Tag: TechCommGeekMom

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Adobe has Tech Comm Suite 4 Superheroes? Find out in August!

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom
Scan of the Adobe TCS4 software cover by TechCommGeekMom
Scan of the Adobe TCS4 software cover by TechCommGeekMom

Adobe has a lot going on this year with, seemingly, many of their major product lines. First, they upped the ante with the Creative Suite package by not only upgrading it, but putting it in the cloud and creating the Creative Cloud service, allowing users access to many more products for a fairly reasonable monthly fee (especially with the starter fee for students and those upgrading from ancient editions like myself). I love having access to more products this way.

Then, some other major productivity tools also got updated in a major way as well, namely the Technical Communications Suite 4, which included the latest updates of Framemaker, Robohelp, Captivate, and now included the latest update to Presenter as well as several other programs.  This is a big deal! I’m so thrilled that all these technical communications tools that I can use for both general tech comm and e-learning uses are the latest and greatest versions now. 

Ever since my Adobe webinar in June, I’ve had a very nice relationship with Adobe’s Technical Communications Suite group.  They invited me to the preview of TCS4 several weeks ago, and they are nice enough to keep me informed of new things going on, and now and then ask if I can pass along information to my readers as well, knowing how much I do like Adobe products in general.  So, it was great to see that the TCS4 marketing department is pulling out all stops to make sure that technical communicators everywhere–whether they use Adobe’s Tech Comm Suite or another product–know what’s going on with the Tech Comm Suite products. Saibal Bhattacharjee, who is a Product Marketing Manager at Adobe, let me know that Adobe is making August their “What’s New?” month within the TechComm Suite products, and they have several Adobe experts (seen as some superheroes to some) lined up to do informational webinars to introduce the new Tech Comm line-up of products in Technical Communications Suite 4.

Having been part of Adobe’s “thought leadership” webinar series back in June, as well as having attended several Adobe webinars myself in the past few months, I can tell you that Adobe seems to go to great lengths to provide quality information in a way that is not only easily accessible (they are done through Adobe Connect), but also accessible in that there’s no fancy talk–it’s real people who actually know and have made an effort to know the products and how users are using them.  So I can only guess that this new “What’s New?” series is going to be just as top notch.

So far, for the month of August, there are three webinars–all free of charge–set up to get technical communicators up to speed on the new Technical Communications Suite 4.  They are the following:

I predict that a lot of great information will be coming out of these webinars that will help technical communicators with these great new products, and understanding how Technical Communications Suite will help them become more productive workers producing state-of-the-art documentation and output, especially when it comes to single-sourcing and mobile projects.

For more information about the webinar series, check out the Tech Comm Central by Adobe blog.

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Flash Technology gone in a mobile….no, wait–that’s not quite right…

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

In the mobile technology wars, it’s been a war between the technology of Adobe Flash versus HTML 5. This has been a long going–at least in Internet years–battle royale that has been going on for a while, but it appears that a break has finally happened.

Recently, Adobe made the decision to end the support of Adobe Flash in Google’s latest Android OS, aka “Jelly Bean.” The significance of this is huge.  To some, this is a surprise. To others, it is not.

Flash has been the driving force of web animation for a couple decades now on many websites globally. It is a huge part of Adobe’s repertoire, and yet… Flash has had a difficult time making it into the mobile realm.  Just in the desktop/laptop realm, a Flash player can be rather unwieldy. There seemed to be only one flavor of Flash made for 32-bit machines, and not for 64-bit machines (like my own) which are becoming more commonplace.  Flash programming is an art unto itself as well. As much as many employers want people to have Flash backgrounds as technical communicators, I’ve also been told by developers to not bother learning it unless I really was dying to know, because it was rather complex even for the experienced developer to use, and developing Flash was time consuming.

This was all brought to the forefront about two years ago by the late Steve Jobs who said that Flash would not last, and that HTML5 was the future. He believed this so much that all of Apple’s new mobile products supported HTML5 from the get-go, but not Flash.  Aaron Silvers reminded me of this when he posted this article from Business Insider, STEVE JOBS WINS: Adobe’s Ditching Flash, today on Twitter. It’s been a huge deal as iPhones and iPads proliferated with HTML5-friendly browsers, and didn’t support Flash, while other browsers for other tablets, like the Kindle, Nook and other Android-based tablets and phones did.

