tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-138737282012-01-18T16:10:39.564-06:00Thoughts from technical writers on the LabVIEW Documentation team at National Instruments in Austin, Texas.Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.comBlogger981100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-10750619201450863822012-01-18T08:54:00.000-06:002012-01-18T16:10:39.589-06:00

I had put a link to a Twitter account here ... but I'm going to be pursuing a different strategy, working with NI's existing social media team. So if you read this post earlier ... never mind! :-)

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-6480085571463907402011-04-01T10:56:00.003-05:002011-04-01T10:58:46.245-05:00

Hello Internet-land, it's been awhile since I posted here. But I work on inspiration, and lately there hasn't been much of that driving any blog posts. I've been at NI for over six years now (crazy to think I've been writing this blog for like five of those years) and think I know pretty darn well how to write effective end-user documentation. Plus, I'm human and have an ego. Put these two facts

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-61817495945005121982010-09-28T15:00:00.000-05:002010-09-28T15:00:23.015-05:00

I've talked here before about speaking the customer's language. Yesterday I saw a post from another technical writing blog that reinforces this point. I quote: ===  ....[A] user may want to send a letter to many different people. If the user doesn't know about the mail merge feature, they will insanely copy and paste all the letters. Having an index entry of mail merge is useless, because if

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-36567318552785032932010-07-30T09:47:00.000-05:002010-07-30T09:47:07.346-05:00

Today's xkcd (a fantastically geeky webcomic) is about designing for your audience ... http://xkcd.com/773/ The parallels to technical writing are obvious :-) How can you know what to write if you don't know what information your audience is looking for?

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-23080359222106895572010-05-25T14:44:00.002-05:002010-05-25T15:04:21.431-05:00

No, really, I don't! At least, not when reading my documentation. One of my guiding principles behind writing & reviewing technical documentation is "Remove the burden of thought from the customer." After all, our customers are NOT getting paid to read documentation. They're not even getting paid to figure out how to program in LabVIEW. They are getting paid to solve problems. So when I'm

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-17805895171458919492010-03-17T13:44:00.000-05:002010-03-17T13:44:14.013-05:00

At NI, technical writers often are the first non-developer users of a feature (API, dialog box, what-have-you). We are expected to notice UI issues and raise them with the developers. The next time you defer or reject a minor UI change, consider these examples of how UI can impact your revenue: The $80-million-dollar color The $300-million-dollar button

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-43350653480617206332010-02-16T14:29:00.001-06:002010-02-16T14:40:39.700-06:00

LabVIEW is a visual development language, right? That's why, many years ago, when I wrote the following about how to trim a nonlinear subsystem: Obtains the value of the State Derivatives parameter of the car model using the SIM Query Subsystem VI. The State Derivatives parameter contains car position, which is equivalent to the velocity of the car. Wires the State Derivatives parameter to

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-49257342123706368002010-01-19T08:43:00.001-06:002010-01-19T11:25:34.524-06:00

Apparently someone got a hold of a Chinese spam-producing software and used it to target this blog. Blogger doesn't have features for editing/deleting comments en masse, so I won't be able to remove them from the posts. Hopefully they do not interrupt your browsing experience :-) I've turned on comment moderation for older posts and enabled some other features that should prevent such spam from

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-3216259571085568782009-12-16T11:35:00.005-06:002009-12-18T14:45:15.288-06:00

Writing a great tutorial is an art form. There are several requirements for a successful how-to exercise:- The user needs enough information to successfully complete the task.- The user needs to move through the exercise in a reasonable amount of time.- The user needs to learn several basic concepts that will continue to be useful outside the context of the tutorial.A common thread in these

Alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13832492748461032339noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-65934168240688886282009-12-16T10:48:00.001-06:002009-12-16T10:48:12.071-06:00

Hope ya’ll don’t mind a little horn-tooting! In a Glassdoor.com survey, NI’s been named the second-best tech company to work for, coming in behind Juniper at #1 and Google at #3! Can’t say I’m surprised :-) If you look at the site’s overall company ratings, we come in at #13, just behind Kraft. If only we had the power of mac & cheese, we’d be better than they are, I know it …

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-86201350778160339702009-12-08T15:37:00.001-06:002009-12-08T15:37:19.060-06:00

Funny post from Andrew Brooke, a new blog I’ve added to my RSS feed. The troop surge represents a 43% increase in the number of soldiers. Can you imagine the effect if a company increased the number of its tech writers the same amount? It would annihilate much of the company's misinformation and missing information, a victory in war on error.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-28797716871717370412009-12-03T09:38:00.001-06:002009-12-03T09:38:33.398-06:00

A couple tidbits for ya today: LabVIEW, VeriStand, FieldPoint, CompactRIO, iPhone – what do they all have in common? Their product names use camel case. (h/t to DF) The sorry state of Linux documentation; from a user’s viewpoint.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-81724725691923340302009-10-30T11:46:00.000-05:002009-10-30T11:46:20.521-05:00

 It’s a tradition: Every year on Halloween (or as close to it as the work week will allow), tons of LabVIEW developers set up shop at their desks and demonstrate features or products they’ve been working on to all comers. The email goes out to the entire company (in Austin, anyway) and for two hours, (most) work stops as people come by to check out what we’ve been working on. Today’s that

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1988579131709329322009-10-26T11:53:00.001-05:002009-10-26T11:53:14.174-05:00

In the comments on my last post, Yair pointed me towards this preview of the LabVIEW 1.0 beta, all the way back in 1986. Enjoy!

