The Return of Location-Based eCommerce

One benefit of longetivity in any field is the ability to see cycles. The latest cycle I’ve seen is the return of location-based eCommerce – an interesting idea (just as it was ten years ago).

Consider an article entitled Social Media’s New Mantra: Location, Location, Location in the May 10-16, 2010 edition of Bloomberg Business Week. The article discusses the promise of social media-based, location-based ecommerce. It focuses on several companies that are moving into this space or that already have a presence, ranging from startups to existing companies. The article suggests the example of an iPhone app that checks your friends’ calendars to see if they’re free for the evening, suggests a restaurant that everyone’s wanted to try, notes table availability, and notes where your friends are to make it easy to hook up. Cool…

Now consider this description...

… there’s a specific type of location-based application that’s likely to affect technical communicators – lCommerce (“l” for Location), or mCommerce (“m” for Mobile)… these applications will determine your location and try to sell you things based on that location. For example…

• The florist’s site beeps you when you’re within a mile of the store to remind you that tomorrow is Mother’s Day.

• The car wash beeps you as you drive by on the day after a blizzard to remind you that road salt is bad for your car’s chassis – why not come in right now?

• You’re looking for a Cajun restaurant in an unfamiliar city, find one on an online restaurant list, select it, and have a web site detect your location and continuously provide directions to the restaurant

More ambitious applications could bring people together by detecting their relative locations. For example, a Starbucks’ site might call as you drive past and tell you that your friend Bob is inside and that you’ll get a dollar off a latte if you drop in now. Or that florist’s site might beep to tell you that tomorrow is Mother’s Day but warn you that your mother is in the store right now.

This latter description is from a column that I wrote for Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication, in February 2001. I ended that column with this prediction as to how location-based apps might affect technical communicators.

… should see two types of work coming out of the location-based applications. First, there’s likely to be an increase in site development work as local businesses decide to create web sites. Second, given the high potential for irritation…, we may find work creating filters to block calls from the same sites that we created. If all this sounds unlikely, remember that it isn’t too long ago that the idea of technical writers creating web sites was ridiculous. Location-based applications will be an interesting addition to our repertoires.

I’d have to say that I got this prediction wrong. (There may be technical communicators out there who do this type of work, but I’ve never met one.) However, as society becomes increasingly mobile, the idea is still sound and the technology is a lot better than it was in 2001. I have no idea what might come of this technology, but it is worth watching.

RoboHelp Goes Mobile

Help authoring tools, or HATs, have been around for a long time. RoboHelp, the second oldest HAT, appeared in 1991/92 – impressive longetivity in a technical field.

HATs stay alive (business issues aside) by constant adaptation in the face of technical changes. For example, HATs in general could have disappeared in 1997 when Microsoft introduced HTML Help, since we could now create online help with web authoring tools like Dreamweaver. Many of the original HATs did in fact fail to make the shift to HTML and disappeared. But the larger, better funded ones like RoboHelp and Doc-To-Help did make the shift and are with us today.

That large-scale adaptation has continued since 1997, with the incorporation of support for PDF, XML, DITA, and now, mobile output, the focus of this post.

The mobile space has been chaotic since the late 1990s. Technologies like Windows CE Help and Wireless Markup Language looked good but failed to penetrate the mass market for several reasons, a major one being the fact that mobile output looked like this in 1998 (a screen from a Wireless Markup Language presentation that I gave back then):



This was a simple mobile app designed to teach the coding, but full-scale apps weren’t all that much more exciting. The screens were grey and bland compared to what we expect today, which looks more like this…



So mobile content and mobile apps are more inviting than they were a decade ago. And the explosive growth of the iPhone, Android, RIM, and other mobile devices has given mobile a degree of market credibility that it hasn’t had before. So it makes sense to start looking at mobile. And yet…

Many companies are reluctant to try mobile for three reasons:

• There may not appear to be any environments in which their apps can be used in a mobile mode. But some uses just may not be immediately obvious. For example, accounting apps might be used in the field for inventory control and need mobile-style online help. Or reference guides containing settings for pollution sensors in a food processing plant might be more usable on a mobile device when the sensors are mounted up near the ceilings.

• Companies may be looking at the market for mobile apps or help or “content” and find the choice between the various platforms to be too confusing or chaotic to be able to pick one.

• Companies may have tried mobile before and been disappointed by the feature set or burned by the reception in the market.

In each of these cases, companies will be rationally reluctant to invest in new tools. But if your company uses certain HATs, and I’ll focus on RoboHelp here, there is a way to test the mobile waters almost effortlessly.

On April 23, Adobe released a RoboHelp 8 script that converts RoboHelp projects to the ePub format. ePub is a standard from the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) for “reflowable” text, which essentially means that content can change its width to take into account the width of the screen on which it’s being displayed. You can find the instructions for downloading and installing the script, along with suggested best practices for coding content, on the blog of Ankur Jain, RoboHelp Product Manager, at Adobe’s Technical Communication blog at http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/. The instructions for the script itself are in the April 23 post. The preliminary announcement was in the April 12 post.

