by Ron Miller

Shall We Play a Game? - Gamification and Software

It's always easy to shy away from the latest buzzwords and pass them off as the passing fancy of the day, but gamification can drive usage for your software or service. You just have to be clever about how you implement it.

Read my full commentary on the Ness Software Engineering Effectiveness blog.

Photo by ShardsOfBlue on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Do Adobe Layoffs Portend a Tech Slow Down?

Do Adobe Layoffs Portend a Tech Slow Down? - DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller

Could Adobe, a large company with a loyal customer base and full control of the creative and web development software market, be technology's version of a canary in coal mine? It's hard to say with any certainty, but it doesn't bode well for the first half of next year...Read the full story on DaniWeb.

CutePDF provides Free PDF Writing for Windows Users

Image via WikipediaThis morning my wife needed to download some course materials for an online course she's take as part of a doctoral program. She needed to save the web-based course work as a PDF as she likes to look at these things offline, often printing them. What she she needed was a PDF writer, but since Windows doesn't provide one natively, and she doesn't own a copy of Adobe Acrobat, it seem she was stuck.

I suggested she do a search for a free PDFWriter and up popped CutePDF Writer, a free PDF writer utility that lets Windows users save files as PDFs. She downloaded it, installed it and worked like a charm. It's extremely simple, only providing a PDF print driver in your Print dialog box, but it does the trick and that's all she needed.

Read it and Weep Big Software: My Favorite Free Windows Apps

Link: Read it and Weep Big Software: My Favorite Free Windows Apps - DaniWeb TechTreasures

There’s an old saying, 'What do you want for nothing, your money back?' But the fact is there is lots of good free software out there. Much of it has a much smaller footprint than your typical Windows software from Mega Corporation (you know which companies I’m talking about) and these programs have great features. I’m going to share some of my favorites with you today.

Moving Your Office Online Published in April EContent

I published an article called Moving Your Office Online in the April issue of EContent Magazine. I look at four online alternatives to Microsoft Office from the perspective of an enterprise customer. Unfortunately, EContent articles are not available online without a subscription (or a one-time payment).

I looked at:

• Google Docs
• Glide Business
• Zoho Business
• ThinkFree Premium

Each of these packages offers a base  of word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program to compete with basic Microsoft Office functionality, but each offers additional functionality. Some provide online and offline ability, while others don't. If you get a chance to see the print version, there is a chart comparing features, which is not available online.

I spoke to Forrester analyst, Kyle McNabb for the article. Essentially, McNabb believes that Google is in the best position right now to capture some market share from Microsoft, however small that might be,but they need to provide online and offline access, which they are working on, to make any real  movement. Glide  currently offers the best integration between the desktop and online worlds, something many business users are increasingly looking for, but Glide still needs to establish itself to gain credibility in the marketplace.

IrfanView: A Powerful, Free Graphics Program That Belongs in Your Arsenal

Today, while working in FrameMaker and WebWorks Publisher to generate online help, I needed to manipulate my graphics. After futzing around for a while in each of these programs, I learned from a virtual colleague that all the tweaking in the world was not going to change the look of my help output. I realized I needed to change my source graphic files.

Luckily, I had imported my graphics into Frame by reference, meaning I could change the source graphic file and it would update automatically in my Frame document without having to import again. I decided to resize the graphics using my favorite little graphics tool IrfanView. With this little free beauty of a program, you can convert files to different graphics formats (individually or in batches), view slide shows, play movies and most important of all, for my purposes, tweak your graphics.

I decided to resize the graphics, setting each one between 80 and 90 percent  of the original and leaving on the Sharpen filter to make up for lost quality when I resized. The program makes this easy. In the Resize dialog box, you simply click the Sharpen check box and it applies the Sharpen filter while resizing. You save the graphic and it updates automatically in Frame. Resizing is obviously not the optimal way to go because you loose quality, but sometimes in a pinch, with the help of a tool like Ifranview, it can do the trick.

If you aren't familiar with IrfanView, I highly encourage you to check it out. It can help you with all of your graphics needs, whether you are a technical writer or someone trying to view or tweak your digital photos.

Two Compact Windows Email Clients

Yesterday during my rant against BIG SOFTWARE, I mentioned a small software company called MemCode Software. These guys make a tiny email client called inscribe (among other programs), a $20 shareware program and i.scribe, a free version of the same software that limits you to a single account and five email filters. The download executable for this software is a minuscule 968K and this is a full-featured email program, folks.

The beauty of MemCode's approach is they don't write to the Windows Registry. This means to delete the software, you simply delete the folder (or use the Uninstall link on the Programs menu entry) and, poof, it's gone instantly. This harks back to the days of DOS when you could delete the program directory to get rid of a program and to me it's a breath of fresh air compared to these BIG SOFTWARE programs that take over your computing life.

I also took a look at Poco Email. It's a bit larger 4.12 MB, but it also sports a nice interface and is simple to set up and use. It's not quite as elegant as MemCode's approach. It still uses the Registry, but it does the job without sending out tentacles all over your operating system.

These two programs prove it's possible to create software with a small footprint that still has plenty of features. I wish more software companies took the approach of these two light-weight gems.

