tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78989700087341092842012-04-15T22:49:38.134-05:00Obscure thoughts on the state of user assistance in the technological worldfrankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-25203785211910526182010-07-07T13:13:00.007-05:002010-07-07T13:38:24.262-05:00

With the release of the latest Eclipse 3.6 and CDT 7.0 in Helios we on the CDT team have taken a deep breath, stepped back, and looked hard at what the needs of C/C++ developers will be for the Indigo release next year. We already have some good ideas which you can read here, but we wanted to hear from everyone, not just those on the CDT mailing list.With that in mind, Marc-Andre Laperle took the

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-22261241380876177182008-06-30T14:46:00.006-05:002008-06-30T15:23:51.010-05:00

Just a quick update on the new Eclipse 3.4 documentation goodies that improve doc creation, including:- TOC editor for quick and easy table of contents creation- Context help editor for fast linking of page content with help context IDs. Man, has this made my life easier.- Plug-in Spy for actual confirmation of help context IDs within a dialog or view.That's not to say everything is perfect yet

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-28708981489199443992008-05-09T10:10:00.005-05:002008-05-09T10:36:55.669-05:00

Posted some future documentation plans on the Creating Carbide.c++ Developer Blog that concern the Eclipse Infocenter and Carbide documentation.

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-40505695699550246992008-03-23T22:45:00.004-05:002008-03-23T23:11:44.009-05:00

Just spent most of last week at EclipseCon 2008 for the first time. It was a great trip where I met a host of people and really had a chance and time to investigate some technologies I was interested in. Basically I had some ideas on how other Eclipse project technologies like BIRT and Mylyn could be merged into future releases of Carbide to help our users in their day-to-day development. I left

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-9567218207838995832008-03-04T13:27:00.005-06:002008-12-09T21:47:22.130-06:00

Thought I'd try a small experiment with Plug-in Spy. While it works great from within the 3.4M5 release I use everyday to manage and test my doc plugins, would it also work with our standalone product? Even if its based on the 3.3 sources.Copied the org.eclipse.pde.runtime plug-in to the Carbide\plugins folder and relaunched.Pressed ALT+SHIFT+F1 and BAM! Works like a champ.

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-61979446975804119222008-02-11T10:24:00.001-06:002008-03-04T13:48:59.934-06:00

With the release of 3.4 M5 there is now a Context Help editor to accompany the Table of Content editor previously released. Nice! For one that works on a product's help material it's really great to see more support inside Eclipse for creating and managing help content. Using Dreamweaver is fine but there is no way to really do quality control without a lot of manual testing. Having an editor for

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-45057288587576481682007-06-21T09:27:00.000-05:002007-09-26T23:17:15.776-05:00

So, it's nearly done. CDT 4.0 will be out the door with the rest of the Eclipse 3.3 goodness and all I can say is, whew.This release marks the first time I've publicly contributed to the Eclipse movement, the first time I was able to look beyond my cube and the work involved there in shipping Carbide.c++ and really try to make some difference with the tools we've been using as the basis for our

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-70376394415811784612007-06-08T08:09:00.001-05:002007-06-08T10:33:08.586-05:00

When writing technical document, especially for busy software engineers, the three rules I follow include:Keep it conciseKeep it accurateMake it completeSoftware engineers work under very stressful deadlines. When they need information they need it now. They want to go in, find the answer they seek, and return to whatever they were doing before. Preferably as quickly as possible so they can move

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-40311682682496455682007-05-22T08:27:00.000-05:002007-05-22T08:44:50.543-05:00

The XML editors available for Eclipse to a great job of helping me form valid Table of Content (TOC) XML files. What they don't do is help me verify that the href entries in the data are correct. To do that I need to basically run/debug a test instance and review the error log to see if my help is broken. Or worse yet, manually test each link.Now, normally I use Abode Dreamweaver to write, format

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-8268293286285578102007-05-20T14:28:00.000-05:002007-05-20T15:05:05.241-05:00

Spent a bit today creating an initial keyword index file for the C/C++ docs. Nothing special, simply a reordering of the reference and task XML file contents so that a user can type in a few high level terms like "view" and "preferences" and see a complete list concerning C/C++.Noticed some changes in how indexes are interpreted and displayed, both good and bad. The good includes much better

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-50283969234156035672007-05-16T21:59:00.000-05:002007-05-18T14:26:48.377-05:00

So, as one of the first things I decided to contribute to the CDT project were updated tutorials, preferably ones that used cheat sheets and integrated a little better with Eclipse. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the Simple Cheat Sheet Editor. It took less than an hour to convert the original basic and import tutorials to cheat sheet format. And the inclusion of the new Command Composer

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-65820375205890749372007-05-14T17:10:00.000-05:002007-05-14T17:41:07.162-05:00

Woohoo, a new Bugzilla to play with.We use Bugzilla internally for our bug tracking and enhancement requests. It was easy to setup, does what we need it to do, and generally behaves itself. No real issues to worry about.Except it's pages are butt-ugly! That's why I'm excited about two things in the new release, the first is real template + CSS support. Using some standard CSS I hope to customize

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7898970008734109284.post-15779621585483470092007-05-13T11:22:00.000-05:002007-05-13T16:10:20.196-05:00

My name is L. Frank Turovich and I've been writing documentation and training in the software industry for 16+ years. It all started with a article published in Nibble Mac called "The MacCipher Machine" and I haven't stopped yet. Since then I've worked on variety of technologies and platforms. My main interests are in user interfaces, documentation, and training. Making it easy for the user to

frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16367423341141776840noreply@blogger.com1