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-14053945722500811302009-10-26T10:02:00.001-05:002009-10-26T10:02:18.721-05:00

Here’s a review of the original Macintosh, done in 1984. It’s amazing to read this now with 25 years of perspective and realize both how different it was and how similarly things still work today. But even back then some people seemed to “get it”. When LabVIEW was first released in 1986, it was for the Mac, because that was the dominant graphical platform of the day, and LabVIEW is

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-90453731136884101622009-10-23T15:59:00.002-05:002009-10-23T16:02:29.025-05:00

I find myself reading a lot of tech news sites. I sometimes email these links out to developers or other technical writers if they are interesting or have applications to LabVIEW/NI, but I figured, why not share them with the world?Here's are a few things I came across lately:Don't offer preferences to users if you don't have to. I think about this sometimes as we design software here ...

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-25979838741831821952009-10-13T13:46:00.000-05:002009-10-13T13:46:31.687-05:00

Leica makes some of the highest-quality, precision-engineered cameras in the world. WIRED magazine recently caught up with them and took a tour of their facility in Solms, Germany. In one of the shots, you can see a LabVIEW application (designed by Ramitek GmbH) being used to test the M9, Leica's newest camera. It's kind of awesome to see LabVIEW being used to help control tolerances as fine as

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-41737633608202567242009-09-17T12:17:00.001-05:002009-09-17T12:17:42.385-05:00

Small bit of background: I recently got (more) into digital photography and have been having a fun time dreaming of buying fancy-schmancy camera lenses. So I was checking out Sigma's web site and saw they have an "advisor tool". I clicked it and was presented with this: This tool is of absolutely no use to me. Why? Because I don't think in terms of "Lens technology" or even "Weight". I think in

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-41609442081515716262009-08-07T15:00:00.003-05:002009-08-07T15:15:14.048-05:00

As NI's newest tech writer, I feel like it's part of my job to experience as much of our technology as possible. In my day to day work, I can do this by talking with developers about the product and learning from them about how the customer might use the new features they're working on. Sometimes I get the chance to see a demo, but it's rare that I get to see the end result from a customer's

Alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13832492748461032339noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-87531690302579116122009-08-07T09:44:00.006-05:002009-08-07T09:55:05.402-05:00

Wednesday at NIWeek, we took the wraps off of the newest project I've been working on - a way to host LabVIEW in a Web browser, letting you build VIs without installing ANYTHING on your computer (ok, that's not the whole truth, you DO need to spend 30 seconds downloading the Silverlight runtime engine!) Just like Gmail, Google Docs, et al let you access email and spreadsheets without installing

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-24363518492792877882009-08-03T09:21:00.000-05:002009-08-03T09:21:39.250-05:00

In case you're wondering just what we do all day ... or all year ... the LabVIEW 2009 Help system is now available online. It contains the help for the LabVIEW Base/Full/Pro development systems as well as each individual module and toolkit. Bet you didn't know we have so many LabVIEW add-ons! Did you know we make a toolkit to help you develop adaptive filter algorithms? (You know, like if you

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-3577927189911123252009-07-31T11:09:00.006-05:002009-07-31T11:12:59.534-05:00

Yeah, the cat's out of the bag! We're publicly announcing LabVIEW 2009 today. If you're attending NIWeek next week, you'll of course get a more in-depth look at it, as well as a chance to pester developers about it :-)I'm pretty excited about the Enhanced Block Diagram Cleanup feature. I used the first version of this feature a LOT in LabVIEW 8.6 when developing some VIs here for internal use. It

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-46728869714100622022009-07-28T10:06:00.004-05:002009-07-28T10:19:26.596-05:00

From ESPN:Jamie Moyer allowed seven baserunners before recording an out in the third inning. Somehow, none of them scored. I read this bit and did a double-take. This makes it sound like Moyer did the following:Allowed seven baserunners in the third inningDid not record an out until the eighth batter of the inning Did not give up a run during this timeIf you follow baseball, you might remember

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-65591351264449103362009-07-21T11:15:00.002-05:002009-07-21T11:21:55.498-05:00

I'm not trying to start anything political, but I think this is pretty interesting. This is often the end result of documents I write, although we use Adobe PDF Reader to mark comments and distribute them electronically.I like how Vanity Fair has separate literary, research, and copy editors. Often at NI we have to combine these roles into one person.Photo used from http://www.flickr.com/photos/