Why I Hate Big Software

I had to install Adobe Acrobat 8 today on my XP partition. I had it on my Vista partition, but I can't use my legal copy of Vista anymore because I got a message from Vista last week that my legal copy wasn't legal. I have no idea how to fix this issue, but I can't access anything but Internet Explorer to buy a serial number. My inclination at this point is to simply blow away the Parallels partition because I hate Vista (using that word hate a lot I know, but it's the only appropriate word to capture just the level of enmity I feel toward this OS).

Anyway because Microsoft screwed me up the yin-yang, I was forced to install Acrobat 8, a seemingly simple task, except, oh yes, we are dealing with another BIG SOFTWARE COMPANY. After taking ages to install, then requiring a restart (where of course it locked up requiring me to shut down Parallels manually), I finally got Acrobat 8 up and running.

My task was simply to create a PDF with editing tools to send to a client. I tried do this using the wizard but got an error at the end of the process that it couldn't find an email program. I figured this was because I don't have a default local mail client in XP. I just use GMail. So I went looking for a small email client and found inscribe at MemCode Software. These guys are the polar opposites of BIG SOFTWARE. The program doesn't even use the registry. You can delete the folder when you are done. Imagine that.

Anyway, I got a message in my system tray that the ADOBE UPDATER, which installs and starts automatically each time I start Windows, had a new update, so I clicked OK to install it because I was hoping it would resolve the problem I was having with the Email Reviewing wizard. Adobe contacted the server and began downloading, and then it did something I really hate from BIG SOFTWARE COMPANIES, it asked me to insert my install disk. Why the heck do they need my install disk to download an update.

Then it was like a fresh install, only slower. After an eternity, my system restarted (to its credit, Adobe didn't break things so badly that it locked up this time during restart) and now maybe, just maybe I can create my PDF with reviewer tools. But wait, don't answer yet, when it restarted, the updater let me know there was an update. Yup you guessed, it version 8.1, which is what I thought I just installed. Naively, stupidly, I clicked install and the process started all over again. Sigh.

In the end, it turned out that the only email program Acrobat could communicate with was Outlook, of course its BIG SOFTWARE brethren at Microsoft. After I installed Outlook, the error message disappeared and I was able to send the file for review.

I've taken over an hour and a half to do something that should have taken a couple of minutes. Software and computers are supposed to simplify our lives, aren't they? Then why does it seem that they make the situation so much more complicated than it should be. Probably because we're dealing with BIG SOFTWARE.

Framemaker Graphics Trick

For the last several years in my role as a tech writer, I've been fond of the Framemaker/Web Works Publisher Model. Currently I'm using Frame 7 and Webworks 2003.

Framemaker has always been to superior to Word when it comes to creating long documents, but one thing I've always missed when using Frame instead of Word, is the ability to resize graphics in Word. In Frame, you import graphics files in this very kloogy way and then you have to set the DPI before importing. I always have gone for a middle of the road 150 dpi (dots per inch), but you can't see what your final graphic will look without saving to a PDF and WWP. Often it's fine in PDF, but the graphic looks huge in WWP. Finding a middle ground has always been a challenge for me.

Over the weekend I came up with a perfectly wonderful awful idea for resizing graphics in Word before importing them into Frame, which I will share with you now:

1. Capture your screen with your screen capture tool of choice.
2. Open Word and import the image.
3. Right-click the image and select Image Properties. Click the Size tab and set the size of your graphic. To be consistent, I set each one at 55 percent.
4. Use your screen capture program to capture the image in Word.
5. Save it in the graphics format of your choice. I chose PNG.
6. Import the graphic into Frame, choosing 150 dpi for the resolution and it looks great in both WWP and PDF.

I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier because it would have saved me a lot of trial and error I've encountered when trying to make screens look decent in Frame. I found this method while somewhat lengthy, did the trick.

Acrobat Comment Merge Works Like a Charm

As I've written about in the past, in addition to being a freelance technology journalist, I'm also a freelance technical writer. I've got a new client and last week I handed in my first deliverable. To simplify the editing cycle (or so I hoped), I decided to use the Acrobat Review and Comment feature, which enables me to send the comments to all the reviewers in one step, then merge the comments into a single master PDF upon return.

Recipients mark up the PDF inside the free Adobe Reader using the Acrobat markup tools. The secret here is that the markup tools only appear in the Reader when activated as part of this type of editing cycle. Otherwise these tools are hidden.

In order to implement this type of editing cycle, you have to own the full version of Acrobat (not just the free Reader). I'm using Adobe Acrobat 8 3D that came with the Adobe Technical Communication Suite, but other versions of Acrobat support this feature.

I selected the Review and Comment Feature from the Getting Started with Acrobat Home page and followed the wizard instructions to activate the Adobe Reader markup tools for any recipients. I then entered the email addresses of each reviewer and customized the instruction letter Acrobat generates as part of the process.

Today, after receiving my comments back, I opened up each one. As I opened the reviewer comments, Acrobat knew this was part of a review and comment process and prompted me to merge the comments into my original PDF. I repeated this process for each reviewer and it worked like a charm and I now have all the comments from my reviewers conveniently in a single PDF.

My only issue is that Adobe uses the same file name regardless of the reviewer, so you can't save all the reviewer comments in a folder without renaming them (otherwise the next one simply overwrites the existing one). Might be nice if there was a way to append the file name with the reviewer initials, but overall I'm very pleased with the results and it's a huge time saver not having to check against multiple documents when implementing the reviewer comments.