Alan Brandon

Authoring tool Flare, from MadCap Software, is one of my favorite content development applications. It’s right up there with FrameMaker, and might even take the number one spot — if I ever got a chance to use it. Flare’s popularity is growing, but I haven’t had many clients or employers that have adopted it as their authoring tool.

It used to be common for technical writers to specialize in either print or help. The growth of web publishing helped blur the lines between the two disciplines, and I think it’s safe to say that the best contemporary tech communicators have embraced the mode of creating content (you know, writing) that can be published in any number of media: print, online, desktop, and mobile. This sort of multi-channel publishing is what Madcap Flare does best.

I’m a big believer in “use it or lose it”, and I don’t want my Flare skills to atrophy so I am looking forward to attending MadCap’s Roadshow when it comes to Boston in May. I’ll post a report here after the event.

I wrote an article in Gizmag about Quest Visual’s Word Lens app, an augmented-reality translator that uses your phone’s camera to view printed words and translate them into another language as you watch in real time.

According to reviews the app is not fully baked yet, but it seems to be off to a great start.

When I was starting out in technical writing it was common to define terms such as CPU, MHz, and RAM, whether in-line or in a glossary. As such high technology became more mainstream, it was no longer necessary for most audiences. MHz and RAM seem to be understood by most of the general public. Indeed most non-technical readers can comparison-shop for a new phone or camera using these technical specifications.

But other industries are newer to the mainstream. For example, many of us learned new financial and business terms when our banks were bailed out and our 401Ks evaporated. Suddenly many writers needed to cover new topics, with new terminology that wasn’t familiar to their audiences.

Enter The Financial Writer’s Stylebook by Chris Roush and Bill Cloud. The book features definitions for 1100 terms, plus information  on legal issues specific to financial and business reporting.

Such a style guide should help writers who are new to financial topics — or whose audiences are. As Bill Cloud says on the American Copy Editors Society website, “There are fewer dedicated business copy editors. The confidence level it gives, whether to define something or not — I think that’s important.”

The book will be available in November.

Aptara, a publishing technology and process company, has released a nifty little video about publishing eBooks. The 2-minute video highlights the five things every publisher must do to successfully produce eBooks for readers such as the iPad, Kindle, and smart phones like the Android and iPhone.

(via The Content Wrangler)

In the last couple of months there has been some great discussion inspired by Michael Hiatt’s blog post about the “myth of single-source authoring”.  I love Michael’s summation of the nearly 20-year history of single sourcing:

Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.

In my experience at companies large and small, I have never seen a successful implementation of a single-source process. Like so much else in writing (and life) one size does not fit all. Sure, single-sourcing has its place and can be a great tool for some types of information delivery. But different audiences need different communications channels, and different channels need their own approach to crafting information.

Also check out Tom Johnson’s podcast and interview with Michael at Tom’s blog, I’d rather Be Writing.