It was with slight trepidation and certain anticipation that I attended my first STC program meeting on September 16, 2008 as a volunteer. Though I work with technical writers as an editor in a Vancouver engineering firm, I do feel decidedly out of touch with the latest innovations in software, document design, and the acronyms that techie people seem to inject so casually in their conversations while their cohorts nod knowingly.
I wasn’t really quite sure what to expect at the meeting, but it was “virtual” so I just had to be there! RJ Jácquez, a Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe, gave us an enthusiastic virtual presentation of the new Adobe Technical Communication Suite offerings via webcast from his office in San Diego.
While I found much of what RJ was talking about esoteric, I did find myself oohing and aahing over the ability to break apart the components of a brake drum using a slider bar inside an Adobe Acrobat PDF. I thought of my experience a few months ago as a volunteer for my company’s entry into CANstruction, an annual event for the Vancouver food bank where architects, engineers, students, and artists create sculptures out of cans of food.
2008 Juror’s Favourite Award “CAN Pooh Reach the Honey?”This year, my company CANstructed an 8-foot high sculpture of Winnie the Pooh, with the caption CAN Pooh Reach the Honey? One of my company’s engineers designed Pooh in AutoCAD 3D, a design software that allowed him to dissect Pooh in many layers while providing front, top, bottom, and spinning views. I asked the engineer how long it took him to create the design. Did he really say 60—six oh—hours? Is it possible the new Acrobat product could have saved him some time?
Editor’s Note: No. He would still have spent 60 hours building the model in AutoCAD 3D. However, using Acrobat 3D he could generate a version to import into a PDF. Then anyone who viewed the PDF could dismantle and reassemble the virtual model on their desktops
A quick look at http://www.acrobat.com showcases some of the newer offerings that RJ touched upon in his presentation, available to users after signing up for an Adobe ID:
- Buzzword—Flash-based word processor that includes web-based file sharing and storage
- Create PDF—online document conversion services to create up to five PDF files
- Share—file sending service to buffer large files sent over email
- My files—online file storage for easy access anywhere
- Connect Now—the “lite” version of the Connect Pro web conferencing and screen sharing service used for the meeting
The virtual conference was not without its minor glitches—the computer audio wasn’t properly amplified, so the embedded video from Rahel Bailie and audio from Theresa Putkey were difficult to hear. Also, we may have lost the connection a couple of times. Bruce Sharpe had to reconnect to the conference to get the video working again. Even with these problems, I found the meeting to be totally WAVE, and look forward to the next one in November. What does WAVE mean? Don’t you know?
Wow, A-plus Virtual Experience.
The chapter thanks Liessi Häussler of Cyberscribe Solutions Inc. for providing the refreshments for the evening, and door prizes supplied by Rahel Bailie of Intentional Design, Inc., and Sheila Jones of International Wordsmiths, Ltd.
Read the program meeting review from the perspective of a virtual participant.
Discuss this article in the STC CWC forums.
