Technically Speaking

Not too long ago, I found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place. I work for a large organization (30k+ world wide workforce), and I’m just one tiny fish in a very large lake.

I was asked to provide help content in the form of a getting started guide for a piece of software that was going to be released world-wide.

I started working on the project using my tool of choice, a help authoring tool called MadCap Flare. This is a tool I really like, and have been using for several years. I’m something of an expert on Flare, so it is my first choice for pretty much any authoring project.

I started working within my group, however, and found that Flare wasn’t going to be the right solution for this project because of project constraints outside of my control. We have an in-house translation group that does all our content translation. They have their tools in place and are not interested in obtaining and learning to use a new tool (MadCap’s Lingo tool). There are certain strings in the project (specifically surrounding variables and master pages) that wouldn’t get sent to translation if they didn’t use Lingo. This project is going to go out in 24 languages, so simplifying the process is essential.

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If you are a technical communicator who pays attention to the latest releases of help authoring tools, you probably heard that MadCap Software released a new version of its flagship product, MadCap Flare.

I’ve been using Flare V6 for a couple of months now, and this review is to give you an end user’s review of the features and enhancements Flare V6 has to offer. You may be asking yourself if it’s worth it to upgrade your existing Flare installation to the latest version. Let me give you eight reasons to upgrade, if your budget allows.

Reason 1: WebHelp Mobile Output

Flare V6 includes a new target: WebHelp Mobile. This target creates a web-help output designed for mobile browsers, particularly the iPhone.

If you are trying to produce help content in a way that is accessible in the increasingly-important mobile browser market, this output format is exactly what you need.

To leverage your existing content in this new output format, it is as easy as adding any other target. You add a target to the project, and select WebHelp Mobile as the target type. The first time you add a WebHelp mobile target, you will also need to create a mobile skin. If you leave the default values, Flare creates a skin that matches the native iPhone skin very nicely. (There are actually thee different mobile skins to choose from including gray (default), slate, and green.)

Now, set your skin in your mobile target file, and build your project. In about 30 seconds, you’ve created a mobile-friendly target. The results look great:

Reason 2: Batch Generate and Publish

This is a feature that I needed about two years ago, and I’m thrilled to see it built directly into the Flare interface.

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Several months ago I bought a new laptop for my side business. I’ve tried to figure out a backup solution that would work for my computer, and after doing some research, I decided that I wanted an online backup solution that would work automatically in the background. I picked Mozy for several reasons. I got it installed, selected my directories I wanted to back-up, and let it go about its business.

Mozy has been great. It runs in the background and every so often updates the online storage with the latest files from my laptop. At under $5.00 a month, this is a solution that works nicely for me. I suppose, it is $5.00 of insurance because hopefully you’ll never need it, but it is $5.00 for peace of mind.

Like I said, I never expected I’d need it. Until last night. My computer had a catastrophic failure. I have no idea what happened. I hadn’t installed any new software or drivers or hardware for a couple of weeks (at least), but yesterday it failed to restore from hibernate. We ran several tests and it wasn’t able to fix itself.

Now, normally, I’d be panicking right now. This is the main computer in my house. It has all my writing for the book I’m working on. It has all the web work I’ve done including my backup files for my website. It has all my photographs and my music. I had over 60GB of data that was gone in an instant. But I’m not panicking, nor am I inhalint anti-anxiety meds. You see, I’ve got Mozy. And they’ve got my back.

Mozy is a great service. You download the Mozy client, and you tell it what directories you want to back-up. One folder I backed up was my “Users” folder in Windows, because that contains all my critical data.

Mozy gives you 2GB of backup free. If you want unlimited backup, it’s $4.99 per month (with discounts if you purchase larger blocks of time up-front). If you want to add a folder to the backup repository, but it isn’t already there, you can just right-click on the folder in Windows, and say “Add to Backup”.

When something goes wrong, you can either restore a specific file, an entire directory (including sub-directories), or in the case of a catastrophic loss you can request backup downloads, which get compiled in 3GB increments and which you can download from Mozy’s website. These backups are executable files that you can run to restore all your old files in their former locations. All of that is free (well, included in your monthly fee if you have more than 2GB of data).

If that solution doesn’t work for you, Mozy can even take your entire backup, burn it to DVD, and mail it to you. That is not a free option, but it is probalby the easiest option, and it is the option I chose for my data restoration. When I tried to restore my backup files, I was able to download several of the backups, but not all. I have high-speed internet (which, by the way, is required to use Mozy), but I think my ISP may have been throttling my speed after I tried downloading 15 GB + of data in a couple of hours. I didn’t have the paitence to keep waiting, so I decided that to restore all 60BG+ of my data, I’d request the DVD restore option.

