Each technical communication conference I attend, one of the activities that attendees look forward to is strolling through the exhibit hall, perusing the various tech comm booths, picking up freebies and fliers, listening to vendor pitches, and generally taking in the tech comm world of products. With that in mind, and as an opportunity to give more visibility to my sponsors, I offer a regular … more »

Sometimes I can hardly believe I’ve gotten along for so many years as a technical communicator without a thorough understanding of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Flash. They seem critical to technical communication. Why Illustrator With vector images (which Illustrator allows you to create), your images in quick reference guides will look sharp and crisp. The more quick reference guides I create, the more I realize … more »

MadCap Blaze: a new publishing powerhouse? | A Technical Communication Community.

Adobe Video Workshop.  A lot of nice video tutorials here.

InDesignSecrets. This is a cool site — lots of tips and tricks if you use InDesign. And it has an extensive and regular podcast.

Free Adobe InDesign Tutorials | Layers Magazine

Technically Speaking » A shout out to MadCap Support

AdobeTV

Adobe Acrobat.com — Free online web conferencing through Acrobat.com. I think it’s limited to 3 people, but still, how cool!

A few months ago, I started to write a post about the cultural shift blogging would create in the near and long-term future. I didn’t get very far and quickly became mired in speculation. But when I learned today that RJ Jacquez now has a blog, I started to remember some of my predictions. Basically, it goes like this: Amateur bloggers start to saturate Google … more »

RJ Jacquez and Mike Hamilton: Blogs by Lead Adobe and Madcap Evangelists

This is a guest post by Daniel Ng, a technical writer in Malaysia. Daniel mentioned an interesting article he’d read on the possible return of Corel Ventura, and I asked him to expand his thoughts in a guest post.

Download MP3 Duration: 30 min. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] In this podcast, I talk with Theresa Putkey, a writer/usability consultant in Vancouver, about the largest project of her career. She explains how she approached a project that had upwards of 2,500 help topics, many of which consisted of duplicate content. She explains how she transitioned from RoboHelp to Flare, the advantages she … more »

Charles Jeter recorded an excellent podcast with Mike Hamilton, V.P. of product management at Madcap Software, and posted it on his blog yesterday. Jeter is a technical writer in the California area who has been carefully analyzing the online help tool market. The following are some of my takeaways from the podcast:

Rob Houser’s recent article in Writers UA, “What’s New in RoboHelp 7?“, is a thorough, insightful article I highly recommend. After reading his review, I thought I’d post a few notes from my experiences with the same. (For more about Rob, see his site.) This past month I’ve been heavily using the RoboHelp 7 and Captivate 3 components of the Technical Communication Suite. RoboHelp 7 … more »