I saw a recent article that said that according to one language watcher, English is getting close to having a million official words. There is some debate, of course, including from people of Oxford English Dictionary. One of the factors of language change that is especially significant in our time, though ignored in this article, is the rapid advances in technology. But in the rush to give an innovative name or verb to everything, let’s not forget English’s old town charm.

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I have enough to say to follow up on my previous post regarding RoboHelp vs. Flare that I thought a new post was in order. (If you read the other post, read the ensuing discussion.) One of the things that made me think about that topic in the first place was seeing Flare’s ad that suggested trading in your “legacy” software for the “new model,” Flare. RoboHelp was the only product mentioned by name in the promotion that offers a discount for switching. However, I’ll not assume that Mike Hamilton has anything to do with MadCap’s marketing, since he’s involved in the product management.

The podcast that Tom mentioned has Hamilton saying he wanted to disband some myths floating out on the Web about what happened between him and Macromedia. A brief summary: When Macromedia acquired eHelp, he expected RoboHelp to go to the next level, but they primarily wanted RoboDemo (now Captivate), another eHelp product. Macromedia seemed to make some counter-productive decisions: The RoboHelp team was working on RoboHelp X6 and only three months from release when Macromedia laid off half the team and planned to send RoboHelp to India. Then Macromedia decided to drop it completely, even though it was a very profitable product. When MadCap was founded, Hamilton and that team thought RoboHelp was dead. They wanted to provide something to help authors that was alive and running.

What I remember reading at the time this was going on, though, indicated that Hamilton was pretty skeptical of Adobe’s ability and commitment to carry RoboHelp forward. In the podcast, Hamilton mentions advantages of Flare that RoboHelp 7 also has. Macromedia clearly set RoboHelp back by shelving it, but Adobe has pushed it forward. He’s doing what he should when he promotes Flare, and perhaps it’s the fact that Flare’s history is so tied up with RoboHelp that it’s hard at this point to talk about the strengths of Flare without talking about RoboHelp.

At least in the podcast, Hamilton still seems to view RoboHelp as a limping technology, and MadCap’s ad appears to reflect that. Again, I’ve simply given my own observations of what happened. As my father says: Opinions are like noses—everybody’s got one. And if you’re like me, your opinions may be as strong as your nose, too.

A couple of years ago, I was using RoboHelp X5, a help authoring tool (HAT) that was several years old. In the software industry, letting your product go that long out of date is bad for business. RoboHelp still had a lot of users for a couple of reasons: Many had used RoboHelp and its predecessors for years, and there weren’t very many alternatives.

Macromedia had shelved RoboHelp and disbanded the product management team and RoboHelp developers in 2005. Mike Hamilton, the product manager, left about that same time. On the Internet, Hamilton criticized Macromedia, and by extension Adobe Systems, who had purchased Macromedia. He announced his joining a new company, MadCap Software, and that they would be releasing Flare, their flagship product and new HAT.

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After hearing about the kerfuffle around Sarah Lacy’s interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg (I read about it first on Tom’s blog), I finally watched some of the interview yesterday. Interviewing is an important skill for technical communicators, who spend much of their time gathering information, so that is the approach Tom took.

Lacy did talk too much, I think, but one of the things that jumped out at me in the interview is that she teased Zuckerburg for writing ideas down by hand in books. I do that myself, so I don’t know why someone who likes and uses computers can’t do things the old-fashioned way sometimes. For me, writing things down by hand helps the ideas feel more personal because they’re in my handwriting. I feel more connected to my ideas.

On the other hand, I tend to do that more for creative pursuits, not for technical writing projects, where handwriting equates to inefficiency.

I’ve just finished reading some Middle Eastern mythology, mostly from the Sumerians and Babylonians. Not the most uplifting stuff, what with gods intermarrying and trying to overthrow each other. The myths we do have from those areas were fragments found written in cuneiform on clay tablets that are a few thousand years old.

Not much else was left behind by these civilizations: some deeply buried building foundations, the practice of irrigation, and so forth. Powerful societies have come and gone throughout the ages. It is interesting to me that of the few things that last, writing is a prominent one, and it is the writing that scholars rely upon to piece together a picture of these societies.

The ancient priests and scribes found it important enough to preserve facts (and fiction, in some cases) by writing them down. Much has been learned about ancient civilizations through little more than discovering and deciphering their writings.

It makes me wonder what future generations, having nothing else to go on, would learn about our society through its writings. If all they found were newspapers, they’d find a bleak picture. Would they be able to access the myriad texts stored in electronic formats, such as disk drives and Web servers?

Obviously, we are living in an era where nearly all of the entire world is in touch, and I imagine that it would be difficult for an entire society to cease to exist without affecting the rest of us and readily leaving behind knowledge about it. The Internet and other technology through which we communicate so quickly has broadened community to the point that I doubt any of us could disappear as completely as some of the ancients did.

Still, I think it’s important for us to write as if that’s the only thing that would give future generations any idea about what life is like for us. Ancient civilizations may have failed to make enough of a mark to be remembered until archaeologists stumbled upon their remnants, but one impression they can yet make on us: A society that leaves behind no writings may hardly be counted to have existed at all.

The common perception that all technical writers do is produce instructional manuals isn’t totally undeserved; after all, that is where the profession got its start. While the field of technical communication has branched out considerably, a technical communicator’s job still involves giving directions of some sort.

It can be a little exasperating when people run into trouble because they tried to accomplish a task without reading the instructions that the technical writer crafted so carefully. Therefore, it stands to reason that the same tech writer would take the same care in reading and following directions himself. Given his understanding of the one who produced the instructions, a technical writer ought to adhere to the Unspoken Rule, which is to give deference to those instructions.

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When I told my brother that I was starting a blog and writing the first post, he asked, “What next?”

“The second post,” I answered.

Deciding whether to start a blog was, for me, similar to wandering through a bookstore while thinking about writing a book. There are so many blogs out there of every conceivable ilk that starting a new one is like letting fall a drop of water into the ocean. What possible difference could my drop make? Why would anyone read what I have to say when there are so many choices?

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