The reason this script release is important is that it’s strategic. If you’re a RoboHelp shop but have wanted to try mobile output, you no longer have to buy and learn new authoring tools. Instead, mobile simply becomes one more output in a tool you already own. And if mobile turns out not to be what you need, there’s no money wasted on a dead-end tool - just abandon the mobile output and go back to your regular RoboHelp work.

I’ll be describing the feature set and some test results in an upcoming post.

"Beyond the Bleeding Edge" Returns

The "Bleeding Edge" returns to the STC Summit after a three year absence. If you're not familiar with the Bleeding Edge, it's a one- or two- session track in which speakers have 20 minutes to cover topics that appeared after the formal conference schedule was firmed up or just didn't fit into the formal conference presentation categories.

There will be one session this year, from 8 to 9:15 AM on Wednesday, with the following subjects and speakers:

iPhone, iPad, Android: A Quick Intro to Developing UA for Mobile Apps – Joe Welinske, WritersUA

Joe Welinske is currently working on the design of Help for iPhone, iPad and Android applications. While many mobile apps are simplistic, there is a rapidly growing list of applications with robust capabilities. Many of the more robust apps work in concert with web-based applications and knowledgebases. Joe's focus is on exposing the users to features that are not easily discovered. He is also improving user interface text. Word choices are extremely important with minimal screen real estate. In this session you will be exposed to the underlying iPhone and Android development environment. This brief overview can provide you with the basic tools to get started with mobile UA on your own or with your team.

Re-purposing Software You Already Have - An Example Using Mimic - Gretchen Hambright

What can one do with no money and a client who wants a new type of training?With only their brains and a spunky attitude, learn how the TetraTechAMT Training Team used MadCap Mimic to overcome this hurdle and create a new learning system to help make the skies over Washington, DC a safer place.

Search Engine Optimization: My Life with Spiders – Robert Armstrong

In this brief introduction to the world of Search Engine Optimization, we’ll lift the cover off the online marketing world and expose common practices that Technical Communicators should know about. We will discuss ways these practices can be adopted in the documentation world to improve content continuity, publication relevance, and even open doors to new career opportunities.

Hope to see you there...

March 17 STC IDL SIG Tools Webinar - Notes and Answers to Questions

This post contains answers to questions that I received during my portion of the webinar, and some related notes. Some of the questions that came in apply to several of the tools that were presented so, if I missed your question, feel free to get in touch.

From KB:

Q: I will look the book up. Do you know if Adobe have a user's group for Captivate?
A: Yes – see http://forums.adobe.com/community/adobe_captivate

Q: is there a way to add a TOC into Captivate?
A: Yes, for an individual movie through the skin editor and for a group of movies through the aggregator.

Q: I found that the online captivate training is a little lacking. Can you recommend a good book to purchase to learn Captivate 4?
A: Look on Amazon for the books by Brenda Huettner and Kevin Siegel.

Q: Would like more on Captivate. Maybe another longer seminar with just Neil. A session dedicated to best practices on questions in Captivate would be a suggestion.
A: Something might be arranged thru the SIG at a later date, but that wouldn’t be for a while. In the meantime, if you’re near Philadelphia, I’m doing a half-day Captivate 4 workshop for them at their annual conference next Saturday - http://www.stcpmc.org/index.php?section=66. I’m doing the same half-day workshop again at the annual conference in Dallas, and a regular session on Captivate as well. If you can’t get to any of those sessions, email me offline and we can look at other options.

From MA:

Q: Would you quickly run through the differences between version 3 and 4?
A: The main changes, IMO, are the addition of a “review” output based on AIR that lets reviewers comment electronically, project templates as a part of the app itself, variables, customization via “advanced actions” and Flash-based “widgets”, movie tables of contents, multi-movie tables of contents created the aggregator which replaces the old MenuBuilder. Take a look at the Captivate 4 page on the Adobe site for a complete listing.

Q: I have trouble getting true video files to play within the Captivate movie once it's published & moved to a different location (intranet)--can you speak to that?
A: I’d need to know more about the types of video files you’re using – “true video” – before I could take a stab at this. Feel free to email offline if you’d like.

Q: Can you speak more about the "game" usage?
A: Basically, introducing an element of play to the learning process. Beyond that, I’d need to know a bit more about what you’re thinking of.

From LS:

Q: Can we see a question slide inserted?
A: Done. LMK if you had any questions about what I did.

From JR:

Q: Will any of these publish to Silverlight, WMV or other Microsoft formats?
A: Captivate will not. MadCap Mimic will publish to Silverlight, and I think Camtasia will also but you’d have to verify that on the TechSmith site.

Again, feel free to email offline if necessary.

