Jared Spool tweeted this morning: PLEASE, PLEASE! Tell me that Apple is going to release Hypercard for the iPad! — Jared Spool (@jmspool) September 9, 2014 HyperCard was a hypertext program that came with Apple Macintosh in the 1980s. It allowed you to create “stacks” of online cards, which organsiations used to create some of the first… Read more »
Category: Technical Communication
SharePoint for documentation projects
Most of the Technical Authors I have met don’t have a good thing to say about Microsoft SharePoint. In many ways, it represents how not to publish content online. It is seen as encouraging people to move print-optimised documents (Blobs) around, rather than units of content (Chunks), and users are typically left to rely on search… Read more »
What would life be like if there were no instruction manuals you could read?
Illiteracy is, sadly, something that can greatly affect people’s lives. According to The Literacy Trust, less than one per cent of adults in England can be described as completely illiterate and approximately 16 per cent as “functionally illiterate”. There are various articles on the Web that indicate how people live with their illiteracy: They depend on… Read more »
Reputation Management – Can user documentation help quash rumours?
In the ‘Whispers’ episode of BBC Radio Four’s Digital Human programme, Aleks Krotoski explores how rumours spread both online and in the physical world. As an example, she looked at how two people were able to spread a rumour that a tiger was running loose in London during the 2011 riots. Hope untrue!! RT @Twiggy_Garcia: #LondonRiots… Read more »
The big questions in technical communication
David Farbey wrote a semi-existentialist post on the challenges for technical communicators yesterday. I’d like to look at the issue in a different way, by looking at the big questions in technical communication today. The answers to these questions (which may be decided by people outside of the profession) are likely to affect the future… Read more »