iPhone/iPod Touch cradle for H-D motorcycles
The apple meets the shield-and-bars in the DashLink iPhone cradle for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. In this piece for Gizmag I cover a slick accessory from Hell’s Foundry.
With my fat fingers, I’d hate to try using an iPhone or iPod Touch while riding. But safely stopped, this would be a good way to keep the tunes rolling (or use a GPS app).
Hands-on review of Recon-Zeal GPS goggles
My hands-on review of the Recon-Zeal GPS goggles is posted on Gadget Review. This was a fun one to do because the goggles have that living-in-the-future feel to them.
I’m trying to line up some more gear for more hands-on reviews. I’ll link to them here when I do.
Financial writer’s stylebook
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.
Wearing your underpants on the outside?
Not only is that a great headline, it’s also a great metaphor used by Brain Traffic’s Meghan Casey in her article, “4 Web project problems content strategy can solve“.
One of my biggest pet peeves is corporate websites that are designed around the company’s organizational structure, and influenced by internal politics. Casey calls this “underpants on the outside”.
When I see a website where the products are organized under “small cap verticals” or “solutions, broadcast” I know that company didn’t think of me, or other potential customers, once during the design process. Then it’s up to me to decipher their “code” to find what I want. This inside-out approach is practically an epidemic in larger companies. A smaller company, with fewer products, has an easier time of organizing their content around what their customers want to know.
As Casey points out, this type of non-user-centric approach leads to, “Lost opportunities … sales not made, relationships not built, brand not recognized.”
The article includes three other common problems as well (plus solutions!), and is definitely worth a read:
- Great ideas, no content
- The content broke my design
- We thought you were creating the content
- Underpants on the outside
Quote of the day
If I had more time I could write shorter manuals.