The 7 Rules for Writing World Class Technical Documentation | SCALE 8x – 2010 Southern California Linux Expo

The 7 Rules for Writing World Class Technical Documentation | SCALE 8x – 2010 Southern California Linux Expo.

Saw these seven nuggets of wisdom from Bob Reselman via Twitter and my friend (and fellow speaker @ Macworld Expo) Dan O’Donnell.

Writing a technical document is hard. Reading a poorly written technical document is harder, and probably more painful than writing one. It takes a lot of work to create a clear, accurate, engaging piece of technical writing. Thus, in order to make life a little easier for all parties involved, I am going to share with you the 7 Rules that I follow when creating a piece of technical documentation.

The 7 Rules are:

1. Dry sucks
2. Before you start, be clear about what you want your reader to do after you end
3. Write to a well formed outline, always
4. Avoid ambiguous pronouns
5. clarity = illustrations + words
6. When dealing with concepts… logical illustration and example
7. Embrace revision

Wish I could attend the session in question.

Apple releases Camera Raw for Panasonic Lumix G1

I noted last week that Apple finally released compatibility in Aperture & iPhoto for RAW files from the Panasonic Lumix G1 series cameras. I haven’t used the RAW features of my G1 much yet, as there has been no way to handle them in my workflow. Now that I can, I think I will.

I attended every user conference session I could that featured Aperture workflows and RAW format work at Macworld last week (when I wasn’t teaching MacIT sessions that is!) I REALLY want to start handling all my images in RAW to avoid the destructive nature of the JPEG format work I’ve been doing since I went digital back in the day. Until now I really couldn’t. I’ve installed the new update, and have requested a 30-day trial of Aperture 3.0. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Car Photo of the Day: Mystery Car

Name that car!

I posted this car once before, as part of a larger guessing game, but it remained unidentified. So I’m posting it again. In fact I’ll add another close-up photo of it to give you another hint.

Your extra hint.

I love this car, and expressed my undying admiration for it to my navigator at the event we saw it a few years back. I picked it as my “car from this event I’d most like to take home.” My navigator thought I was nuts. I imagine once identified all you guys will suspect I’ve lost my marbles as well.

Well maybe not ALL of you, we’ll see. I know some of you also would lust in your petroleum-pumping hearts for one.

The marque has produced some iconic machines and there is one in particular (not this model, but not long after its day) that I have never seen in the flesh and can not wait to be able to photograph its legendary shape.

Today is a “travel day” for me as I’m headed down to San Francisco for Macworld Conference & Expo. This means I won’t be here to hand out hints or tell you if you’re wrong or right until I’m in my hotel at the end of the day. Good luck!