by Ron Miller

Stupid Windows Tricks: Accessing System Administrative Tools in Windows XP

I was documenting a process today for a client when I came across a reference to the Windows System Administrative Tools. When I checked my Start menu, I couldn't find them, then I learned from a colleague they were buried, one of those sets of tools that Microsoft hides to prevent users from accessing the full compliment of tools.

The System Administrative Tools enable you to access such tools as the Services window where you can see which services Windows is running or the Performance Monitor where you can watch a running graph representing your system's performance. The fact is, that most users don't need to use these tools, but on the oft chance you do, it's good to know where they are.

To access the System Administrative tools in Windows XP:

1. Right-click on an open part of the Windows task bar and select Properties. The Properties dialog box opens.
2. Click the Start Menu tab, then click the Customize button. The Customize Start Menu dialog box opens.
3. Click the Advanced tab, then scroll to the bottom of the Start Menu items list  and click the radio button next  System Administrative Tools > Display on the All Programs menu and Start menu.
4. Click OK twice.
5. Click Start > All Programs >  Administrative tools to access these tools.

Note that you can make other changes to the Start Menu from the Advanced tab including turning on and off items or making the Control Panel display as a cascading menu, rather than opening as a separate dialog box, the default state.

Keep in mind these types of changes will change the expected behavior in Windows, so you should customize with care, but if you need access to those Administrative tools and other functions, and you're comfortable customizing Windows, it's good to know where these tools are.

Adobe Technical Communication Suite Not Quite A Single Source Solution

I spent a few days last week playing with the new Adobe Technical Communication Suite ahead of a review I'm writing for an upcoming issue of EContent.

While I was going over the programs and testing its single-sourcing capabilities, I had an interesting online exchange with some virtual colleagues (tech writers I know online, but have never met in person). These folks maintained that the TCS was not true single sourcing, while I argued that it was. The fact was, none of us had actually played with it yet, so all of us were speculating. My colleagues, based on past implementations of FrameMaker and RoboHelp; mine was based on discussions with Adobe. My colleagues turned out to be right.

In the TCS, if you were to experiment with single sourcing, you could generate your source content in FrameMaker and then generate output in RoboHelp HTML. In my current workflow of choice, one I've been using for several years, I generate source content in FrameMaker 7.x and generate output, usually cross-browser compatible web help in WebWorks Publisher 8.x from Quadralay.

I figured the best way to test this was to use an existing project, one I knew was stable and I had used to generate WebWorks Help . In this way, I could conduct, to the extent possible, and apples to apples comparison.

In TCS, you can link a RoboHelp project with a FrameMaker book, so that any changes you make to the Frame source will be reflected in the RoboHelp project, the next time you open the project (or force an update). This link is certainly promising, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's single source.

Part the problem, without giving too much away from review, is that you have to massage the material on your RoboHelp side before generating the content. The trouble with this approach is that if you make changes to RoboHelp, then update your Frame source, you lose the changes and you have to start again.

Why update the RH side at all, you may be wondering? Good question, but I found you needed to do some fundamental tweaking to the content at the CSS level on the RH side. When you update the CSS, you change the formatting to your liking, but, and this is a big but, if you update your Frame source content again after tweaking, the changes are overridden when you update the RoboHelp project.

This is a major issue and one that needs to be resolved to put the TCS firmly in the single source category because if you have to tweak, it's not single sourcing. Turns out my colleague's gut feeling trumped my meeting.

ThinkFree and Glide Review Published on Information Week

This week I published a review of two Microsoft Office alternatives, ThinkFree and Glide, on Information Week.

ThinkFree tries to give you a one for one exchange for Microsoft Office applications: Word, Powerpoint and Excel, and does a decent job, although you won't find the range of features you find in MS Office. For instance, the ThinkFree spreadsheet doesn't support multimedia elements such as sound and animation, but it does give you a decent basic set of functionality for a reasonable price.

Glide OS, is more than just a Microsoft Office replacement, it's an entire online operating system complete with email, media exchange tools, high-level security, chat and many more features than I can list here. It also offers a seamless exchange between the desktop-web experience and the mobile experience.