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-68025345101077844642009-04-17T10:49:00.000-05:002009-04-17T10:49:35.502-05:00

Lonely Sandwich talking about how prepositions affect the perception of the App Store: I could say I bought a song on iTunes, but when I speak of it like that, I think of iTunes as more of a network for content rather than an outlet, much in the same way I’d say I saw 30 Rock on NBC or heard my favorite song on my favorite radio station. So does this mean that Apple likes to think of its iTunes

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6Austin, TX, USA30.185357529701808 -97.8985462185664830.18072052970181 -97.90584171856648 30.189994529701806 -97.89125071856648tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-59599528301048752152009-03-23T18:11:00.003-05:002009-03-23T18:20:12.226-05:00

Okay, this sounds kind of odd, but hear me out. A developer friend recently told me about the "rubber duckie" method of coding. In a nutshell, you as a software engineer place a generic rubber duckie on your desk. Every time you make a big coding decision or implementation, you explain how it all works to the rubber duckie. If you find yourself straining for an explanation, or if you find

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-56247759350856333072009-03-23T18:05:00.001-05:002009-03-23T18:05:17.408-05:00

An example of some great, actionable user feedback: 3. From the docs: "When you are ready to upload the code, select the correct serial port and NG board type on the Tools menu". This made me want to tear out my own eyes. What are the correct settings!!?We (LabVIEW technical writers, product support engineers, applications engineers, and yes even developers) try to monitor our forums, we really

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-84176993022236103322009-02-12T09:19:00.041-06:002009-02-12T09:33:06.063-06:00

I bought a new lens for my digital SLR a couple weeks ago. As I was checking out at the store, I noticed that the staff was setting up for an instructional session of some sort. I asked them which session it was, and the clerk said it was their digital photography basics class. He said the class came about because the staff was having to answer all sorts of these basic questions and do all these

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6North Burnet, Austin, TX, USA30.396276 -97.73276930.387022 -97.74736 30.40553 -97.71817800000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-37852162799575814952009-01-23T10:31:00.003-06:002009-01-23T11:10:38.139-06:00

Some stats on Microsoft's technical documentation for communication protocols:1,660 identified bugs ... Nearly 800 Microsoft employees are working on the technical documentation ... More than 20,000 pages of technical documentation ...That works out to:2.075 bugs per writer0.083 bugs per pageI don't know about you, but I think those are excellent ratios, even given the fuzzy numbers and imprecise

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-30297109036238222242008-12-03T01:45:00.002-06:002008-12-03T03:05:29.179-06:00

I think one of the hardest things in technical writing, especially for new hires, is to be assigned to document a product or feature that you know nothing about. Since we have a wide variety of LabVIEW products, from signal processing to HMI to control and simulation to report generation to sound and vibration measurements (not to mention the core product itself), no one can be expected to

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-67492424019593556922008-11-26T23:29:00.004-06:002008-11-26T23:48:30.013-06:00

Over at Ars today, Erica Sadun gives thanks for the iPhone SDK's documentation:Thank you for the kick-ass SDK documentation. I know you have employed many OCD victims who would otherwise be wandering the street picking up litter and tidying our world and instead aimed them at creating precise and glorious help pages. Sure, it takes about five years to download each API update but oh, the beauty

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-73124628282758927302008-11-17T19:39:00.005-06:002008-11-17T20:06:54.129-06:00

Hat tip to Daring Fireball (an excellent blog that I read despite not owning any Apple products) for the news that Apple has released its 2008 style guide.When 1,000 writers are writing technical documentation for 2,000 products, consistency is very important, even down to the correct capitalization and noun strings used to refer to specific parts of software or hardware. Style guides keep

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-2312449880347545302008-10-28T20:25:00.004-05:002008-10-28T20:40:32.593-05:00

McLuhan famously said "The medium is the message." In my 10 months in Shanghai, I've been learning just how true that is. More than once now I've been involved in a disagreement or similar situation that has been instigated, and carried through, in email. These emails take a lot of time to write and respond to, because we all want to be precise. And because of the time difference, I don't receive

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-17785959404496122042008-10-24T21:34:00.004-05:002008-10-24T22:03:29.241-05:00

I'm really proud to say that I'm not only a LabVIEW technical writer -- I'm also a client! One great thing about being a technical writer at NI is the opportunity to actually USE the products we document. Okay, so I haven't gotten a chance to prototype a control system. But technical writers at NI use LabVIEW every day to improve our internal processes.That's a pretty general statement, so I'll

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-29113438862982231332008-04-01T04:34:00.002-05:002008-04-01T04:38:14.583-05:00

One of the tech writers here at NI Shanghai has posted a great entry describing what she does all day. Now, we don't do all of this stuff every day. But a large majority of it will be done over the course of a week or so. At any rate, it's a great peek into just what life is like at the office -- because I know you all were curious about exactly that :-)

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-29361200347210578902008-03-21T03:46:00.002-05:002008-03-21T04:14:18.558-05:00

