Technically Speaking

The makers of the iPhone, Apple, today announced a “revolutionary” device: a tablet computer they call iPad. Now, normally I’m a big fan of things Apple. I have an iPod touch (don’t want the service contract or wireless provider of the iPhone), and I love it. So you might be expecting me to be geeking out over this new device. But, not so much.

Here is what we know: the new device will run the iPhone OS (albeit an updated version). The iPad will have an option for unlimited wireless 3G connectivity (again from AT&T) for $30 bucks a month (or a limited plan for around $15 per month). If you don’t want 3G connectivity, you can purchase the non-3G version and just connect over wireless networks.

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO and presenter at today’s announcement, says that the iPad is thin and lighter than any netbook. In the $500 to $1000 price space, they are competing against similarly priced netbooks or low-end laptop computers. The iPad also comes with iBook – essentially an e-book reader, which puts iPad in direct competition with devices like Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader.

Essentially, it seems, iBook is a Kindle with the iPhone interface. Apps written for iPhone/iPod touch will run on the iPad, and Apple will roll out new apps (and released a developer’s SDK today so app writers can begin creating apps specifically for the iPad) so you can do word processing, spreadsheet data entry, and more on iPad.

But the question I keep asking myself is, “why?” I mean, Apple has been telling us for years now that smaller was better. Each version of the iMac seemed to get smaller. Each version of the Mac Book Pro got thinner. Apple even rolled out the Mac Book Air, and amazed us with a laptop that can fit in an manila envelope. Then Apple sold us on the iPhone and iPod touch, showing us that we can take the Internet, a bunch of very useful apps, and tons of our data everywhere we go.

Now Apple wants us to believe that bigger is better. Isn’t the iPad essentially an up-sized iPod touch (with optional 3G connectivity)? But are you going to carry the thing around with you wherever you go? That is what I love about my iPod touch–it goes with me everywhere. It is my PDA, it’s my music player, its my e-book reader, my e-mail client, and my portable gaming device all in one. Now Apple wants me to buy an iPad that does all of that, but is just bigger?

It will be interesting to see if iPad takes off like the iPhone did. I’m certainly not going to be standing in line to get one. I’m just not convinced that it will make my life that much better than my iPod already does.

What do you think? Are you geeking out over the iPad? If so, why? If not, are your reasons similar to mine?

Back in 2004 we received a much needed gift: a little red truck named Lassie. Lassie was a 1984 red Toyota pick up truck that got her name because when my in-laws owned her, she was stolen several times, yet every time she came back home (the police found the truck and brought it back). Since she always came back, they named her Lassie.

We’ve used Lassie since then as a second car to our 02 Nissan Sentra. However, due to the pending birth of our third child, we needed something larger than the Sentra. We’ll have three kids 3 and under, and you just can’t fit three car seats in the back of a Sentra. At least if you want both doors to close. Working with my friend Clip Palmer at Just a Car Lot we were able to get a fantastic deal on a 2008 Kia Sedona (pictured below).

That gave us three vehicles for two drivers and a garage that only fits two cars. Plus, Lassie has been having some plumbing trouble lately, and has been leaking oil and brake fluid. (In fact, the brakes have been failing on occasion, like the time I flew past the Walgreen’s drive through window; luckily there were no cars in front of me.)

Thus, we made the decision to support the National Kidney Foundation with a Kidney Cars donation. This is a great program, and I hope that our small donation can help out some people who really need it. So we had to sacrifice Lassie, but it was for a good cause. Click on the link below to learn more about the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Car program.

As a technical writer, I develop content for the applications I’m supporting. Often that includes designing content, images, and multi-media to provide the best user experience possible. As content developers, however, we have a responsibility (both legal and moral) to ensure that the content we are using is being used properly and legally.

We live in a world with lots of avenues to get content for our projects. Several websites specialize in searching for media that you can download and use in your product. Just because you can find it, however, does not mean you can use it. There are legal requirements that you need to be aware of when you are using content created by somebody else.

For example, I can’t just do a Google image search and find any image and put it directly into my project. The person who created that image has copyright protection on that content. You can not use it unless you get a license to use it from the copyright holder.