Honestly, this option cost a lot more than I expected. They charge a base fee of $30 for setup, plus $.50 per GB for the media, plus $40 for shipping (Next Day Air, shipped via FedEx). So my restore of 60GB was just over $100.00. I understand the setup and media fees. I was dissappointed that the only shipping option was FedEx Next Day Air. There are many shipping options, and I wish Mozy had let me pick my price depending on how urgent my need was.

Now I await my restore DVDs. I am very happy that I selected Mozy’s service. Even though it cost me $100 to get my data back (because I dind’t want the free download), that is still a lot cheaper than what I would have paid to recover the files from my hard drive. And my music and images are worth the $100.00 restoration, because really, the photos are priceless.

If you don’t have a backup solution in place for your computer, I recommend you consider a solution like Mozy. It saved the day for me this week. When will it be your turn?

(By the way, I’ll write a new post after I’ve been able to restore my data, so I can tell you how easy/hard it was. Stay tuned!)

TechSmith produces a couple of tools that are important in my tech writing workflow including Snagit (probably the best stand-alone screen capture software available, in my opinion) and Jing (a simple program for sharing quick screen captures and screencasts (video).

I complained last week about Jing’s latest release, and how when I capture small videos and play the SWF file directly, the video scales to the browser viewport size. So videos that I had captured at 300×200 pixels were being displayed six times their size in my web browser, and like 10 times their size on my boss’s monitor.

I’ve had an extended conversation with TechSmith’s support department over this issue, and then yesterday I received an e-mail from a developer who is working to resolve the problem.

We’ve now written back and forth a couple of times, discussing ideas to resolve the problem.

I’ll wait until the next release of Jing to decide what I think about this whole issue, but I wanted you to know that what I think TechSmith is getting right, so far, is  how they are handling my complaint. I feel like my concern has been not only heard, but is being acted upon.

In the end, TechSmith will have to make a decision on how to proceed based on what they think is best. But at least I know that my voice has been heard and considered.

Thanks, TechSmith.

I’ve been a happy user of a tool from TechSmith called Jing. It is a quick and easy way to take screen shots and screen cast videos and share them with other people.

I’ve been looking forward to the latest version of Jing, which was released last week, and when it first came out I found some things that I loved about it.

Unfortunately, however, I have decided that TechSmith blew it big time in one critical area for me.

To understand why this is important, let me give you a bit of background.

Like I said, Jing lets you take a quick screen shot or video of your comptuer desktop. This tool has become a valuable tool in my kit. When I’m working with pre-release versions of my company’s software, I often discover bugs. I can quickly take a screen shot of a problem in our application. Jing saves the screenshot to a pre-determined location, and puts the filepath on my clipboard. I go to the bug repoting system, and just click “paste” to put that filepath into the attachments field. It makes attaching an image to a bug report VERY quick, and painless.

The same thing goes for screen casts. When I find a bug that results from a process I encounter, or whose functionality is better shown in a video, rather than captured in a still image, I can use Jing to grab a video, record my audio commentary of the bug. When I save the Jing video, Jing saves the video to a pre-determined location, and puts the filepath on my clipboard. I go to the bug reporting system, and paste the filepath into the attachments field. My developers love it.

I also send jing videos and images via instant message to my co-workers all over. It is a quick and easy way to share information.

However, the newest Jing, released last week made a major change to the way that videos are shown when you play them. Now videos expand to the full window size, regardless of the size of the recording window. I never record full-page videos. It is harder for people to process, and wastes space on the file system. Now, when people open my videos by opening the video from the bug system, or by clicking on the link in my IM, the video plays full screen. My boss has a 30″ screen. I created a video that was about 300 pixels wide by about 200 pixels high. It was expanded to full screen on his monitor. He had to stand back several feet to even understand what he was seeing.

I contacted TechSmith to disucss this issue. They tell me that this is a “feature” in the new version of Jing, and suggest that I embed the video into an HTML page to control the video size.

Nonsense. This is about quick sharing. There is no way that I’m going to take a video, then create a html page, then embed the image into the html page, then save the page, then upload the page to a server and then send the html page’s location to a co-worker. Not going to happen. Remember TechSmith? This is about quick sharing of information. There’s nothing quick about making me embed the video into an html page in order to make the size be at  100%  of the recorded size.

I wish I were writing about what I like in the new Jing. Problem is, I can’t recommend it for anybody who wants to take video  because I believe this “feature” makes it unprofessional at best, and unusable at worst.

TechSmith? Can you hear me? Can you fix this please?!

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Update (1/29/09): TechSmith heard and answered. Check it out.