Category: Uncategorized

Found on the Yahoo HATT group, the AP (Assistance Platform) team is blogging.

So, writers (and those teaching writers of the future), where’s your blog?

Quick note: Pink Floyd’s “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” is still one of the best rock albums ever made.

Link

I always knew, growing up, that something about West Michigan wasn’t right. Now I know just what it was.

A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it’s actually the far less ominous 616.

616 is the area code for much of West Michigan. If, in fact, the biblacal text should read 616 instead of 666, it would be irony at the loftiest of levels.

Link

Much digital ink will be spilled about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie this weekend. I saw it this evening with more than a little trepidation. I’m a huge fan of the books. In fact, I make it a point to re-read them at least every two years.

With that in mind, the movie isn’t that bad. It’s not the book, but then, what movie is? It is, however, in the spirit of the book. The opening 45 minutes bear a striking resemblance to the book. After that, it’s hard to tell where the bits made up to fill in the bits written by Douglas Adams start and end. The movie works, despite Mos Def’s flat effort as Ford.

In short, I give it a 7/10. It’s nowhere near as bad as Adams’ biographer made it out to be. If you like the books, hang your critic out for the evening and go see the movie with an open mind. It really isn’t that bad.

MAKE, a occasionally interesting “hacking” blog, came out with a whopper of an article Monday detailing how to turn an old PC into a DIY TiVo/music server/gaming console. If you have an old PC and the console gaming stuff, it’s a pretty cheap solution. Aw heck, it looks like fun to build, too. It even using Cygwin, so it has a hint of Linux without all the command-line odor.

Link

Because Microsoft is coming for them, targeting one of Adobe’s flagship products.

Later in the day, Microsoft also unveiled “Metro,” which can be best described as an alternative to or replacement for Adobe’s PDF. Metro is an XML-based document specification that covers creation, viewing, and printing. Windows applications will be able to create Metro documents and Microsoft hopes to have printer manufacturers include support for it in much the same way as Adobe’s PostScript. Microsoft will offer developers APIs so they can incorporate its features into their applications, as well as royalty-free licenses in order to encourage its adoption.

Adobe broadened their portfolio, so to speak, just in case. I wonder what they know about that hasn’t been announced by Microsoft yet.

[Via Ars Technica]

Much has been made of the upcoming release of Windows, still called Longhorn. (Can we possibly get someone in Microsoft Marketing to stop that stupid Office campaign [warning: Flash site] and come up with a name for the next version of Windows?)

While I’m not convinced that Longhorn is simply a bunch of “fixes and cosmetic enhancements”, I’m also not convinced that Microsoft is going to deliver a compelling reason for lots of people to upgrade. They’ve already dropped WinFS and scaled back Avalon, both major incentives to use Longhorn.

That said, I do know of one thing that is coming that is actually kind of exciting. Terrifying in its own way, but potentially very cool. Longhorn Help. That’s right, I said Help. First, a little background.

Back in the WinHelp days, technical writers and developers rarely met, and when they did they exchanged barbs and went back to their own sides of the building. Then along came people who can write AND develop. They got a hold of the WinHelp engine and started writing DLLs that made up for the shortcomings of the Help implementation in Windows and made some usable, if not impressive, Help.

Then comes compiled HTML help, CHM files. Suddenly the world of HTML is open to the Help development world. Some people (not many, mind you) but some learn HTML inside and out. They learn Javascript and CSS. They learn that tool vendors can do really cool things with HTML technology. Better help is written. Disk space increases and video starts popping up. Suddenly Help and instruction collide and you have technical writers working with instructional designers and *gasp* working with developers. (Reality check: this scenario represents about the top 10% of writers/companies/developers. The usual adversarial attitudes abound in the technical writing/development world still.)

The Help got generally better, more robust and, well, helpful. One fundamental limitation still held many writers and developers back, however; Help was not a part of the application. It was a separate engine buried inside Windows, doomed to non-interaction and certainly not able to actually DO things for users (except within a very specific set of instructions).

And now, on the horizon, is Longhorn. Longhorn could change the face of Help development. Could. If Microsoft would have done one thing. Microsoft has pledged to maintain the Help engine not just for CHM files (one level of backward compatibility), but also for WinHelp (five levels of backward compatibility). Which means that all those people who cut their teeth on WinHelp, and know it inside and out, will not switch until they’re forced. They have provided no incentive (or demand) that anyone in the Help world change. Which is bad. Why?

Because of this. Longhorn Help is built on MAML, the Microsoft Assistance Markup Language. It’s a proprietary XML language specifically written for the User Assistance in Longhorn, and it’s also the first engine able to make actual end-to-end User Assistance. Why?