I've never had the opportunity to learn a foreign language before, outside of the pidgin-Spanish I can remember from 7th-8th grade. Coming to Shanghai and attempting to learn Mandarin has been an adventure. A frustrating and difficult adventure, but a worthwhile and rewarding one also.At the same time as I'm trying to learn a new language (or at least get some basic handle on it), I'm reviewing

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-24973559309639353522008-03-04T03:58:00.002-06:002008-03-04T04:05:21.894-06:00

From now on, I'm going to start filing typos as bug reports that are far more serious than "trivial".Barry Bonds seized on a pair of typos, complaining in court papers Thursday that the government's mistakes could compromise his chances for a fair trial. The typographical errors showed up in a recent filing by prosecutors wrongly accusing Bonds of flunking a drug test in 2001. They later admitted

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-73398363791348768932008-02-10T21:27:00.000-06:002008-02-10T21:56:38.926-06:00

For the 3+ years I've been at NI, I have been reviewing documents by printing out hard copies and distributing them to reviewers. However, now that I am doing more reviewing than writing, I've fallen in love with the commenting features of Adobe Reader. The process works like this:Create CHM or PDF files.Print CHM file to a PDF file. We can do this because we have Acrobat installed.Enable PDF for

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-37509169450169286892007-12-27T12:57:00.001-06:002007-12-27T13:55:13.593-06:00

(Side note: Every time I see the acronym for Subject Matter Expert, I think of Smee from Captain Hook. Every time.)Through a co-worker's blog, I came across a post about sitting near your SME at the office. I cannot agree more emphatically. At NI, most of technical writers sit in the same general location as the engineers for whom they write documentation. For most of my three years here, I

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-17390283663037712372007-11-27T10:09:00.000-06:002007-11-27T11:25:44.298-06:00

...but I wanted to link to two posts I saw on the User Advocacy blog:Technical Writing in Transition: Part 1 and Part 2.Makes for some interesting reading, I think.Quote:Technical writing has adapted with three fundamental changes:1. Task-oriented writing. Instead of describing the parts of a system, we walk the user through tasks and explain technical knowledge incidentally.2. Single-sourcing.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-42018982908433552602007-08-03T15:24:00.000-05:002007-08-03T15:33:52.690-05:00

File this one under "Coolest Things I've Ever Seen." Vineet samples himself beatboxing and singing. He can do this multiple times until he is giving himself a full backing melody.His mic is hooked into a PXI-7831R running LabVIEW FPGA. The performance is from the NI Live Talent Show we have once a year; this one was on July 12 2007.Watch this one to see Vineet turn it up a notch!Try doing that

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-23695203469652356882007-08-02T15:30:00.001-05:002007-08-02T15:33:34.627-05:00

NIWeek 2007 starts next Tuesday, August 7th at the Austin Convention Center! This year, instead of simply attending, I'm giving a presentation! Here's the info:Date / Time: Wednesday August 8th, 3:30 PM. Room 16A.Title: Documentation Dividends: Help that Pays OffAbstract: Well-planned product documentation can save time, reduce customer frustration, and improve your product’s reputation.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-86307526887995928742007-06-28T08:44:00.000-05:002007-06-28T09:36:50.722-05:00

Jim Kring and Joel Sumner have posted recently about the benefits of source code control (SCC) for software development. At NI, the technical writers also use SCC for our documentation development. For those who are unfamiliar with SCC, it works like this:Your source files are stored in a repository on a central server.To edit a source file, you must "check out" the file. Checking out a file

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-81118196214202602402007-06-18T17:31:00.000-05:002007-06-18T17:32:57.311-05:00

Even our developers think so :-)

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-22295927772743998932007-06-08T14:52:00.000-05:002007-06-08T14:54:20.284-05:00

Interested in working as a technical writer but don't know what it is that we do? Our Texas Tech recruiting team gathered some alumni and put together an informative video that consists of interviews with technical writers and managers here at NI. The video also has some great tips for those who are applying for technical writing jobs. Top tip: Proofread your resume! :-)

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-48303611574877354252007-05-25T09:16:00.001-05:002007-05-25T10:08:26.026-05:00

At NI we have a company-wide style guide. One of the weirdest things about it, and something which I've had the most trouble getting used to, is the guideline against splitting verbs.Before I came to NI, I'd write a sentence like this:You can also double-click the Add function.But now I write like this:You also can double-click the Add function.Also:You must manually specify the value.Becomes:

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-72804032272403781442007-05-16T09:41:00.000-05:002007-05-16T09:49:57.405-05:00

I don't know how I missed this, and I apologize for not posting it sooner! For those of you who are familiar with wikis, the LAVA (LabVIEW Advanced Virtual Architects) group has a wiki for LabVIEW. I encourage you all to go and contribute your knowledge to this compendium. Communication among customers about LabVIEW always is a good thing. It will be interesting to see how this wiki compares

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-3968637198553010082007-05-11T11:13:00.000-05:002007-05-11T14:47:19.614-05:00