If you are looking for an inexpensive online alternative (although both are coming out with local versions soon as well), either of these tools is worth a look. With Glide, however, you get a richer more collaborative environment. ThinkFree gives you some interesting features such as sharing and posting to blogs from a document. In either case, if you are looking to escape the Microsoft hegemony, these tools offer reasonable alternatives.

FastStone Capture: Fast and Compact Windows Screen Capture Software

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a small Adobe Reader alternative called Foxit Reader, which I found while looking for compact alternatives because I'm running low on hard drive space on my Parallels Windows XP partition. I do a lot of screen captures for both my journalism and tech writing work and I was also looking for a smaller screen capture program that still had decent features, and happily I stumbled onto the FastStone Capture screen capture utility.

For 19.95, this program does just about everything you would expect from a screen capture utility including capturing the active window, the entire screen or an area you define. You can even capture a free-form area or a scrolling area (to capture more than fits on a single viewable page), all of which you'll find in more sophisticated high-end (and usually higher priced packages). The only feature that is conspicuously missing is a timer feature.

After you capture the screen, you access a robust editing program where you can add text, call-outs, mark up different areas of the screen you want to call attention to, and so forth. Again, you don't normally see this type of advanced functionality in a $20 shareware program, and it takes up far less space than most programs of its ilk while giving you all of the power you need to do the job. This utility may not be the best known out there, but it gives you a lot of bang for your buck, and it's certainly worth your time to take a look if you do a lot of screen capturing.

Foxit Reader Makes Good Adobe Reader Alternative

I use Parallels to run Windows XP on my Mac Book Pro. It's great, but when I created the Windows virtual machine I was a little stingy with the hard drive space. After more than a year, I'm running out of room, and as such, I'm looking for ways to run smaller programs.

The Adobe Reader, the free tool from Adobe that enables you to read PDFs, is to put it bluntly, a bit on the bloated side. I've also always found it particularly annoying how long it takes to open PDFs in a browser, but my bigger problem was my need to reduce the size of programs on my hard drive to free up some space. I went searching for an alternative and found a great one in Foxit Reader.

The beauty of this little gem is its size and speed. It doesn't take up a huge amount of space on my hard drive and it does the job quickly and easily. I can fill in PDF forms, just as I can with the Adobe Reader. I can read any PDF on the web much faster than I could with Adobe's product. You certainly give up some of the features you get in Adobe Reader, but to me, that's mostly unnecessary software bloat.

On the OSX side, there is a built-in Reader and a PDF driver to create PDFs from the Print dialog box making it simple pimple to open or create PDFs. Of course, nothing could be that simple in Windows, so you have to be creative. If you need a PDF Reader for Windows with a small footprint, check out Foxit Reader. You won't be disappointed.

PDF Round-up Published on Government Computer News

At long last I published a round-up of PDF tools on Government Computer News. I say at long last, because I wrote this review at the beginning of the year, about the time that Federal Computer Week was absorbed by the company that owns GCN. (Image courtesy of Nuance.)

This resulted in a back-log of FCW reviews (which included two of mine) and a long publishing delay. But finally, the review is out there. I looked at Adobe Acrobat 8, ScanSoft PDF Converter 4 Pro and Abby PDF Transformer 2.0.

Each serves a different purpose with a range of features and price tags. Check the review and see which one is right for you and your budget.

userplane Case Study Published on dev.aol.com

I published a case study on Plentyoffish.com's use of userplane instant messaging services this week on dev.aol.com.

The case study looks at Markus Frind, the man who started and runs the site as a one-man shop in spite of the fact it has grown to a billion page views per month and is one of the top 50 sites in the English-speaking world. Frind discusses why he chose userplane instant messaging for his site and his experience implementing and using it.

By the way, Frind makes a nice chunk of change for his efforts. According to this WSJ article, Frind claims his dating web site generates between $5M and $10M a year in advertising revenue. That's not too shabby for a site, he says, he threw together as a way to teach himself asp.net programming.

LeapTag Creates a Hybrid Web 2.0 Tool

LeapTag is new product that works inside your browser, and combines several different Web 2.0 functions in a single tool including:

• finding sites that match your interests based on keywords you select
• the ability to import existing RSS feeds or subscribe to feeds on the fly
• tagging and social bookmarking
• content rating and content sharing
  

LeapTag, like many that came before it, hopes to make money with advertising, but what's interesting about LeapTag's approach is that user's can approve or disapprove each ad, enabling LeapTag to deliver  ads specifically geared toward your own particular requirements and interests. What's more, the ads are completely unobtrusive and don't even really look like ad content.

