Apparently Adobe are soon to launch their Prerelease program for Captivate 4. Silke Fisher (Captivate Product Manager) recently announced:

The engineering team is busy working on Adobe Captivate 4 and the beta is going to start soon. We need testers with many different backgrounds and system configurations for trying the new features and providing feedback (you don’t have to be an existing user to participate).

So if your interested in trying out the new version of Captivate and helping improve the product, sign up for the Prerelease program:

Prerelease Interest Form

Remember by registering your interest there is no guarantee they will accept you into the program.

What do you do to cope with a fast approaching deadline? I have seen people fall apart, ‘freakout’ and collapse under pressure. Thankfully most people will never be put in that sort of situation but for Technical Writers like Project Management it is part of life. I thought I would jot down what I tend to do when I have a fast approaching deadline.

• I tend to focus (funnily enough the best way of focusing is by applying some pressure)
• Get the facts (find out exactly when the deadline is for and understand what else can affect the deadline)
• Sort out your priorities (If like me, you are involved in multiple projects prioritise the work you need to get done)
• Improve your time keeping (Plan/re-plan the work you need to complete and make sure you stick to it)

The best way of dealing with a fast approaching deadline is to ensure you are on schedule / ahead of schedule. But many times while documenting software I often find that after months of minimal documentation being done due to continuous change or not meeting desired specification the software all of a sudden comes together. You then find that the task that you once thought you had 1 month to do ends up being required within a week.

To cope with this sort of environment I tend to re-assess constantly. I prepare, plan and execute my documentation in small chunks which help me stay on target. I prioritise the ‘chunks’ constantly and work quickly at getting the basics done. I will then revise or re-edit my final draft a few days before the deadline.

This is the way I tend to deal with deadlines, does anyone have other good methods or suggestions?

The company I work for took a number of employees out for dinner the other night. We went to the restaurant Dans Le Noir in Faringdon, London. Dans Le Noir is an interesting concept. They provide 4 different menu types, you are told nothing about the menus except that one is suitable for vegetarians (green), one contains fish (blue), one contains meat but no fish (red) and one that is a surprise (white). Being the adventurous type I choose the white menu.

The next thing you are told is to remove anything that can produce light, including watches, cameras, phones, etc., and to place them in the lockers provided. OK nothing particularly interesting yet, but then you are told that you will be eating in the dark and being served by blind waiters and waitresses.

After a few drinks in the dimly lit lounge we were chaperoned to our table in complete darkness with our hands on the shoulder of the person in front. A conga line of sorts. Once we were seated it was time to reflect on how our other senses were affected by the loss of sight. The first thing to become apparent is the imagination runs wild. You start to try and work out the dimensions of the room, the number of other people in the room, how low the ceilings are, etc. The next step is to start perceiving that you can see things like your glass, napkin, etc,. Only after a while do you realise that you can see these things not because you have built in night vision but because you are aware they are there, the brain seems to make up the rest to compensate the loss of sight.

The food arrives, in only what I can assume is some sort of cart pushed by our waiter. I don’t know for certain. Our dishes were placed in front of use and we were instructed where our knives, forks, glasses and napkin should be. After a few minutes of rummaging around and wrestling with others for what we thought was rightfully ours, we managed to tuck in to the food. I found this amazing, not only was the food not compromised to make life easier for us it was extremely difficult to identify through taste or smell what was on our plate. It is only with hindsight that I can now recognize the items on my plate. The number of suggestions we had for the starter and main course were so far from the truth that you wonder how you could have even placed those ingredients together in the same dish.

Overall I would say that eating at Dans Le Noir is certainly an experience. If you can do it in a large enough group, 4+, it can be great fun and more than makes up for what I would consider a lacklustre menu.

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.6. This has been to take advantage of the increased security and a few of the new features they have added. Let me know if you see anything that doesn’t work or is out of place.

I have been considering whether to get a LiveScribe Smartpen for ages. I think they are a cool little gadget. I can also imagine them as an excellent medium for a new form of podcast, the pencast. Some people have already tried this and there are some really interesting community contributions and experiments on the LiveScribe website. Imagine a podcast that is completely anotated, true it defeats the mobility of a podcast but I think it adds so much rich information by including the written/drawn content.

Check out the example below.

Pencast - Starwars