A company called Walker Reading Technologies has produced research showing that the human brain is not "wired" to read text in the traditional way we print it, which is in blocks. In short, we're constantly filtering out text that surrounds what we're trying to actually read. This filtering impedes our comprehension of the material.Supposedly, the optimal format is a series of "short, cascading

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-4916996141148042932007-01-11T13:06:00.000-06:002007-01-11T13:39:53.041-06:00

As part of a great effort between our technical writers and the SW developers, LabVIEW has multiple entries into the LabVIEW Help. The LabVIEW Help itself is huge, which is mostly a function (hah!) of the number of things you can do with LabVIEW. Additionally, because many LabVIEW customers use the product to make other products, we have to account for a lot of use cases, generalities, and

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-76726380993497444892007-01-08T10:05:00.000-06:002007-01-08T10:34:33.899-06:00

I opened my inbox this morning and found an email from my dad. He congratulated me because NI made FORTUNE magazine's "Top 100 Companies to Work For" list for the 8th consecutive year. I seem to remember that last year we were higher in the rankings, but being in the list is a good thing all by itself. It would have been neat to have been able to participate in the employee survey, but it's

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1164068855280780472006-11-20T18:12:00.000-06:002006-11-20T18:36:07.586-06:00

Every year at NI, we have an internal conference for all the employees in the Technical Communications department. This conference, conveniently enough called NI-TC (for NI-Tech Comm) is in late October and lasts for two days. It's a time for us to bring everyone up to speed on what's going on the department. We have multiple presentations/seminars, a demo fair that showcases the neat products we

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1162915299398576252006-11-07T09:48:00.000-06:002006-11-07T10:02:23.540-06:00

6-7 years ago, NI created a website, in partnership with Texas Tech University, that walks you through A Week in the Life of a Technical Communicator. Because the design is so 90s, and because the "star" of the web site is no longer with NI, in January 2006 a group of writers decided to update the site with a more "modern" look. (Wow, that's a lot of quotes here.)The result is a

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1162846300795990502006-11-06T14:46:00.000-06:002006-11-06T14:52:58.943-06:00

Every Halloween, the LabVIEW team sets up various demos of our products for other members of the company. This year, the VI Road Show invaded and caught some of what went on. The following video shows Varun, myself, and Alex discussing and demonstrating the LabVIEW Simulation Module. Beware the horrible scrolling CRT monitors! P.S: I feel I should explain my bloody face :-) My costume this

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1161985386848094192006-10-27T16:32:00.000-05:002006-10-27T16:44:00.996-05:00

I was re-reading the post about April's interview in the Statesman, and the last sentence stuck out at me:...the fact that she is not a programmer or engineer serves her well as a tech writer.This phrase is very true. I said the very same thing to a class of students at UTSA last fall, and I find myself thinking it at the career fairs I've been to recently. Many job applicants hear "technical

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1161366637641375182006-10-20T12:49:00.001-05:002006-10-20T12:50:37.663-05:00

Welcome the newest NI Blog member - the VI Road Show. This is actually a vlog (video blog) that will take you around the country (and possibly world) as the owners showcase NI's employees and customers.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1161209873357716282006-10-18T17:14:00.000-05:002006-10-18T17:20:34.266-05:00

The Austin American-Statesman recently interviewed a co-worker of mine, April Brinkmeyer. She is a technical writer for the LabVIEW core product. Here's a snippet:Writing, reviewing, updating and improving the program's extensive help documentation in-program, in print and online is an on-going project for Brinkmeyer and the others on the documentation team. She also sits on committees that are

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1160496286241076292006-10-10T10:52:00.000-05:002006-10-10T11:20:51.646-05:00

I'm not sure how it is at other places, but part of being a technical writer at NI is dealing with usability. We are often the first non-engineers/non-developers to see a feature in action. We come across many malformed and confusing dialog boxes, interface widgets, organizational structures, and so on. In LabVIEW we have a great usability advocate in Christina Rogers, who recently made a

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1159892999033153592006-10-03T11:25:00.000-05:002006-10-03T11:29:59.046-05:00

/. has a bit this morning about bloggers competing with high schoolers on the SAT essay. If you like, you can even rate the bloggers' submissions yourself!Here's the essay question, timed at 20 minutes:Directions: Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1158776766232871112006-09-20T13:22:00.000-05:002006-09-20T13:35:44.613-05:00

Since the day I started at NI, I knew I wanted to be involved in recruiting technical writers. We have a dedicated HR department at NI, but the people you see at career fairs are regular full-time employees. I like this method much better than having recruiters represent us, because I know more about technical writing at NI than the HR people do. Therefore, when students come up to me or I

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1158775878840514782006-09-20T13:06:00.000-05:002006-09-20T13:28:42.483-05:00

It's been a little while since my last post, so here's what's happening:A group of technical writers and I put the finishing touches on A Week in the Life of a Technical Writer. This web site follows 4 technical writers (and 1 manager) through a "typical" week at NI. I say "typical" because there is hardly a typical day here at work :-)I got promoted just ahead of my two-year anniversary here,

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1156794732437927902006-08-28T14:50:00.000-05:002006-08-28T14:52:12.636-05:00

Brian Powell, a LabVIEW software engineer with almost 20 years of experience on the team, has joined the blogging crew. Welcome, Brian!

