Gridlines » Conferences

Get the Latest News on User Assistance from WritersUA

CharJT — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:43:09 +0000

Visit WritersUA and get the latest news on user assistance. Among the topics:

Skills and Technologies Survey results now available
Salary Survey in progress
Tools Survey in progress (restarted due to glitch…if you’ve already taken it, go take it again!)
Free Apple Help tutorial by Matt Neuberg now available
User Assistance Group started on LinkedIn

In addition, get $100 discount of the full conference price for the 2009 WritersUA Conference if you register by 9 February 2009.

Conference Calendar updated

CharJT — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:54:28 +0000

The HAT-Matrix Conference Calendar has been updated and now includes:

Intelligent Content 2009 (next January in Palm Springs, CA)
Web Content 2009 (next February in Clearwater Beach, FL)
SXSW (next March in Austin, TX)
DocTrain West (next March in Palm Springs, CA)
WritersUA (next March/April in Seattle, WA)
STC’s Technical Communication Summit (next May in Atlanta, GA)

Let us know if there are any others that should be added!

HAT-Matrix blog now includes Conference Calendar

CharJT — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:23:59 +0000

Wondering when the next conference is? Or what conflicts you might run into while planning? Gridlines now includes a Conference Calendar page (from Google) to help you plan!

Conference organizers are welcome to submit additions to the calendar by sending an email to calendar at hatmatrix.com. Your event will get added within a reasonable time frame. (And if we figure out a safe way to let people auto-add events to the calendar without opening it up to spammers, we’ll implement it!)

DocTrain East Conference currently taking place

CharJT — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:14:47 +0000

Technical communicators and Help authors from across the country gathered at the DocTrain East Conference in Burlington, MA, this week for sessions on DITA, simplified English, APIs and SDKs, along with tool presentations by the vendors.

The major tool announcement this week was MadCap’s DITA roadmap. Phase 1, due out in Q1 2009, will let users import and export DITA XML files. Phases 2 and 3 add more functionality, including support for the DITA schema. MadCap’s DITA support lets technical communicators create DITA XML files but saves them from having to use the DITA Toolkit to publish (transform) the output.

Author-it Software Corporation will release Author-it 5.2 in December, with support for structured authoring and DITA 1.1. Author-it was the first authoring tool to support DITA by means of custom topic templates that published DITA XML files.

Adobe demonstrated some of the new features in Acrobat 9 and, while very little could be announced, expect to see the next version of RoboHelp sometime around Q2 2009.

And with more DITA news, Robert Anderson from IBM said that DITA 1.2 is currently in review and should also be available during Q2 2009.

For more information (and to see the slide decks from the presentations), visit the DocTrain East 2008 website.