 Arrives, And It’s Craptastic—several technical communicators (and a few software marketing folk) are having a discussion about the Adobe RoboHelp, the popular online help / single-sourcing software used by many technical writers. The blog posting has yielded several tangential discussions, but what’s not being discussed is why professional technical documentation teams don’t use metrics when making software purchasing decisions. Scott Abel of TheContentWrangler.com left the following comment on the blog and is in the process of authoring several articles (and a presentation or Read the full article…

CM Pros Seeks Presenters for Web Content Management Summit

June 10, 2007 Blog No Comments

Content Management Professionals has announced the Call for Participation for its popular CM Pros Fall 2007 Summit. The event takes place Monday, November 26, in Boston, MA at the Westin Copley Place and will explore Web Content Management technologies and their impact on the way we work. If you’d like to submit a proposal to speak at the Summit, visit the Summit website and complete the online submission form. Dates to remember: June 22, 2007 – Abstracts due June 25, 2007 – Presenters notified June 26, 2007 – Program launched Read the full article…

TheContentWrangler Rated Top Blog In “The Right Time” Survey

June 8, 2007 Blog No Comments

This one slipped by our radar screens while we were hard at work on a new project. The readers of The Right Time Tech Comm Blog have rated TheContentWrangler.com as “Best Blog” (in a tie with monkeyPi) and one of the “Most Frequently Read” (in a near tie with Tom Johnson’s popular I’d Rather Be Writing blog). Thanks to all of our readers who participated in the survey and helped make us number one.

Readability Tools 1.0 for FrameMaker Helps Writers Communicate Clearly

June 4, 2007 Blog No Comments

Readability Tools 1.0 is a shareware plug-in for Adobe FrameMaker that provides tools that help you analyze and improve the readability of FrameMaker documents and books. The plug-in provides information about the readability of the content you create. It can do things like calculate standard readability formulas, generate readability reports, and produce lists and counts of all words used in a document or book. Readability Tools includes the following tests: Flesch Reading Ease (designed to determine how difficult a reading passage is to understand) Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (provides grade level-based Read the full article…