In fact, in my preliminary tests, the only thing I don't like about this software, is the fact that content is stored locally, rather than on the internet where you could access this information wherever you are (with an internet connection, of course), but LeapTag is supposed to add this functionality within the next month or two. I hope so because without remote access, it could turn off many users who are used to getting information on the fly whenever they want.

The product is in Beta right now. A release date has not been announced, but 1.0 should be ready by the end of the summer.

Google Docs Makes Better Use of Ribbon Concept than Microsoft

I like to use GMail to transfer files between my desktop and my laptop. Today while opening a Word attachment, I chose to open it as a Google Document (just out of curiosity).

Now imagine my surprise when the document opens and I see an elegant use of the tab/ribbon Microsoft implemented so clumsily in Office 2007. (I reviewed Office 2007 previously). Google wisely chose to keep things fairly simple with only the most needed functions, not every bell and whistle that ever popped into the mind of a developer (or provided justification for the high cost of Office). What's more, Google did the smart thing and combined the menu/toolbar metaphor into a simple interface, rather than trying to completely reinvent the wheel.

Check out the screen shots below. Click each one to see a larger image.

Recently, I've started to think that the simpler a software product is, the better. There is a tendency by the large software vendors, whether it's Adobe, Microsoft or any other mass market vendor, to load on the functions and attempt to be intertwined more and more with the basic operation of your computer. I plan to write an entry soon on my new simplicity movement and offer some alternatives to the larger bulky offerings that have become so common-place.

Google may your incur your wrath from time-to-time as all large companies do, but they have an uncanny ability to understand what users want, whether it's search or online software and at first glance, they appear to have created a very simple and useful word processing tool.

Office 2007: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back - Part 2

This is my second of two parts on my view of Office 2007. In Part 1, I took a look at the general design in Office 2007. In this part, I continue my analysis.

Now, for some reason Microsoft decided that when they exposed the interface, this meant that you had to do away with multi-tabbed dialog boxes and wizards because you have to click to see some parts that aren't immediately visible. If you are going to be radical about this design, I suppose you have to look at the design in this fashion, but in reality by completely doing away with the time-tested wizards, Microsoft sacrificed the user at the alter of interface design orthodoxy.

Let's look at an example--creating a Chart in Excel.

In 2003, you clicked the Chart button in the toolbar and the Chart Wizard opened as below:

Inside this single dialog box, you can make all of the selections necessary to produce a chart including deciding if you want it on the current page or its own page, configuring the legend, giving names to the X and Y axes and so forth. Can you see all of these function? No, you cannot, and from this perspective it is flawed, but what you can do is take care of your chart in one set of organized steps.

For Office 2007, Microsoft did away with this methodology and spread out the same functions over a couple of different ribbons.

Yes, your developers proved they could follow directions and expose all of the chart making functions to the user, but at what cost? They are now spread out over several places, forcing the user to hunt and peck for the items that were once available in one compact wizard-driven dialog box. This isn't change for the good, it's change for change's sake and the loser is the user who has to relearn everything. And it's just one example repeated many times throughout the suite.

I was talking to Don DePalma the other day from CommonSense Advisory and he pointed out that Word 2004 for the Mac actually has a better approach than the ribbon, a formatting toolkit of sorts, which you can see in the screenshot below.

This provides a compact way to deliver all of the functions you need to complete a job, but in a single view that's, in my opinion, much easier to navigate than the clumsy ribbons designed by Microsoft.

One other thing that bugs me about the Office 2007 design is the fact Microsoft did away with the Window menu. I often have a bunch of different windows open and I use this menu frequently to navigate among the different files. The Microsoft OS is called, after all, Windows and it seems silly to have eliminated the menu devoted to managing them.

So there you have it. Office 2007 could have been something special. It could have taken software to an entirely new place, but all it really did was take what we have all carefully learned over these past several years and splattered it against the wall. In the process of trying to make something exciting and new, Microsoft seems have forgotten about the most important part of software selling: the customers.