tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-138737282026-05-05T04:04:09.472-05:00Thoughts from technical writers on the LabVIEW Documentation team at National Instruments in Austin, Texas.Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.comBlogger96125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-10750619201450863822012-01-18T08:54:00.000-06:002012-01-18T16:10:39.589-06:00

I had put a link to a Twitter account here ... but I'm going to be pursuing a different strategy, working with NI's existing social media team. So if you read this post earlier ... never mind! :-)

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-6480085571463907402011-04-01T10:56:00.003-05:002011-04-01T10:58:46.245-05:00

Hello Internet-land, it's been awhile since I posted here. But I work on inspiration, and lately there hasn't been much of that driving any blog posts. I've been at NI for over six years now (crazy to think I've been writing this blog for like five of those years) and think I know pretty darn well how to write effective end-user documentation. Plus, I'm human and have an ego. Put these two facts

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-61817495945005121982010-09-28T15:00:00.000-05:002010-09-28T15:00:23.015-05:00

I've talked here before about speaking the customer's language. Yesterday I saw a post from another technical writing blog that reinforces this point. I quote: ===  ....[A] user may want to send a letter to many different people. If the user doesn't know about the mail merge feature, they will insanely copy and paste all the letters. Having an index entry of mail merge is

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-36567318552785032932010-07-30T09:47:00.000-05:002010-07-30T09:47:07.346-05:00

Today's xkcd (a fantastically geeky webcomic) is about designing for your audience ... http://xkcd.com/773/ The parallels to technical writing are obvious :-) How can you know what to write if you don't know what information your audience is looking for?

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-23080359222106895572010-05-25T14:44:00.002-05:002010-05-25T15:04:21.431-05:00

No, really, I don't! At least, not when reading my documentation. One of my guiding principles behind writing & reviewing technical documentation is "Remove the burden of thought from the customer." After all, our customers are NOT getting paid to read documentation. They're not even getting paid to figure out how to program in LabVIEW. They are getting paid to solve problems. So when I'm

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-17805895171458919492010-03-17T13:44:00.000-05:002010-03-17T13:44:14.013-05:00

At NI, technical writers often are the first non-developer users of a feature (API, dialog box, what-have-you). We are expected to notice UI issues and raise them with the developers. The next time you defer or reject a minor UI change, consider these examples of how UI can impact your revenue: The $80-million-dollar color The $300-million-dollar button

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-43350653480617206332010-02-16T14:29:00.001-06:002010-02-16T14:40:39.700-06:00

LabVIEW is a visual development language, right? That's why, many years ago, when I wrote the following about how to trim a nonlinear subsystem: Obtains the value of the State Derivatives parameter of the car model using the SIM Query Subsystem VI. The State Derivatives parameter contains car position, which is equivalent to the velocity of the car. Wires the State Derivatives parameter to

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-49257342123706368002010-01-19T08:43:00.001-06:002010-01-19T11:25:34.524-06:00

Apparently someone got a hold of a Chinese spam-producing software and used it to target this blog. Blogger doesn't have features for editing/deleting comments en masse, so I won't be able to remove them from the posts. Hopefully they do not interrupt your browsing experience :-) I've turned on comment moderation for older posts and enabled some other features that should prevent such spam from

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-3216259571085568782009-12-16T11:35:00.005-06:002009-12-18T14:45:15.288-06:00

Writing a great tutorial is an art form. There are several requirements for a successful how-to exercise:- The user needs enough information to successfully complete the task.- The user needs to move through the exercise in a reasonable amount of time.- The user needs to learn several basic concepts that will continue to be useful outside the context of the tutorial.A common thread in these

Alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13832492748461032339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-65934168240688886282009-12-16T10:48:00.001-06:002009-12-16T10:48:12.071-06:00

Hope ya’ll don’t mind a little horn-tooting! In a Glassdoor.com survey, NI’s been named the second-best tech company to work for, coming in behind Juniper at #1 and Google at #3! Can’t say I’m surprised :-) If you look at the site’s overall company ratings, we come in at #13, just behind Kraft. If only we had the power of mac & cheese, we’d be better than they are, I know it …

