Technically Speaking

Twitter is an interesting tool. In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of it, Twitter is a social networking tool that lets you share updates (or tweets) with the world. People can subscribe to your twitter feed, and will see your tweets (mixed in with the tweets of anybody else they follow). The limitation, though, is that an individual tweet must be 140 characters or shorter.

I follow lots of technical communicators and increasingly I’m seeing people reach out for help on the software they are using. That is really cool in some ways. I follow several writers, and I know several writers follow me. If I’m having trouble with a piece of software, I can pose a quick question, and one of my followers might have the answer I need.

There is a limitation, though. Since an individual post is limited to 140 characters, it is hard to give a detailed description of the problem I’m experiencing, and it is likewise difficult for somebody responding to give a detailed description of the possbile solutions. While technical communicators generally prefer brevity, you must be able to at least be comprehensive.

Today one of the people I follow asked a question about MadCap Flare and wanted to understand the conceptual difference between togglers, drop-downs, expanding text, and pop-up text, and wanted to know what the use cases were. I don’t mean to pick on this person, but it provides a good example for an issue I’ve been thinking about for some time now. See, I know quite a bit about these four features in Flare, and can provide a good explanation with use cases are. The trouble is, how can I do that in 140 characters?

Even if I dedicated a separate tweet to each of the four features, I’m still quite limited in what I can say, and how can I provide an adequate explanation and use case in such a short space? Plus, if I were to dedicate four tweets, I begin to clutter up my twitter feed responding to a single Twitter user, which is bad form and carries on a coversation that most of my followers probaby aren’t interested in.

I’ve seen several Flare users get product support from MadCap employees using Twitter, and I think that is nice for a quick question with an easy solution. Twitter, however, is not a great format for a detailed question that required specific exampled and detailed answers. In such cases, the best solution is probably to go to a related email list or forum where you can ask the question in enough detail that experienced users can provide helpful results.

Twitter can be a great tool, and can help people get answers quickly. However, when you have a question and need an answer, you probably ought to consider your question, and determine what channel is best suited for the type of answer you need. That may or may not be Twitter.

TechSmith corporation has released an update to Jing, the free screen capture/video capture tool. I ranted in January about a code change in that release that really bugged me. TechSmith responded here on my blog, and via e-mail, and today’s update addresses that issue (thank you TechSmith!) but introduces a couple more issues for me. But lets take them one at a time.

First, my original complaint with the January update was that when you created videos with small pixel dimensions (because you don’t want to capture the whole screen), when somebody tries to view the video directly (not embedded in a web page), the video expanded to the full screen.

This was a problem for me because one of the VPs in my company has a 30″ screen. If I’ve grabbed a video of a bug that happens in our software, and attach it to the bug report, when the VP tries to view the video of the bug, it is expanded something like 10x its captured size, which is hard to follow and looks terrible.

The release of Jing I installed today fixes that issue! Now when you directly view a Jing SWF file (say it is attached to the bug and the developer clicks on it to view it), small videos don’t expand to the width of the screen. Large videos do, but I can’t figure out where the breaking point is. And frankly, I’m okay with that. It was my small videos (in terms of pixel dimensions) that I was concerned about. So, a big thank you to TechSmith for listening and taking swift action on this issue.

My only gripes, and these are minor, are that first,  I wish the control bar that is added to the SWF file was placed below the capture region, instead on top of the bottom part of the capture region. Take this video for example.

Is there a reason that the controls cover up the bottom part of the captured image? If so, you ought to warn us that the bottom part won’t be visible, so we know to grab a taller portion.

My second gripe is that when I updated to the latest version, Jing lost all my button customizations. I had created several buttons to directly FTP content to my web server in a particular folder, or other buttons to save files on the network share in a specific folder. I’m going to have to remember what those were and re-create the buttons. In the first place, Jing shouldn’t have deleted these, and in the second place, if Jing really needed to delete these when it upgraded, it should have warned me first so that I was at least aware that I was going to lose my user-configured settings.

However, when I updated my second computer, these settings were saved. So there is a chance that this was user error, because for one computer it works like I want it to, but for the other one, it deleted my custom buttons. Ah well.

So my final review in a nutshell: great update, especially if you capture small pixel dimension videos. Great job TechSmith. Be aware, however, that the upgrade *might* totally erase all your custom buttons. Probably it won’t. Unless you do whatever it was I did. Anyway, thanks TechSmith!