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Welinske Talks Trends October 5, 2006 Joe Welinske runs conferences on help and customer assistance, so he recruits speakers, schmoozes with vendors, and listens to managers of technical communication groups. He stopped off at Fiesta's Restaurant to talk with our members about the trends he sees in our field. Some highlights: Real Estate Is Shrinking For years, we've been able to assume that the user is looking at a computer screen…but now we have to cope with as many as four dozen different operating systems, with multiple browsers, on the little screens such as those for PDAs and cell phones. Joe showed a slide from the makers of the Opera browser showing a grid of mobile units—tiny computers bundled with telephony, camera, video, music…oh, and a little customer assistance. Bob Johnson was impressed with this chart. "It identified the multitude of information/communications devices that are now in use. And to think that not too long ago (within the baby boomers' lifetime) we only had the telephone! I guess I am a neo-communications outlaw because I still prefer face-to-face communication when possible." Microsoft Won't Support Vista Help by Outsiders Jan Wright, who has done a lot of work for Microsoft over the years, said, "I was astounded to hear that the Vista team was not going to provide any engine for outside application developers to include Vista Help. "Joe's WritersUA conferences have covered Vista help's features, as they have decreased in scope, every year. Two years ago I was horrified to find that there would be no index. Now to find that there was no way for developers to have a standard help system that matched Vista's is astonishing. "One thing that access to a standardized help engine has done is to provide users with something predictable, even if the quality of content fell short. They may hate help, but at least they know what the tabs mean. Now users will have to cope with help with no predictable location, labeling, or operation. All I can say is 'What can they be thinking?'" But Joe also said that Adobe was going to support RoboHelp after all, even though it has lost market share to upstarts like Flare, from MadCap, the programmers who wrote RoboHelp in the first place. XML Is Everywhere Even though the most-widely used tool is Acrobat, noted by more than 85% of the respondents to one of Joe's surveys, that tool is still not used in a very sophisticated way, because most groups simply use it for the production of PDF versions of manuals designed for paper. But most large companies are moving toward content management, for which the lingua franca is XML. This trend dovetails with the move toward ubiquitous computing. For example, XML's parser is so lightweight it can fit in the tiny CPUs embedded in cell phones, and most of their help systems are done in variations of the Wireless Markup Language. Joe pointed out that we may soon have to learn Voice XML, to prepare scripts so that the nice announcer person can respond to questions from the user, without having to display any text on screen. Joe encouraged us to learn a bunch of web technologies, too, such as HTML, DHTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And, as Leslie Beach noted, "Technical writers will increase their value if they can do document architecture and template design. 'Structured authoring' is the current buzzword." Mary Hamel said, "It was a most enjoyable presentation—I wish we could do more like that!" Mary, we'll try. —Jonathan Price |
For More Info Joe's web site has lots of tool tips, advice, and resources. http://www.winwriters.com/
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