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Text Preferences Survey
What is the ideal text size to use on the web? What about line height and column (line) length? Most of the information in this area is based on print (at best) or anecdotal (at worst). A design agency in Brighton, Message, has decided to try and find out by carrying out a survey:

“Our goal is to publish a report that provides hard facts about what constitutes ‘readable’ text on the web … We see this report being of value not just to our clients and their customers but to web users at large.”

It only takes a few minutes to complete so go and take the survey.

Why software applications need product blogs and why they don’t get them
As well as having a very long title, Tom also hits on some points well worth considering if you are at all web savvy (and I’m presuming that, as you are reading this blog, you are). Most of his ideas are spot on but would require a lot of business process change, but I think they are worth picking up on:

I can think of six major ways product blogs can benefit users and project teams. Product blogs can …
– Provide a venue for product announcements
– Allow users to submit product bugs
– Allow users to submit feature requests
– Provide a roadmap preview for the product
– Enable a point of connection between users and project teams
– Provide a way to teach advanced tips to users

He also mentions something that I too have pondered, namely including RSS feeds in online help and somehow merging the two in a more dynamic way than before. Probably not much point in purusing that now but who knows what may happen in the future.

How to work better
A short list of simple, but powerful, advice which is applicable to everyone. Go on, there is at least one thing on that list that you could do better (or if you are like me, 3 or 4).

Subversion for writers
Entirely focussed on Mac OSX users, this has reminded me that we use Subversion at work and that I should really write up our process. Regardless of platform, the basic benefits of using a version control system can be realised with little cost.

What does it do? It manages multiple versions of a project in development. You check your project out of the repository, make changes and you commit those changes back to the repository. At any time you can view older versions of the whole project or of individual files, and revert to them, if the work done since was in error. You can make branches, which allows you to develop your work in two (or more) ways in parallel, and you can tag your project to say, at this point I met a certain milestone (eg: first draft, second draft, version sent to publisher X, version sent to publisher Y, published version, etc.)