May 25th Boston STC SIG Meeting on Mobility and Tech Comm

This is a reminder about the Technical Editing SIG presentation that I’m doing for the Boston chapter of the STC on May 25 in Natick, MA. (See the chapter site for the address, times, and directions - www.stcboston.org/sigs/te_sig_may2510.shtml.)

I’ll start by discussing the rationale for mobile content, and for tech comm to be creating that content as part of our regular role. Then the history of mobile, briefly – one slide, followed by three reasons why mobile information may succeed this time.

I’ll then cover three target options, two architecture options, and two dev options, with the dev options focusing on using HATs like Flare or RoboHelp to create mobile content vs. using dedicated mobile web authoring tools. Finally, I’ll look at what standard online content design elements work or don't work in the HAT-created content and how we’ll have to change some ways in which we work in order to fix those things and add mobile to our repertoire.

I’ll also demonstrate a number of readers and emulators including, at the moment but not officially, MadCap’s WebHelp Mobile viewer with content from Flare 6, Adobe’s Digital Editions ePub emulator with content from RoboHelp 8, an Android emulator, a quasi iPhone emulator, Firefox in small-screen rendering mode, and whatever other tools I can set up between now and the 25th.

And if you're interested but can’t make it, email me and I’ll send you the slides.

This stuff is fascinating...