Help topics can use system data from Windows to determine the most appropriate content to display for the user.

For the first time in a Windows environment, writers have to work with developers because now writers have the ability to provide accurate, on-demand, personalized content. Oh sure, tool vendors will make much of this functionality available through their tools but, as with the previous incarnations of Help engines, the really useful stuff will come from that top 10% who can hack the system to make it do what they want, not what a tool dictates they can do.

Microsoft has demonstrated the ability for UA developers to have multi-tiered assistance. If the user doesn’t accomplish something by being told how to do it, you can do it for them (with some limitations). A user shouldn’t see some part of the UA because of rights restrictions? No problem; Longhorn Help is aware of the current users permission level and limits topics based on those rights. No solution was found anywhere in the UA? Within the same panel, the user can connect to a support forum or live support.

Is this pie-in-the-sky kind of assistance? Sure, because there’s nothing forcing people to learn how to develop User Assistance at this level. The adoption rate of writers/developers/companies will be driven by not just the adoption rate of the OS (which could potentially be glacial compared to XP), but also by the perceived “unnecessary” cost of training writers to be quasi-developers or the outright unwillingness of writers to learn the new technology.

This also requires a fundamental shift in the way User Assistance is written. First, it has to be developed as User Assistance, not Help. Help is informative, demonstrative, and expository. It is not well-suited to assisting users, because it can’t. Longhorn Help can, but only if you program it to do that.

Which brings up the second major shift. UA is programmed, not written. Yes, the instructional parts are written, as is much of actual assistance. But, like an interface, the words are minor parts of a larger solution. UA should be a solution, not a manual.

I’m looking forward to seeing what writers can do with Longhorn help (which I see has been dubbed TrésHelp). But, what I’ll be really interested in seeing is what the other 90% of writers can do. I said in another post directed to MadCap Software: “let writers write, designers design, and everyone publish”. That still holds true, but I think many people who self-identify as “writers” will soon be redefining that role. Should be a fun ride.

…this could come in handy. The Clamptite: “It transforms any old wire into the tightest clamp you can imagine.”

Sounds like $24 well spent.

[via Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools]

You know why I love del.icio.us? Because I dump stuff there I would never have bookmarked before. Maybe it’s the niche nature of the tool, or the buzz, but I do like using it.

Plus, it let’s me find stuff like The Always Amusing Euphemism Generator. Now, Lord only knows where I ran across that the first time, but I had foxylicious installed so it was right-click, add tags, hit save. Which means I could find it today. Which now means I have the phrase “smurfing the peach” stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

Thanks del.icio.us!

From Instapundit:

MICHAEL BARONE LOOKS AT religion and politics in America:

But whether the United States is on its way to becoming a theocracy is actually a silly question. No religion is going to impose laws on an unwilling Congress or the people of this country. And we have long lived comfortably with a few trappings of religion in the public space, such as “In God We Trust” or “God save this honorable court.”

The real question is whether strong religious belief is on the rise in America and the world. Fifty years ago, secular liberals were confident that education, urbanization and science would lead people to renounce religion. That seems to have happened, if you confine your gaze to Europe, Canada and American university faculty clubs. . . .

America has not moved in the expected direction. In fact, just the opposite. Economist Robert Fogel’s “The Fourth Great Awakening” argues that we’ve been in the midst of a religious revival since the 1950s, in which, as in previous revivals, “the evangelical churches represented the leading edge of an ideological and political response to accumulated technological and social changes that undermined the received culture.”

My thoughts on the subject can be found here.

UPDATE: Jon Henke thinks we’re far from theocracy:

I’m simply not persuaded by the argument that there is a burgeoning “Theocracy” in the United States. You can tell the Social Conservatives are losing by the very battles they are fighting. Almost without exception, they are doing rear-guard duty. I mean, we’ve got partial nudity on prime-time television, and gay marriage on the radar.

That’s one hell of a long way from the 1940s-50s, where even married TV characters had separate beds, and the question was not whether homosexuals deserved marriage, but whether they deserved a lobotomy. We may feel strongly about arguments like the 10 Commandments statue, Intelligent Design in schools, and Janet Jackson’s nipple, but the fact that we’re arguing about these should indicate just how secular our government has become. 50 years ago, we were putting God into the Pledge of Allegiance.

Indeed.

It is a long way from the ’40s and ’50s. Maybe we just have to give up on the instant gratification. Change happens, just not very fast. Considering it took almost 50 years for this “revival” to start, we may be in for a few years of holier-than-thou rhetoric (from both sides). But, like most things religion, this too shall pass and secularlism will once again dominate, as it usually does, even with those who identify themselves as religious.

[Via Instapundit.com]