Adobe’s had a hard time with this, as far as I could see. Just for the record, I love Apple products, but I also love my Adobe products as well, so it’s been a tough debate to follow. I actually wrote a case study about it just several months ago about it, entitled, A Case Study: HTML 5 versus Flash, which discussed the history of this debate and what actions I saw Adobe–as a company–trying to make to work within this new environment that was pushing HTML5. At the time of the writing, Steve Jobs had just passed–literally within days of when I wrote my first draft and final draft of the paper–and so much was out in the media about the great Steve Jobs and how he was the mastermind that he was. I still love Steve Jobs, but after all, he was still human and fallible,  so I wanted to show how Adobe countered his attacks against Flash. In the end, the conclusion at the time was that HTML5 was the future, but it wasn’t completely NOW (or at that moment). HTML5 needed more development, and in the meantime, Adobe would adjust with the HTML5 revolution with its work on the Adobe Edge product and bringing that capability to its development products, but in the meantime, Flash was still working on most of the machines in the world, and there was no reason to stop working on that as well.

The way I saw it, Adobe’s point was that you don’t just abandon a long standing technology that’s worked so well overnight, just because the next best thing is starting to come along. It’s like abandoning DVDs just because Blu-Ray disks are out. There has to be some sort of legacy transition, and until HTML5 was more mature and used by those other than the developers at Apple, it didn’t make sense to abandon Flash altogether. But in the meantime, time needed to be taken to start working with the new medium and figure out the best way to move forward.

Fast forward to now, about six to eight months after I wrote the case study above. Mobile technology continues to explode on the market, and the race is on to be the dominant technological mobile device with new tablets and smartphones being introduced.  RJ Jacquez posted this article that came out today on Twitter: Adobe: Web standards match 80 percent of Flash features. Arno Gourdol, Adobe’s senior director of Web platform and authoring, was quoted at the Google I/O show, referring to HTML5’s capabilities at this stage, “I think it’s close to 80 percent.”  Seeing the writing on the wall, it’s obvious, after reading the rest of the article, that Adobe has been making efforts to keep up with HTML5, and make forward progress on using the web standard. Adobe’s not quite there either in keeping up, but it seems that it’s starting to make significant progress in this direction.

So, where does this leave us in the mobile learning world? As I see it, this is another means towards single-sourcing for learning. Flash has been good, there is no doubt. Some of the most interactive e-learning and m-learning sites (depending on your device’s capabilities) have been Flash driven, and so much has been Flash driven for years that Flash capabilities and interactivity are expected. In speaking with my e-learning developer husband about the topic, he said that Flash, while complicated at times, was easier to develop than HTML5, because HTML5 depended not only on new HTML5 coding, but also javascript and jquery much more than before to have content play the same way–or at least similarly–to Flash. From the sounds of things, those similarities are getting closer and closer. How soon will HTML5 be a true standard in the same way as standard HTML has been all these years? Probably sooner than later, but I see it as a big step towards that single-sourcing solution that will help eliminate the idea of problems with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). No one will have to worry whether something will work on an Android, Windows or iOS device. It will just work because they all use HTML5.

This is an important issue to follow, because it’s not the mobile technological devices that need to be watched as much as how they will be programmed and used. Flash isn’t gone yet, but seeing what will happen with it, and where and how HTML5 progresses will be a hot issue for some time to come–so keep on top of this!

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Whitepaper: The Future of Mobile Learning: Empowering Human Memory and Literacy

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

Yes, it’s official. I’ve written a whitepaper.

Actually, I wrote it a while ago, but just haven’t gotten around to reformatting it. This is actually a paper that I wrote for one of my classes recently just before I graduated, and it was edited by Mayra Aixa Villar. When editing the paper at the time, it was she who suggested that I either present this somewhere, or post it as a whitepaper here on my blog. Since I’m not able to get to any professional meeting anytime soon, I’m taking the latter suggestion, and posting it here. So, before anything else, many thanks to my friend Mayra for not only editing and providing criticism on this paper, but for helping me feel confident to put my work out there. (Muchas gracias, mi amiga querida!)

That being said, this whitepaper is entitled, “The Future of Mobile Learning: Empowering Human Memory and Literacy.” The basic concept behind this is that many of the basic elements that humankind formulated to enable memorization and literacy throughout history are basic elements that are used and needed in formulating the foundations of creating effective m-learning.