Thoughts on “Context-Sensitivity” and Dynamic Output Reconfiguration

I wrote the 2010 trends article for STC Intercom magazine. One of my predictions there was the emergence of “dynamically reconfigurable output,” which I took from an item in the News Digest section of an issue of ComputerWorld from around 2005. That item’s take was that XML, and xMetal in particular, could let us do cool things, such as creating online information that was sensitive to its “context.”

If you’re in tech comm, you may have been doing context sensitive online help systems – that know where you are in the application and display only relevant information – so what’s the big deal? But that wasn’t the idea of the item in ComputerWorld.

The idea there was online information that changed depending on its context, the example being an aircraft service manual whose content changed automatically based on whether the temperature was above or below freezing. (So this manual served two “audiences”.) Or consider smart phone and mobile device apps whose display mode shifts from portrait to landscape automatically, depending on whether the device is horizontal or vertical. (So this manual also serves two “audiences”.)

From tech comm’s perspective, this idea of “context sensitivity” has two interesting angles.

First is simply the idea that “context” means different things to different people and we in tech comm can no longer take that meaning for granted. (The article Context Matters by Beth Schultz, in the September 21/28 2009 issue of ComputerWorld, discussed “context” as the tagging of equipment in a hospital to define its location and make it easier to find. Anyone hired to do “context sensitive help” for that hospital who assumed the standard meaning of “context sensitive” would run the risk of creating the wrong project.)

Second, and odder, is the idea of dynamic reconfiguration as a means of serving different audiences, like below-/above-freezing or horizontal/vertical in the examples above. Such situations are easy to handle using today’s help authoring tools – create one project and, using conditionality and other single sourcing features, generate one version of the output for each audience. We then leave it to some other mechanism to direct users to the right version of the help depending on the circumstances – temperature, physical orientation, etc.

The problem with the multi-output approach is that it’s cumber- some. We have to create one output per audience, which can become challenging as the number of outputs grows. Better to create one output that can modify itself.

We’re slowly heading there. Mark Logic ran a webinar in October 2009 entitled “Dynamic Delivery Is Where It’s At: Custom Documentation From Multiple Formats” that offered some possibilities. And I’ve been told about various proprietary, code-level experiments in online help authoring. I’m just not aware of any developments at the help authoring tool level yet.

If you’re aware of any work on dynamic output reconfiguration using help authoring tools or as proprietary, code-level experiments that can be discussed, I’d love to hear about them on general principles, or possibly as an Intercom column or, if you can get to me between before March 19, possibly as a proposal for the Beyond the Bleeding Edge session at the annual STC conference.

“Beyond the Bleeding Edge” is Back, and Looking for Proposals!

(for STC's annual Tech Comm Summit (aka annual conference) in Dallas, May 2 to 5.)

Sometime between now and May of 2010, might you…

…develop one online document conditionalized to be viewed on a desktop PC and an iPhone?

…create a document containing dynamically customizable content?

…create a hybrid document?

…perform a hard-dollar cost-justification of your documentation group’s work?

…or do something else that’s bleeding edge, and applicable to technical communication?

Many technical communicators are hard-put to keep up with the daily grind, let alone have time to look into emerging technologies. “Beyond the Bleeding Edge”, which debuted at the 1999 annual conference, addresses this by presenting summaries of technologies and methodologies that are too new or unusual to make it into traditional Summit sessions. After a three year hiatus, “Beyond the Bleeding Edge” is back and looking for presenters for the Tech Comm Summit in Dallas.

Is there a technology or methodology that you’d like to discuss? It can be:

· New… Are you creating online help that can change its contents depending on the outside air temperature?

· Existing, but fairly new to technical communicators, like physical context-sensitivity for mobile devices.

To be accepted, a “Bleeding Edge” topic must be fairly new as of early 2010. A “Bleeding Edge” presentation should be:

· Short – You’ll have about 20 minutes to cover your topic and take questions.
· Informal – Attendees prefer handouts but this is at your discretion.
· Level-appropriate – You can cover a topic at whatever technical level you consider necessary as long as you warn attendees what to expect.

If you enjoy new topics and like to discuss them, we want to hear from you. Send your proposals to Neil Perlin, Hyper/Word Services, nperlin@nperlin.cnc.net or 978-657-5464 by March 19, 2010. There are only three slots this year, on Wednesday, May 5, from 8 to 9:15 AM. Slots fill up quickly, so don’t delay!

Question About DITA Topics Created Using Flare 5

At my DITAbug presentation on Wednesday night, I was asked whether DITA topics created in Flare by exporting Flare's native XHTML to DITA were well-formed or valid. This proved to be a fairly unusual question and it took several phone calls to track down the answer.

The answer, with one caveat, is that the DITA files should be valid per the OASIS DITA DTD. If they are not, there's a bug and the problem should be reported to MadCap. The caveat is that Flare 5 does not support specializations.