Reading time: 3 mins Notes and thoughts from Day 1 of the User Assistance Conference Session 1 – Tony Self – Emerging Help Delivery Technologies It’s been quite a while since I heard Tony speak but as ever he provided an entertaining, if somewhat limited, presentation. Covering the various types of help viewing technologies he nicely summarised some of…
Reading time: < 1 min I’ll write up my thoughts in more detail but suffice to say that, as per usual, my mind is racing with a million on one possibilities. Conferences are a good thing, even if you aren’t a position to change things it’s good to talk to other people in your profession, to find out that most…
Reading time: 2 mins Later on this week I’ll be attending the UA Conference in Edinburgh. Formally known as the “Online Help Conference” it’s a long running conference which I last attended back in 2001 when it was held in Copenhagen. That conference involved a dinner cruise on the canals of the city, followed by a couple… ok several..…
Reading time: < 1 min Most of my experience is based around software documentation. Whilst there are several levels to this, from task oriented User Guides through to highly technical API/SDK documentation, they tend to follow similar patterns making it easy for me to take my experience and apply it to new challenges. I’ve also been involved in writing up…
Reading time: 2 mins When I first started out in this industry I received little direction other than “make sure you check everything” so a lot of my original ideas of how I should work and what documentation should cover were largely my own. I looked at manuals for a variety of applications and took ideas from them, adapting…
Reading time: 2 mins a.k.a Knowing when to stop Hey, here’s a good reason for more technical writers to start blogging, it’ll cut down on the vast amounts of prose, rhetoric and general bile that seems to be clogging up some of the mailing lists to which I am subscribed. Now, I’ve covered this topic before, but it seems…