Two more links for the day ...
- Today NI officially announced LabVIEW 8. This is the framework for most of the upcoming add-ons, so we've all been working with version 8 for awhile now. As far as I'm concerned, however, the most important part of the announcement was the free breakfast tacos we all got this morning :-) Mmm, bacon and egg.
- The newest issue of Wired has a great profile on tech-writing superstar (hah!) Tim O'Reilly. The article talks more about his personal philosophies and his industry prescience than it does about technical writing, but some relevant talk still makes it in there. What, is tech writing boring or something? Heaven forbid! :-)
Anyway, O'Reilly books are probably the benchmark for all third-party manuals out there. I've read/used several, and I know other R&D employees here have copies of one book or another. The article is a fun read on how his business got started.
Tech writing...boring? You know, I get that question all of the time. I wonder why.......
ReplyDeleteYou guys still use Framemaker? Is there any reason why you didn't switch to InDesign? It is a combination of Framemaker and Pagemaker. No reason to change what works, I guess. When I arrived at my company, they were using Word for EVERY manual, so don't assume that just because it lacks functionality that is won't be used. We have hundreds of manuals, all created with Word '97. When I got here, I convinced my boss to use InDesign so that our layouts would look better. We are all using InDesign, but he still can't get it. Perhaps it has too much functionality for him. I'm sure that practice will make perfect, though. As an interesting side note, our printer (person, not machine) does not print using .PDF formatted files. He photographs the printed document to metal plates and prints it from those. An archaic and inefficient printing practice, but it does keep file type incompatibility from being an issue.
Glad you liked your breakfast burritos. We are coming up on the 35th anniversary of our company partnering with McDonald's soon. They are going to be touring our plants, meeting people, and providing us with a free luncheon. Nothing is better than all you can eat free McDonald's!!! ;oD
Also, the comment concerning "Fall Fashion" is a spam posting, not an actual blog. We have very good virus blocking software, so I checked it. I don't know if there is any way to remove it, but just thought you should know. ;)
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