When you are working on a project for personal use, you probably don’t have to be too worried about these restrictions. However, when you are doing work that will be used in any kind of professional setting or commercial setting, you have to be very careful how you use others’ intellectual property.

Take, for example, the case of NBC currently in the news. NBC is being sued for using somebody else’s intellectual property, without properly licensing it. A very similar thing happened at a company where I used to work. The company had been purchased by a larger entity, and was going through a re-branding. The new branding used a font that the company hadn’t licensed properly. When I read the license agreement and realized we were infringing on somebody’s IP rights, I escalated to the management, who had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to use the fonts the way they were planning to. However, paying those tens of thousands of dollars up front saved them potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in the lawsuit that might come from using the fonts illegally.

Since the work you create represents the company you work for (or your own company, if you are an contractor), you really need to pay attention to intellectual property issues to protect your company from being held liable for infringement.

Here are some tips for using intellectual property properly:

• When you use somebody’s material, be sure you get written permission to use it, including exactly how it will be used. If you are going to use it for commercial purposes, be sure that it is properly stated.
• Don’t just assume that people put the content on the Internet so it can be used.
• If you purchase stock photography, make sure you abide by the terms of the license agreement. Generally, you don’t purchase unlimited rights; normally your license restricts how the property can be used (if it can be downloaded, for example; or if it can be used on a T-shirt or mug).
• If you create something from scratch while at work, that work belongs to your employer. You can use that in your work product in any way you want. If you make a derivative work, you have to be sure you are licensed to do so.
• “Fair use” is a defense in court; it is not a legal protection, per se. Be very careful about saying “I can use this, because it is ‘fair use.’” You don’t want to get sued to prove that it is, in fact, fair use. When in doubt, don’t do it.
• Track your IP use. Many licenses to use IP include time restrictions; after a certain date you have to re-pay to continue to use the image. Be sure your organization is in compliance with these rules.
• When you use somebody else’s work, be sure you give proper attribution. In many cases it is required. In other cases, it is just the morally right thing to do.

A special note about Creative Commons License

There are lots of images available out there under a Creative Commons license. There are several forms of this license, but you need to be very careful if you use Creative Commons-licensed material because most Creative Commons licenses require “share-alike.” That means that if you use an image licensed with a Creative Commons license, your entire project must also be licensed under the same license.

That means if you are creating a help system that includes a single Creative Commons Share Alike image, then your entire help system may also be required to be licensed under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

Watching out for others’ IP rights is good for the community. It means you can also expect your IP rights to be respected. It is the responsible thing for us to do, and as writers, we owe it to ourselves, our employers, and our community to make sure we are in compliance with intellectual property requirements.

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Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this should not be considered legal advice. If you have questions about intellectual property issues, please seek the advice of an IP attorney licensed to practice in your locality.

Probably most of you don’t know that I changed jobs recently, which is part of the reason I’ve been posting so infrequently. When you change jobs there is so much to learn, and it takes time.

One of the benefits of my new job is that I’m working with an impressive team. I have great respect for every one of my team members. We have four technical writers, three trainers, and our manager. They are quite the group. We have Intermountain STC chapter president Ben Minson, the unstoppable Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing, and fellow Flare pro Derek Warren. (Derek’s mother, we discovered, is really good friends with my wife. They met while serving as missionaries in Russia.)

Recently we added a new component to our team meetings: Design Review. Every other team meeting, three team members get 30 minutes each to talk about projects they are working on, and they get to demonstrate some of the cool things they are integrating into the project. As a team, we look at the project and both learn from what they’ve done, and make suggestions on how they might improve the project.

Our first design review was this week. Captain Ben was out sick, so he didn’t get to present his work, but we got to see some of Tom’s work, as well as the work of Mike, one of the trainers on our team. I was super impressed with both of their work. Tom demonstrated how he was using a Wiki to manage documentation for a community-developed software product. Mike showed us how he created an online quick reference guide that used JavaScript and divs to hide content and only show the part that the user needed at that moment.

I found both demonstrations very interesting. It was great to see how Tom is working to involve the community in documentation of a community-developed software tool. We talked about the wiki as a documentation source, and discussed the pros and cons of using a wiki for documentation. Tom is up doing a presentation at a university in Idaho today and tomorrow, and he is going to see if he can encourage the university tech comm students to contribute to the project. I’ll be interested to watch to see how that develops. As for Mike’s presentation, I was very impressed with the professional quick reference website that he created in Dreamweaver. It made me re-think how we can provide quick reference material to our customers. We spent a lot of time talking about how you know when to provide it in a quick reference page format, and when to create a full help system, and I found that discussion useful.

