Wednesday, April 12, 2006

The Conference Closes

The closing keynote was by Kate Burridge, who studies historical English at Monash University in Australia, speaking about "Copious Without Order, and Energetick Without Rules," about language change.

When you study Olde English, she said, you're studying a foreign language, she said just after reciting The Lord's Prayer in that language of "just" about 1000 years ago, reciting it in a language that bore nearly no resemblance to present-day English.

Think of it, the change in the language that seems to us so static overall, in just 40 generations, is change so great as to make it almost entirely different.

Because there's no connection between how a word sounds and what it means, she said, meanings are free to move. And meanings often deteriorate, rather than elevate. Sounds change as well.

Wow, Tuesday was busy

Keeping this up-to-date was a challenge yesterday, as in, I didn't get to it. Part of the reason is that I undertook an idea that seemed good at the outset, but that took a lot more time that I had expected.

Let's back up. Last year, Sharon had a cool idea. She gave out these little tags that could be stuck onto the bottom of attendee badges, funny and snarky things that read "Know-it-all" or "Princess" or "Duh!" or "Internet Junkie." So for the last day's newsletter, I had the idea to make a collage of some of the tags people had chosen.

It went over well.

Sharon brought them back this year, and people again had a lot of fun with them. But for the Wednesday newsletter this year, while I like the collage idea, I didn't want to just repeat what I did last year. I had this idea to make a collage of people's faces.

But to do this right, I had to take the photos I had and make the backgrounds, behind the faces, transparent.

Well, I have a new laptop with a decent (1.7GHz) processor and a full 1GB of RAM. And my photo editing software, Photoshop Elements, will do this. But (a) it's not all that easy and (b) it takes a *large* amount or processing time.

And it also took some time and attention to block out the face part of the file, and sometimes I had to tweak the results that Photoshop Elements gave me.

Meanwhle, the sessions that I attended were also compelling, especially the hands-on double session I attended in the afternoon.

The result of all this: no blog entries at all yesterday.

Meanwhile, the conference has been so far, as far as I can tell, another tremendous success. I'd always like to see more people here, of course, the stuff here is so useful, but these days, with short-sighted companies failing to see value in keeping its employees u[-to-date, it's hard to expect anything else.

Besides getting loaded up with a whole new set of knowledge, I love getting to see friends and acquaintances that I've not seen in a long time, most wince last year's WritersUA conference. Many of these folks are on the HATT and HATT-OT lists, but electronic communication just isn't the same as actually seeing someone. For example, I finally got to meet Wade Courtney.

And then this morning I gave my presentation. I had planned to skip the early morning sessions to go over stuff one last time before spoke, and I set the alarm clock in my hotel room 15 minutes later (7:30 instead of 7:15) to get a smidge more sleep.

Actually, I have 2 alarm clocks. There's the one provided by the hotel, and then I have a backup winding alarm clock, which I set for about 7:45.

Well, I woke up at 7:45, just before my backup was going to go off. Turns out I had set the hotel alarm but not turned it on.

Oops.

But I guess my session went well. I got ahead of my slides a bit a couple of times, but I hope that wasn't perceived as too bad a thing. We'll see when the evaluations come in.

Meanwhile, it's afternoon now and I'm listening to Dave Gash talk about XML data islands. Interesting stuff.

I'm wondering if it'd be another solution for my personal sandbox web site, chuck.martin.name, where I have a little MySQL database and some PHP code to create a random quote generator on the page.

Monday, April 10, 2006

WinHelp is Dead! RoboHelp Lives!

Microsoft has made it official. Windows Vista, Microsoft's new operating system that is now expected to be released in early 200, will not support WinHelp.

Why is this important? Well, despite it being rather long in the tooth, some systems still use WinHelp. Some companies have found something that works, and sometimes that something includes WinHelp.

What does this mean? Well, if you have customers who are planning to move to Vista, you will almost certainly have to get rid of your WinHelp systems. Not the content, of course, but many of the carefully crafted ways you've developed to help users find information will have to be redeveloped.

Meanwhile, I just spent a bi of time with Michael Hu, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe and responsible for the RoboHelp product that came to Adobe via its Macromedia purchase. Among the things he told me: There are developers as part of the RoboHelp product team at Adobe.

That's right, developers are actually working on RoboHelp code. And some of them are right here at the conference to meet with and answer questions from their target market.

RoboHelp has a future.

What does this mean? Well, just one year ago, all evidence pointed to the end of the RoboHelp line of products. Macromedia had laid off the entire RoboHelp development team. User assistance developers needed to know what tools they would have to create their help systems, and suddenly, RoboHelp wasn't on that map.

Now it is.

Understandably, Hu couldn't be specific about direction or timetable. But he did say that one of the reasons that he and the developers were here at the conference is to get feedback from attendees and to find out what their needs are, and then to use that to drive at least some future development directions.

So there you have it. WinHelp, no. RoboHelp, yes.

Out of the Gate

For the second consecutive year, the conference opened with a panel, rather than a keynote speech. The panel: User Assistance Trends: What's Ripe, Hype, and Out-of-sight, with Saul Carliner, Dave Gash, Michael Hughes, Sarah O'Keefe, and Joe Welinske

Leading off the Tools and Technologies section was Joe predicting a return/resumption of RoboHelp which brought a laugh from the crowd that remembered Joe's prediction of one year ago about the sunsetting of RoboHelp. Joe suggested that Adobe, which last year bought Macromedia seems to have a different idea about what to do with RoboHelp

Adobe is not only at this year;s conference with a vendor booth (and a "Macromedia RoboHelp" poster), they are sponsoring a big evening social event.

Another predictions suggested the emergence of AJAX (asynchronous Java and XML) at the dominant user assistance technology, making such assistance more dynamic.

Dave suggested that within the next few years, there will be an anti-technology backlash within the user assistance development community, that we will want to re-focus on writing and designing information and won't want to learn the Next Big Thing in technology.

Resplendent in a long ponytail, Dav also suggested that the web will be heavily censored by the U.S. government within the next 5-8 years, suggesting that mainstream media is already heavily regulated by the government and controlled by corporations, and so the freedom of the web is a potential threat to that conrol.

Mike rounded out the IT trends predictions by suggested that the Internet will crash. Not if, but when, and then the big question becomes who will rebuild it.