I hope my readers like the paper and find it helpful. Please download, pass around, and/or refer to this page! (Oh, and if you’d like me to present this somewhere, let me know! ;-))

Whitepaper: The Future of Mobile Learning: Empowering Human Memory and Literacy

Edited to add July 2015: This paper has now been presented three times as of July 2015, at the 2014 e-learning 3.0 Conference at Drexel University, at the 2015 STC-PMC Conduit/Mid-Atlantic Technical Conference, and as a presentation/workshop at the 2015 IEEE ProComm.

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I’ve hit the “Big Time” in Tech Comm!: I’m an Adobe Webinar Presenter now

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

It’s been rather exciting in the last week or so for me. Much like being in Times Square where there are so many lights and sights and sounds that one can’t possible keep up with it all in one outing.

Last week was a big week for me. My much-publicized webinar that was hosted by Adobe was presented last week. It went by so fast that it almost feels like a dream! But now I have evidence that it really happened, as Adobe just published the recording of the webinar presentation on its Technical Communications Suite -OnDemand Seminar  website today.  I’d been waiting all this time to comment about it, but wanted to have the link first.

You can find my webinar–now an Adobe OnDemand seminar here:

Transition from Content Consumer to Content Creator: Dual Viewpoints.

(There is a sign in at the Adobe site, but it’s free.)

I need to thank Maxwell Hoffman for his guidance in the process. He gave me a lot of fantastic advice and things to think about, as well as some great editing of the drafts for the slideshow that accompanied the talk.  If you ever have the chance to work with him, you will definitely enjoy yourself and learn from a master.

I also need to thank Adobe and especially Parth Mukharjee for the opportunity of a lifetime to do this. It was Parth who read my posting here and contacted me through Twitter to make it all happen.  Thank you, Parth! Another Adobe “shout out” to Saibal Bhattacharjee as well for his assistance in this process. I have to say, all I did was use my voice, and to know that people at Adobe were listening, well, that feels rather great, and again, I appreciate this fantastic opportunity. I was already an Adobe fan, but this experience made my loyalty to the brand even deeper. I would readily welcome the opportunity to do another webinar or any other opportunities that Adobe might bring my way. 🙂

I also can’t forget to thank Mr. Mobile himself, RJ Jacquez, blogger of The m-Learning Revolution blog. In the past few months, this former Adobe evangelist has become my friend and a mentor, and I felt that before I took on this endeavor, I needed his blessing. (I didn’t really need his blessing, but it felt right to talk to him about it first.) He definitely supported me and encouraged me to take advantage of this webinar opportunity, and I’m glad he did. So, thanks RJ. You da man. 😉

And then there are the other friends from all walks of my tech comm life that attended–many thanks for your support as well!

I’m proud of the work I did for this presentation, and I hope that anyone who takes the time to listen and watch it will get something helpful out of it, and learn something. I will never claim to be an expert on anything, but as this entire experience has taught me, it is worth it to try new things out by doing and not be afraid to use your own voice now and then to express yourself. You never know what good things might happen. 😀

(Update 9/17/2015 – The links to the webinar have been updated as Adobe has archived the presentation’s location on their website.)

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TechComm Event of the Year! Please attend my first Webinar presentation!

Posted on by TechCommGeekMom

OK, I don’t know that it’s THE techcomm event of the year, but it is to me!

Please come attend my first webinar presentation, “Transition from Content Consumer to Content Creator: Dual Viewpoints,” graciously hosted by Adobe Systems.

It’s tomorrow, 5 June 2012, from 1:00 PM- 2:00 PM US/Eastern / 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM US/Pacific.

Here’s the description for the webinar:

The technical communications world is changing quickly with technological advances. It can be a difficult transition from content consumer to becoming a content creator. If you are new to the technical communications field and trying to find some direction, how do you make that transition and learn the tools of the trade? Join technical communicator Danielle Villegas, who blogs and tweets as TechCommGeekMom, as she discusses the challenges of being a content manager, pursuing a professional course in Technical Communication, and moving ahead in a technical communications career. Danielle will concentrate on content for mobile devices while sharing her first hand experiences learning about the most desired skills. She will be discussing how visual and web design, technical writing and editing, and content management skills come together to create good technical content.

I am very excited to be doing this, and truly hope that you will attend and hear what I have to say. I’ve been working hard to create a presentation that will be . It’s merely based on my own experiences, and I hope it opens up some great discussions in the tech comm world.  Registration is free, too!

You can sign up by clicking on the link above for the title of the webinar.

See you there!

(Updated 9/17/2015 – The webinar link has now been archived, so the link in the article to the webinar has been updated.)