Foul Writer’s World

It seems Adobe have really hit a chord with the new help system included in CS4. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the right chord. Richard Galvan (Product Manager for Flash), has included the following post including problems Adobe is working on fixing for Flash CS4. It seems the help system is the centre of a lot of user frustration:

Next topic: Flash Help.

We have received a lot of feedback regarding the changes made to Help. These changes resulted from an internal initiative to make Flash Help consistent with the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite products. These changes also allow the group responsible for developing Help documentation to produce better and more current content. The Help team also wanted to tie in community-based resources and the ability to search, which means that search now returns help results  not only from Adobe, but from other relevant sources on the web.

We are aware that there are severe workflow issues with the current solution –most of which Adobe is working on.  Some of the concerns we have heard are:

• it’s available only when you are online.

• Help now opens in a browser and not in the IDE.

• it opens a different browser window every time you hit F1.

The Help team has assured us that they are working on these issues and on improving the Help experience for the Flash user’s needs.

Please let us know what other issue you encounter with Help. Additionally, if you have any feedback on improving Help to make help better, we are all ears.

If you refer to some of the comments on the post. It seems people really don’t like the new all in one integrated solution that Adobe has implemented. I use Flash CS4 a lot and I must admit that I do find the help frustrating, but to be fair it is not only Flash that has this problem it is most of the CS4 range. As the help has been integrated across the whole platform and is hosted on a centralized server.

This leaves a number of problems some of which have already been brought up by other users:

• Can’t access the help when not on-line (I work a lot on the road while travelling on Trains or in Planes so it can sometimes be frustrating)
• Help no longer feels like part of the application (It opens in a browser window)
• Searched results often cause information overload. The search results obviously go back to an indexing server that automatically searches all the help across the range of applications and provides all these results to the user (Why would I be interested in similar information from other applications in the range. I want help with Flash, plain and simple)

However, the new system does provide the opportunity for the writers to update the system and keep the information up to date easily. Also, this system does reduce the footprint of the applications and for a product range the size of the CS4 Master Collection it really does make a difference on hard drive space..

Thankfully all the problems people seem to have with help seem fixable. I hope the guys at Adobe can improve the help system.

So I have just had the pleasure of spending some 2 and a bit hours installing Adobe’s CS4 range of applications. Talk about take a while, but at least it was done. I then had to spend over an hour uninstalling CS3

I plan to have a play around with the new 3D effects that Flash offers, plus I’ll have a closer look at some favorites including Photoshop, Fireworks and Premiere. But so far so good I’m liking the new application layout and I see they have taken a leaf from Google and maximized space by getting rid of the title bar.

It will be interesting to see if the same theme is implemented for TCS 2. I suspect it will be.

I posted a few days ago about Adobe being ready to announce CS4.

Well yesterday was the big day. So I signed-on at the required time to watch the launch but nothing happened. Zip, zero, zilch, nada, nothing. For 40 minutes I tried to view the launch, but all that showed up was the player window with the loading icon. I tried many times to refresh the page but still nothing. I even tried different computers.

Did anyone else manage to view it?

From my point of view that doesn’t bode well for a company pushing media and Rich Internet Applications when they can’t even get it right themselves.

Adobe are gearing up to announce officially Creative Suite 4 on the 23rd of September. CS4 will include new versions of the much loved favourites, including PhotoShop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Indesign. CS is essentially the web designers tool box. It will be interesting to see what features have been updated and how this will fit in to the Adobe online toolset that is slowly but steadily being set up. Are we likely to see tighter integration between desktop applications and their web counterparts?

The main reason I’m interested in the launch of CS4 when it happens, is to see what changes are likely to occur in the Adobe Technical Communications Suite 2. The TCS is hopefully due for launch before the end of this year, but we will have to wait and see. Unfortunately in the past the TCS has tended to be the poor cousin of the CS, because it only included a handful of useful tools for technical writers. However, if you are like me and tend to try and include unique illustrations for your documentation a decent graphics application is sorely missing from the TCS. Will one make it into TCS 2. I doubt it, but here is hoping.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I have been busy. I have had a short trip away and lots of work to do.

I just thought I would mention an article I read about PDFs from Charles’ website entitled, Another PhD States: Why I Hate PDFs. Included are some links to a few interesting reads about PDFs.

I have to admit I see little point in producing PDFs because:

• Research from our corporate website shows that less than 10% of readers view the PDFs
• It takes a lot of extra work to ensure that the formatting is correct for PDFs
• We don’t automatically provide hard copies of our manuals anymore
• The time it takes to generate 200-300 page PDFs with images etc., really destroys my timing. Then when you spot a minor mistake you have to correct it and start generating it all over again.

However, the saving grace of PDFs is that they are portable and I think Adobe should start investing time and money in helping organisations make portable PDF e-book readers. They need to provide some sort of incentive. Because there has been plenty of times where I have been on holiday or traveling and pulling out my laptop to read something just isn’t feasible. Now if there was an abundance of cheap, easy to use e-book readers that gave a similar feel to a book i think the popularity of PDFs would shoot through the roof. But until that day happens I am still going to hate them. Unfortunately you would be hard pressed to find one for under $300. Here are some examples:

• E-Book Readers At A Glance

Anyone know of a cheap and cheerful e-book reader that costs around about $200 and is available in the UK?