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1154982340797006682006-08-07T15:23:00.000-05:002006-08-07T15:25:40.810-05:00

Brian and Colin are putting together a vlog (video blog) for NI Week. They'll be running around the Austin Convention Center all 3 days and capturing most of it on camera. Make sure your hair looks good!

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1154617442536513492006-08-03T09:51:00.000-05:002006-08-03T10:04:02.560-05:00

NIWeek is upon us yet again, and it looks like it's going to be fun. If you've been before you know that the keynote speeches and demos are worth getting up at 8 AM for. I've seen several of the keynote demos already, because one is being done by my group, and they're all pretty interesting. Unfortunately I don't think Virginia Tech will be doing a demo like they did last year. However, this

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1153166270739045072006-07-17T14:55:00.000-05:002006-07-17T14:57:50.750-05:00

Last December I spoke with the editor of createdigitalmusic.com about using LV + the DSP Module to make some weird noises. A couple weeks ago he emailed me with a question about that post (which actually came from one of our customers), and the answer evolved into this new post about using LabVIEW itself as a sound application. Having just attended the Summer NAMM show here in Austin, I feel

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1150153766090915822006-06-12T17:40:00.000-05:002006-06-12T18:39:02.536-05:00

Raise your hand: who's heard of Web 2.0? This is the phenomenon that spawned sites like Google, flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Myspace, and many other "killer apps" for today's Internet. Even Web stalwarts like eBay, Amazon, and Slashdot predicted Web 2.0 long before it existed by making user comments crucial to the site's operation.There are several discussions as to what Web 2.0 actually is,

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1148396501939214582006-05-23T09:48:00.000-05:002006-05-23T10:20:32.146-05:00

At my last job, I did a lot of marketing writing in addition to technical writing. This situation arose mainly because my last company had ~25 employees at the time, so we were all required to wear many different hats. Ask me sometime about my adventures in painting the bathroom.I'd had classes in "professional writing" but no formal training in writing press releases or ad copy, although I did

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1146523727926560822006-05-01T17:11:00.000-05:002006-05-02T09:07:30.910-05:00

I've been working at NI for a little over a year now, and I'm beginning to realize that working for this documentation team has raised my expectations any time I hit a Help button in any program. Raised my expectations to my benefit and aggravation!The truth is, not every company that writes software has the ability to, or the willingness to, create a comprehensive Help like I think we do at NI.

Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17754663669316454722noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1142438771544437642006-03-15T09:45:00.000-06:002006-03-15T10:13:02.330-06:00

One reason I enjoy being a technical writer at NI is that we don't just write stuff and draw squiggly editing marks on other people's papers. True, that is some of it. But beyond the writing and editing, we are allowed (and encouraged!) to suggest and implement improvements to the software.For example, all LabVIEW's VI/function help topics contain buttons labeled Place on the block diagram and

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1141686847946352662006-03-06T17:12:00.000-06:002006-03-06T17:18:20.143-06:00

A lot of software developers I know (both here and elsewhere) have expressed interest in designing/coding video games. In fact, that's originally why I entered college as a Comp Sci major. As a parallel, I wonder if any technical writers secretly dream of writing strategy guides.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1140561556381032252006-02-21T16:15:00.000-06:002006-02-21T16:39:16.396-06:00

I caught the following passages over at HardOCP this morning. The quote comes from a review of the Voodoo ARIA Home Theater PC (HTPC). Although the product is a Windows-based computer, the outer case and presentation to the user is drastically different from a typical PC.One thing that I mentioned earlier was the extreme lack of documentation on the Voodoo PC ARIA. Granted, it’s a new product

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1138999008798287802006-02-03T14:24:00.000-06:002006-02-06T10:04:19.246-06:00

We consistently get feedback from our customers that the example VIs we ship with LabVIEW are really helpful. The developers put a lot of time and effort into creating examples that demonstrate new features and show how to accomplish certain tasks using LabVIEW. In addition, the examples serve as great templates for certain common applications. For example, if you want to acquire a measurement

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1137125950187174452006-01-12T22:14:00.000-06:002006-01-12T22:25:40.466-06:00

As Ryan pointed out, the entire LabVIEW 8.0 Help is now posted on ni.com.Because the LabVIEW Help .chm files are actually made up of individual HTML files, preparing those HTML files for the Web wasn't such a huge leap. Currently, the most challenging type of technical documentation to present on ni.com is printed or PDF content.We make a PDF of every printed document that ships with an NI

Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510385309969737093noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1135699648486306012005-12-27T09:59:00.000-06:002005-12-27T10:11:43.483-06:00

