AODC Conference 2008: Day 2

This will be a short post as Uncle Dave’s Trivia Night starts soon…

Thursday of AODC is always the busiest and fullest day, with six meaty sessions today. I’ll try and summarise them, but if you want good detail on each, hop on over to Sarah Maddox’s blog where she’s been posting extensive summaries about each session.

• AIR Help (Tony Self): Tony introduced us to Adobe’s AIR help ‘wrapper’ (AIR = Adobe Integrated Runtime), which looks to me like a CHM on steroids! He demonstrated a couple of implementations of it and it looks pretty cool. My biggest concerns, which I asked questions about, were to do with the installation of any AIR Help as a program. Tony assured us that developers could install AIR Help as part of the application’s installation routine.
• CSS: Image Maps using Backgrounds (Dave Gash): Like Matthew’s session yesterday, I also saw this one at the WritersUA conference in March. And just like Matthew’s it was as good today as it was then. In fact, second time round I understood it better.
• Usability of Embedded Help (Colin Dawson): Colin’s presentation was a case study of a project he’s been working on for some years: getting user-mediated Help into online Help. It was an interesting approach, and I don’t know of any Help vendors doing anything like this yet.
• Techniques for Reviewing a User Interface (my session): See Sarah’s blog post for details.  Slides, handouts, voice recording, checklists etc. for my presentation of this session at WritersUA are available here: http://www.cybertext.com.au/10353.htm
• Write More, Write Less (Joe Welinske): Joe put forward some compelling reasons for making sure that every word we write has meaning and purpose, and looked at minimalist (but focused) documentation as a strategy.
• Estimating Documentation Projects (Stewart Walker): This session hit some nice chords with me, as I have been using a combined approach similar to that he described for some years with my smaller, ad hoc clients. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one, and that I’ve been on the right track.

So to tonight… It’s traditional to have a trivia night at AODC and tonight will be no exception. Dave Gash comes up with some really obscure, arcane, and just plain puzzling conundrums, and he throws in a few groan-inducing questions just to spice it up. Add to that Tony’s silly interpretation of the rules and some ridiculous prizes (where DO they get them?), and it’s a fun night all round.