First, I contacted my bank and I can now access my account online.
There was a lot of activity on the e-mail lists I frequent. I read the dumbest thing I've ever read on the Internet. This is probably not *the* dumbest thing, but it is pretty high up there after "Bob Rock destroyed Metallica." On the Dreamweaver e-mail list, someone actually posted this:
hi,
i'm a student struggling with no job. i downloaded the trial version of cs4 but i cannot afford to pay for it. does anyone have a serial number that can share? you can send it to me directly if you don't want o post it in public.
thanks for your help,
To which frequent posted Al Sparber replied:
"Try this one: GO127-TO453-JA692-IL413"
The original poster was banned from the list and that is a good thing. The barrage of "Are you kidding me?" replies would have destroyed the fragile ego of a wanna-be thief.
I like posts from Gene Kim-Eng, a frequent poster on Techwr-L. He always seems to have constructive advice for whatever issue is being discussed. Today, regarding why users do not read the manual, he wrote
"Most users don't read their docs because they know they can call tech support and have someone else look up the information for them.
I once worked with a small company (not named because as far as I know they're still doing this) where we dealt with users not reading the docs (we're talking about people who often called us because they didn't know they were supposed to defrag their hard drives periodically) by putting a blurb in the sales and warranty material that said tech support was free for one year, after which they would need a "support contract," and the free support countdown clock started with their first call to tech support. In reality the company had no desire to charge for support and didn't even have a process in place to write "support contracts," but simply telling people they had a year of free support that started expiring with their first call resulted in a substantial drop in calls from people who just needed to do things like defrag their hard drives."
Elsewhere on the thread, it was mentioned that those users who say the doc is bad are the ones that either refuse to read it - so how would they know? is what I'd like to know - or who skim over the important warnings that are included in the doc. It brings to mind the story that was circulated as fact - and that has been since documented as an urban legend see http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/cruise.asp - about the person who sets the cruise control, gets up from his seat, and wins a lawsuit because the manual didn't say they couldn't set the cruise control and get up from their seat.
Fourth, one of my favorite topics - embedded help in software came up.
From: HATT@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 10:22 AM
To: HATT@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [HATT] Developing Embedded Help (User Assistance)
I'm looking to connect with anyone out there who has experience developing embedded user assistance. Later this year, I hope to be developing embedded user assistance for a web application and have a few questions.
By embedded help, I mean the set of tool tips and pop-ups that appear when the application user hovers the cursor over a field or a help icon. This is not a help system in that there will be no index or table of contents and there will be no dedicated pane, either within the application or outside, for displaying the help content. It is likely that links within the pop-ups will open a new browser window where we will have a page of more extensive content.
The application is being developed in Microsoft Visual Studio for .NET. The developers are using a toolkit from Telerik called RadControls for asp.net.
As I understand it, all the pieces of help are simply HTML, which I can create in almost any tool. However, have you used tools designed specifically for embedded help?
During the design phase, how do you plan the set of chunks in terms of what is on the application screens?
With embedded help—and no help authoring tool—how do you manage the numerous chunks of content?
To which I replied, off-list:
I have not encountered a tool specifically for embedded help.
I use Dreamweaver for my HTML coding but you can use pretty much anything that suits your needs.
I’m not sure what you mean by this sentence:
During the design phase, how do you plan the set of chunks in terms of what is on the application screens?
In my experience, your chunks of content will be dictated by the user interface and where the user can access that content. That is to be worked out with your programmer. If you’re asking how to divide up a screen into chunks of content, again, the UI should dictate that. I saw a design yesterday where there is a pseudo group box but instead of being a box, it is actually a border with a Help button at the far right. The user clicks that button to get access to help about the fields in that section. You need to identify where the user can access help and where it makes sense to break things up. Again, the UI should aid you in this.
I wasn’t sure from your statement about not having a HAT if you didn’t have a HAT or if you thought you couldn’t / shouldn’t use a HAT because you don’t have a TOC or Index. From my perspective, just because you do not have a TOC or Index does *not* mean you can’t use a HAT to organize your topics. In fact, I have one web app I document where there are Help buttons on each screen. There is no TOC, there is no Index, there is no search. However, I use RoboHelp to organize my topics. I also took the time to create a TOC and an Index for my own navigation in and among topics so that I can find the topic I need to in some way modify. However, for this app, I do not generate Webhelp. I merely take the HTML files that are in the project folder and give the programmer those that are then included with the install.
I do know that getting buy-in from your programmers is key and essential to nourish.
Fifth, I neglected to mention the encounter my son and I had the other day with Wikipedia.
My son (4th grade) had to do research on Duke Ellington. I suggested typing "Duke Ellington" in Google. One of the first hits was for Wikipedia.
"No," he told me. "I can't use that. Someone can write that and I can't use it."
I chuckled. "Someone" wrote all the content on the website that we ended up citing as a source and, to take it a step further, someone wrote all the content on the Internet. Not the same someone but the Internet is a true community effort. I know what my son was getting at - that anyone can change a wiki entry - but it was humorous how it had been translated to a 4th grader.
One of the bands I like is called Let Me Run. They are embarking on a national tour. Guess what state they skip? Yep. Iowa.
Mar 12 Mad Maggies Elgin, Illinois
Mar 13 Reggies Chicago, Illinois
Mar 14 The Wedge Bar St. Louis, Missouri
Mar 15 TBA Kansas City, Missouri
Mar 17 TBA Peoria, Illinois
Mar 18 Moria Indianapolis, Indiana
I introduced my daughter to the J. Giels Band & Loverboy tonight. The ending of "Centerfold" came on the oldies rock station and she liked the "Na na na na na's" in that song. Immediately after that was Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend." I have a weakness for Loverboy. I saw Dokken open for Loverboy in 1986. I count it as my first concert, though I have faint memories of seeing Whitesnake opening for Quiet Riot, but I can find no evidence of actually being there - no ticket stub. So, anyways, Loverboy earned high marks from my daughter.
How about some Opeth since they are not coming to Iowa? Perfect.
And for something less metal:
Finally, and I do mean finally, here is a great song from one of my favorite bands of all time. I realize this is a lot to ingest and believe me, I've been making the roungs and only posting the best of what I've seen.
DOKEEN!!!
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