Well the holidays are upon us, so most of the office is empty. One product of mine is nearing the beta phase, so I've been consolidating the documentation into the installer build. What's in there now is definitely good enough for beta, and really only has a few issues. The interesting (perhaps troubling) thing is that our document review process requires certain steps to be taken after beta.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1134422240092132622005-12-12T14:55:00.000-06:002005-12-12T15:17:20.106-06:00

In my role as part of the LabVIEW documentation team, I use LabVIEW a lot, but often not the way the typical user would. Though I have some NI hardware installed, I rarely acquire, analyze, or present a signal. I use it mainly for… string manipulation. You read right. I use LabVIEW for string manipulation – searching, splitting, and replacing text. Historically, this is not one of LabVIEW’s

jotaemenoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1134060684347158782005-12-08T10:49:00.000-06:002005-12-08T12:04:11.470-06:00

Being a digital music aficionado, I read Createdigitalmusic every day (several times a day, actually). I submitted a news article the other day, and what do you know, it relates to LabVIEW!

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1133996063599467952005-12-07T16:49:00.002-06:002009-01-23T10:52:14.334-06:00

Edited 1/23/2009 by Ryan:I'm really the only person posting to this blog now, so I've removed the information about the other people. I also updated my information.Ryan Pollack (Staff Technical Writer)—I've been working as a technical writer/supervisor at National Instruments for over four years. Currently I design, write, and edit documentation for the LabVIEW FPGA and Real-Time Modules. I also

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1133973701977622682005-12-07T10:00:00.000-06:002005-12-07T10:46:00.890-06:00

In LabVIEW, we have this fun feature called Context Help. The CH window updates whenever you move the mouse cursor over an object, such as a VI, wire, dialog box component, property node, and so on. The functionality is similar to "tooltips," which appear in many programs including LabVIEW. These are the little bubbles/blurbs that appear when you move your mouse cursor over, say, the Insert

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1133815194110425882005-12-05T14:25:00.000-06:002005-12-05T14:39:54.126-06:00

A while back our marketing manager notified us of a blurb on Embedded.com relating to the awesomeness of the LabVIEW Simulation Module 2.0. I wanted to write something about it but got caught up in other activities (such as making sure products shipped on time :-)) I like this blurb in particular: "engineers can use the LabVIEW Simulation Module 2.0 to optimize dynamic system parameters for

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1133548255500869762005-12-02T12:22:00.000-06:002005-12-02T12:37:39.586-06:00

Ever since LabVIEW 8.0 released, several LabVIEW developers have been making trips to present at NI Technical Symposiums about the release. It's customary for the developers to write up trip reports when they get back so those of us who stayed in Austin get the benefit of what they learned from customers. Here's a bit from one such trip report:I had a customer…come up to me after the…keynote…

Kellyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510385309969737093noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1132070333053468772005-11-15T09:40:00.000-06:002005-11-15T10:03:04.063-06:00

When the TTU students visited last Thursday, one of the questions they asked was how much of an expert tech writers are expected to become on the products they document. My answer was "we're not engineers, but we're intelligent enough to deal with engineers, understand their features and products on an abstract level, and make decisions about how those features/products affect the user." I

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1131740100946429262005-11-11T14:14:00.000-06:002005-11-11T14:15:00.960-06:00

I'm happy to announce that several other technical writers/managers in the LabVIEW group will be posting to this blog. The blogging revolution at NI continues :-)

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1131572771209326372005-11-09T15:42:00.000-06:002005-11-09T15:46:11.220-06:00

Those of you who are curious (or in need of assistance) can now view the entire LabVIEW 8.0 help file online. Before we were just posting PDFs and CHMs. The problem is that Google and ni.com's search engine can't access the internal text of these file types. All you could search was the abstract. But now that each help topic is a single HTML page, search engines can index that content so it's

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1130960769714246902005-11-02T13:22:00.000-06:002005-11-02T13:46:09.813-06:00

Last Wednesday (October 26th), another tech writer and I woke up extremely early and drove down to UT San Antonio. We presented information about NI and technical writing to three technical communications classes. UTSA's tech comm concentration is a part of the Communications department, as opposed to some other universities where the tech/professional writing program is a part of the English

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1129746942605924212005-10-19T13:02:00.000-05:002005-10-19T13:40:21.833-05:00

Well it's been a little while, but I've been busy! Since we announced LabVIEW 8, the add-on modules have been running through their own crunch mode as they finish the new versions. I helped out with some of the Datalogging & Supervisory Control (DSC) module documentation. I took 3 help files through the requisite signoff processes and edited a Dev Zone document about the new Domain Account

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1128371562884712662005-10-03T15:25:00.000-05:002005-10-03T15:32:42.890-05:00

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

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1128369359994294702005-10-03T14:36:00.000-05:002005-10-03T14:58:16.333-05:00

Formatting nuttiness! The next version of MS Office will include support for Adobe's PDF format. Brian doesn't mention what "native support" really means, but I imagine there will at least be an "Export to PDF" button or a similar option in the Save As dialog box.There are a bunch of things to talk about with this move. Is this a shot across the bow at Framemaker? No, probably not; everyone

