Friday, September 05, 2008

My Take on Google Chrome



In Marketing parlance: Once you have a brand name, you don’t need publicity at all. Google must be wondering and thanking stars for they have managed to save cash in not marketing for their latest product- Chrome. These chaps make world class online applications, and understandably are the ruling classes of online search engine.

This was much expected; Google has been giving sleepless nights to Microsoft over the past few years, and with its own Internet Browser ‘Chrome’ – Bill Gates you need to do some serious thinking.

Chrome released this week and within a few hours finds itself in the desktops of a few hundreds of computers. This numbers will keep on adding in the days to come, and much like Gmail- Google’s own internet email application, will dominate the market soon.

My assumptions of Chrome hitting the market and being the very best has got to quite a few factors but namely with the market war on Internet Browsers. Observe the scenario: a few years back when Internet became a household name, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the only thing available to the common man.

It was like if you wish to access the world wide web Internet Explorer were the only medium. Though Netscape was the primary browser, it soon fell down. Mozila acquired it. Within few years Mozilla came out with Firefox , which incidentally is an open source browser.



But the interesting part was it had lots of features, faster and bug free (almost). Till date though IE continues to dominate the browser scene with 50 % Firefox has slow and steady and caught up along with Apples Safari.

Faster: Initial days but Chrome is fast- real fast. Its interface is intuitive and just a few keystrokes and joom you are on. Downloading takes a lesser time compared with IE and firefox. Chrome uses Webkit (aka Apple Safari’s Engine) for rendering web pages.

By default, Chrome displays the top nine visited websites on the system on clicking a new tab. This identically gives you a preview to the history of the websites and also allows you the select any of the sites without any additional keystrokes.

The memory usage is very low when you think that it has varied security and javascript tookboxes.

It’s only released for Windows at the moment and will require sometime before its released for Linux.So all those Linux lovers, use it. Initial days. I suggest you try installing and playing with it for sometime.

I love using Google apps , and I am in Totally for it. Well guys! time will tell, but for now much like the Mcdonald's product "I am loving it"

Monday, September 01, 2008

Minutes of the Presentation at Adobe on 30th August



Date: August 30, 2008

Time: 10.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.

Venue: Adobe Systems

Session 1: “Documentation Document usability testing - How to kick start” by Rajdeep Gupta.

Session 2: "Ten tips for enhancing productivity at your workplace: Tools and Processes that can be used to get the most out of your working hours" by Preran Kurnool and “Getting the most out of your help projects: Tips and Tricks with RoboHelp and Acrobat" by Mallika Yelandur.

Rajdeep Gupta started the day’s sessions after setting the meeting’s agenda and introducing the participants.

Rajdeep noted that documentation usability testing could enable users to find information to accomplish a particular task or employ a particular tool in an easy and efficient manner. He emphasized that performing usability testing on documents requires a good understanding of the users and their constraints.

Technical writers and in-house resources could do the document usability testing within a structured and detail-oriented framework. Document usability testing also involves best practices, protocols, understanding and evaluation of user feedback.


Rajdeep also detailed the document usability testing process that he employed, and explained how the testing environment was set up, the resources were identified, and the time and budget were planned. He also presented a classification of “usability errors” that he found while performing document usability testing.


Event: Bangalore TW Meetup Session-Supported by STC India

He added that the errors found should be quantified to make technical documentation more usable.


In the second session of the day, Preran provided answers to how Adobe Acrobat Professional 9 could efficiently manage document reviews. Reviewers could collaborate on the review process by seeing and building on other reviewers' comments.

The comments can be uploaded to a central repository and sorted by author, date, or page. A Review Tracker monitors the progress of shared reviews. The tool allows participants to e-mail reviewers, send e-mail reminders, or invite additional participants to a review.

Mallika introduced the attendees to RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), which allows technical writers to convert existing WebHelp files created with RoboHelp 7 to a powerful Adobe AIR application.

After the WebHelp is generated, technical writers can run the AIR package to develop an AIR application and send it to the users as a single file (.air). The application allows the users to add comments to the Help file and create context-sensitive help.

The meeting ended with a vote of thanks by Rajdeep.