I am going to like these review sessions. They are mentally engaging and it’s fun to see what other team members are doing. I think it will help all of us improve our current projects, and help us be better writers overall.

As  a “young” technical writer, I thought I might share some of my feelings on the STC crisis.

First, a little background on me. I knew while I was in college that I wanted to be a technical writer after graduation. I switched to an English major for that purpose, and picked classes that gave me a “technical communication emphasis”. I joined STC while I was in college because I wanted to connect with people in my field. I got a chapter scholarship to attend a regional STC conference, and had a great time meeting people who did for a living what I was studying.

When I graduated and began working, I joined STC as a regular member. For two of my three jobs, I had to explain to my employer what the “STC” bullet meant on my resume. Until my current job, I’ve never had an employer who would pay for conferences, so my interactions with STC have been limited to those in the local chapter, on the web, and through STC publications. I believe herein lies the problem that STC faces: STC’s value proposition has to be able to compete with what I can obtain from other sources, and do so in a compelling way.

I look at it this way: if the STC were to go away, what would I lose? Let’s take a look at the benefits that I care about that I’d lose:

• STC publications. I like receiving Intercom. I honestly don’t really ever read Technical Communication. I get the need for a peer-reviewed journal, and understand how this is especially important in academia, but the stuff in TC generally doesn’t seem to interest or affect me. But the reality is that most of the articles that are published in Intercom would get published in other forms (like blogs). They might not be on the same subject, but the information is out there, and will continue to be churned out by writers like my colleague Tom Johnson who are better bloggers than I. So, if the publications go away, I’ll miss them a little bit, but not a lot.
• Local chapter affiliation. I’ve not been very active in my local chapter until the last couple of months. I’ve attended a couple of meetings in the 5 years that I’ve been a member, but let’s be honest: like any professional, I’ve got lots of things competing for my time and attention. I have a young family that I really enjoy spending time with. When STC meetings conflict with personal interests, I’ve picked personal over professional because I haven’t seen tons of value in the local chapter. My perspective on that is changing as I’ve accepted a VP position in my local chapter, and I hope that as an executive team, we can find ways to make our local chapter more useful to the technical communicators in our region. Six months ago, I considered not being affiliated with a local chapter, but now I’m finding more value there. Maybe this is a resource like so many others that you get out of it what you put into it.
• SIG / STC online affiliations. The SIGs haven’t been really useful to me. I’m a member of one SIG that has never contacted me with information about the SIG; has never provided any information about lists I might join, nor provided any other benefit. The other SIG has a mailing list, but it isn’t the most active list I follow, and the questions that get posted to that list might as well be posted to other non-STC lists I follow. I’ve watched some STC community leaders create other online sites that don’t restrict their membership to STC members, but they promote these sites to STC members. I think STC loses value in these cases, because I might as well join the other groups (for free) than pay to be a member of STC.
• Salary survey. The salary survey on STCs website is now a complete joke, and I find it useless. I preferred the old method of self-reporting. While less accurate, I found it much more helpful than the current salary survey. I won’t miss this resource at all because I don’t use it. There are several salary websites I can use that provide as much, if not more, value than the STC salary survey.
• Job resources on STC websites. The jobs section of the Society web site has not been a useful tool for me. When I’ve been looking for jobs, there haven’t been any local listings. When I went to post a job, there was an additional $120 fee, which my employer wouldn’t pay because they were already listing on Dice and Monster. The irony is that we were able to post on the local chapter website for free, and the writer we hired found us through the local chapter listing. So without STC’s local chapter website, we wouldn’t have found that writer, but it’s not like there aren’t other job boards that tech writers and their employers are using.

So here is my question: if STC is going to remain a viable organization, what is going to be the value proposition? What will STC provide that I can’t get from other sources? And then I have to ask, how much is that worth to me? I hope STC focuses on what I can’t get elsewhere and does it in a way that is valuable and interesting. That is what will keep me, a “young” writer interested in the organization.