Recent News

UA Conference Europe - September 2008 in Edinburgh (Fri, 05 Sep 2008)

This year's European Online Help conference will take place in the historic and vibrant city of Edinburgh, Scotland. To reflect the current trends towards single sourcing, collaborative authoring, and embedded user assistance, the traditional concept of "online Help" has broadened considerably in recent years. With this in mind, the Conference formerly known as "Online Help Conference - Europe" has been renamed to UA Conference - Europe. The event continues to cover the full range of skills and technologies that combine to assist users, and retains its unique position as the only European conference to focus on software user assistance.

STC Australia Chapter Competitions (Fri, 05 Sep 2008)

STC Australia is hosting competitions in three categories: technical publications, technical art, and online communication. Entries of an appropriate standard are entered in the STC International Competition, and Australian entries have won awards in this competition in past years. In last year's competition, ASIC received a distinguished award for one entry and an excellence award for the other. Entries close on 31 October 2008. Contact Monica Allen at competitions@stc-aus.org.au for details.

WritersUA Software User Assistance Conference in Seattle in 2009 (Fri, 05 Sep 2008)

The 17th Annual WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance will be held in Seattle, Washington, from March 29 to April 1, 2009. The Conference offers the most comprehensive and timely information specifically designed for user assistance professionals. The conference goal is to continue to provide an event with the most comprehensive and timely information specifically designed for user assistance professionals. The event covers all aspects of information and training as a means of support for software users and toward a better user experience.

New Adobe Acrobat Package: Pro Extended 9 (Fri, 15 Aug 2008)

Adobe have released Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, a package that includes Adobe Presenter, Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES, and Adobe 3D Reviewer software. Pro Extended is designed for business and technical professionals creating interactive presentations, as it allows PDF files to include video, voice-over, demos, and interactive quizzes. It also provides a number of form and collaboration features, making it easy to gather feedback, interactively review, and build consensus from a distributed document.

Author-it ver 5.1 Released (Fri, 08 Aug 2008)

Author-it Software Corporation has released version 5.1 of the Author-it authoring tool. The new version has new functionality including Object Variant capability and a Quick Search function. Object Variants are an extension of the Author-it model that allows content components, be it text, graphics, links, or even formatting, to have any number of variations created for them based on user-defined criteria. This allows authors to easily create these variations for whatever purpose they need, and manage them together as a single component. Author-it 5.1 runs on Windows Servers and Windows-based PC's. Current Author-it 5 clients who have maintenance agreements will get an automatic upgrade to Author-it 5.1.

DITA Storm Desktop Released (Wed, 25 Jun 2008)

Inmedius have released DITA Storm Desktop, a standalone XML editing solution based on the DITA Storm Web-based DITA Editor. Desktop allows the user to create and publish DITA documents in a self-contained environment on a single workstation. Installed locally on the end user’s computer, files are accessed, edited, saved and published from local or network drives, regardless of Internet connectivity. With WYSIWYG editing capabilities, authors with little or no DITA or XML knowledge can create valid, structured content. Desktop runs on Mac OS, Windows (including Vista) and Linux operating systems, and costs USD474.

Mimic News from MadCap (Wed, 25 Jun 2008)

MadCap Software announced the availability of Mimic 2.0. MadCap's native XML software simulation application adds new online and print output options, as well as support for MadCap Lingo to facilitate translation. New output formats from Mimic 2.0 include Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR, PDF and XPS.

DITA Open Platform Project (Mon, 23 Jun 2008)

Claude Vedovini has initiated the DITA Open Platform project. The goal of this project is to provide the DITA community with a free and easy-to-deploy DITA oriented production platform. It is targeted at small companies or teams that do not need a complete CMS solution.

Sibersafe Introduces New XSL-T Creation Tool (Sat, 31 May 2008)

Providing a specific look and feel to documentation published from your XML source is often technically difficult and costly to develop, and equally expensive to maintain. A new product from Sibersafe provides an alternative approach to XSL-T development. SiberSafe Styler is built around Microsoft Word's XML capabilities and familiar document formatting interface. It allows you to produce a sophisticated stylesheet draft in minutes without any programming or XSLT scripting skills. Sibersafe Styler works with Microsoft Word 2003/2007 (Professional Edition), and costs USD2000 per licence.