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1127504080079284742005-09-23T14:09:00.000-05:002005-09-23T14:34:40.086-05:00

Perusing /. as I normally do netted me this article about how 'IT' jargon disrupts the workplace. The LabVIEW style guide we follow has a strict 'no jargon' policy. For example, we are expected to define acronyms on their first usage in a help topic or PDF manual chapter. For the Control Design & Sim documentation, I define terms like single-input single-output (SISO), multiple-input

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1126714274062534052005-09-14T11:08:00.000-05:002005-09-16T15:14:55.740-05:00

In her last comment, Kaylene asked me if I ever get discouraged about the whole "no one reads documentation anyway!" issue. I typed out this long response, then decided it needed its own separate entry.===The joke around here is that no one reads the manuals unless they're bored while on hold with phone support :-) I don't really get discouraged about this issue because the products I write

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1126208774004459792005-09-08T13:17:00.000-05:002005-09-08T15:07:22.426-05:00

Today I am trying to track down a naming issue. Microsoft doesn't brand Visual C++ with version numbers anymore; they stopped doing that after VC++ 6.0 (which I used as a CS student for the semester and-a-half I was one). They switched to the .NET 200x nomenclature. So in updating documentation from that ancient period of VC++ version numbers, I'm trying to obtain a one-to-one mapping of "7.x"

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1125074836122506142005-08-26T10:59:00.000-05:002005-08-26T11:47:16.130-05:00

Last week was NIWeek 2005. It was my first time attending, and I had a blast :-) I love seeing all the new things NI is doing. The product demonstrations at the keynotes were especially interesting. My favorites were the table saw demo and the ball bearings demo. You can see them both by watching the keynote speeches. Also, because I'm an audio nerd, Alain's presentation on CompactRIO audio

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1123778375465532862005-08-11T11:28:00.000-05:002005-08-11T11:55:42.916-05:00

Ah, it's been a little while, but things have been busy around here. NI Week 2005 is coming up, which is pretty exciting. I haven't been to one yet, because I only got here last October. But I'm assured it's a good time. I'm excited to see what our customers are doing with the Control & Simulation products. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get some feedback on the documentation and what I can

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1122492670881579882005-07-27T14:30:00.000-05:002005-07-27T14:31:10.930-05:00

Brian Tyler, who works on integrating .NET with LabVIEW, posted a hilarious story that another LV developer emailed out this morning. Check it out, it's extremely well-written :-)

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1122049001145975592005-07-22T10:54:00.000-05:002005-07-26T11:31:22.453-05:00

One of the most striking differences, in my opinion, between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 was the taskbar. Windows 3.1, if you recall, relied mainly on the Alt+Tab keyboard combination to switch between programs that were running at the same time. Sure, you could use the program's minimized icon on the desktop, but then you had to minimize the window and double-click on the icon. While Windows

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1121879514549785542005-07-20T12:06:00.000-05:002005-07-20T12:11:54.556-05:00

Want to see how we write? You can now search our HTML and PDF help online. Currently only core LabVIEW deliverables are up; these don't include any add-ons (like my Control Design & Simulation stuff). I'm not sure if or when those docs will go up, but I don't see why we wouldn't post them. Also, since the linked web page says " NI Products" and not "LabVIEW," I assume that other product

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1121369794392182332005-07-14T14:14:00.000-05:002005-07-14T15:29:49.480-05:00

What features are self-evident? What features really need documentation? If a feature does need documentation, how much documentation does it need and what level of prominence should a feature have? These are questions I have to ask myself many times throughout a document's life cycle.During the planning phase of development, it's my job to gather the proposed features together and determine how

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1120753983941424942005-07-07T11:26:00.000-05:002005-07-07T11:54:07.656-05:00

Two of my products are in beta right now. Both programs are generating feedback to the developers, which is very good of course. But the interesting thing I'm dealing with today is trying to fit new features/tweaks/bug fix documentation items into the existing structure of the documentation set. What I mean is, I've spent the past several months working with the developers and my manager to

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1119889709476754482005-06-27T11:14:00.000-05:002005-06-27T13:46:38.616-05:00

Today I emailed a link to this blog to the LabVIEW team, as well as the Tech Comm team (which includes all technical writers, artists, and others who assist in document creation). It's funny to think that within a single company, not everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Then again, my last job was at a company with 25 people; NI has several thousand employees worldwide. I'm still getting

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1119459388458609622005-06-22T11:55:00.000-05:002005-06-23T10:19:07.180-05:00

Welcome to Technically Speaking!My name is Ryan. I'm a technical writer for the LabVIEW Control Design & Simulation group at National Instruments. When people ask what I do for a living, I respond with "I write software manuals." I follow that up with an explanation and then maybe a little bit about what the LabVIEW Control Design & Simulation products do. Somehow I don't think there is a

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3