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-86201350778160339702009-12-08T15:37:00.001-06:002009-12-08T15:37:19.060-06:00

Funny post from Andrew Brooke, a new blog I’ve added to my RSS feed. The troop surge represents a 43% increase in the number of soldiers. Can you imagine the effect if a company increased the number of its tech writers the same amount? It would annihilate much of the company's misinformation and missing information, a victory in war on error.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-28797716871717370412009-12-03T09:38:00.001-06:002009-12-03T09:38:33.398-06:00

A couple tidbits for ya today: LabVIEW, VeriStand, FieldPoint, CompactRIO, iPhone – what do they all have in common? Their product names use camel case. (h/t to DF) The sorry state of Linux documentation; from a user’s viewpoint.

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-81724725691923340302009-10-30T11:46:00.000-05:002009-10-30T11:46:20.521-05:00

 It’s a tradition: Every year on Halloween (or as close to it as the work week will allow), tons of LabVIEW developers set up shop at their desks and demonstrate features or products they’ve been working on to all comers. The email goes out to the entire company (in Austin, anyway) and for two hours, (most) work stops as people come by to check out what we’ve been working on. Today’s

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-1988579131709329322009-10-26T11:53:00.001-05:002009-10-26T11:53:14.174-05:00

In the comments on my last post, Yair pointed me towards this preview of the LabVIEW 1.0 beta, all the way back in 1986. Enjoy!

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-14053945722500811302009-10-26T10:02:00.001-05:002009-10-26T10:02:18.721-05:00

Here’s a review of the original Macintosh, done in 1984. It’s amazing to read this now with 25 years of perspective and realize both how different it was and how similarly things still work today. But even back then some people seemed to “get it”. When LabVIEW was first released in 1986, it was for the Mac, because that was the dominant graphical platform of the day, and LabVIEW is

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-90453731136884101622009-10-23T15:59:00.002-05:002009-10-23T16:02:29.025-05:00

I find myself reading a lot of tech news sites. I sometimes email these links out to developers or other technical writers if they are interesting or have applications to LabVIEW/NI, but I figured, why not share them with the world?Here's are a few things I came across lately:Don't offer preferences to users if you don't have to. I think about this sometimes as we design software here ...

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-25979838741831821952009-10-13T13:46:00.000-05:002009-10-13T13:46:31.687-05:00

Leica makes some of the highest-quality, precision-engineered cameras in the world. WIRED magazine recently caught up with them and took a tour of their facility in Solms, Germany. In one of the shots, you can see a LabVIEW application (designed by Ramitek GmbH) being used to test the M9, Leica's newest camera. It's kind of awesome to see LabVIEW being used to help control tolerances as fine as

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-41737633608202567242009-09-17T12:17:00.001-05:002009-09-17T12:17:42.385-05:00

Small bit of background: I recently got (more) into digital photography and have been having a fun time dreaming of buying fancy-schmancy camera lenses. So I was checking out Sigma's web site and saw they have an "advisor tool". I clicked it and was presented with this: This tool is of absolutely no use to me. Why? Because I don't think in terms of "Lens technology" or even "Weight". I think in

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-41609442081515716262009-08-07T15:00:00.003-05:002009-08-07T15:15:14.048-05:00

As NI's newest tech writer, I feel like it's part of my job to experience as much of our technology as possible. In my day to day work, I can do this by talking with developers about the product and learning from them about how the customer might use the new features they're working on. Sometimes I get the chance to see a demo, but it's rare that I get to see the end result from a customer's

Alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13832492748461032339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-87531690302579116122009-08-07T09:44:00.006-05:002009-08-07T09:55:05.402-05:00

Wednesday at NIWeek, we took the wraps off of the newest project I've been working on - a way to host LabVIEW in a Web browser, letting you build VIs without installing ANYTHING on your computer (ok, that's not the whole truth, you DO need to spend 30 seconds downloading the Silverlight runtime engine!) Just like Gmail, Google Docs, et al let you access email and spreadsheets without installing

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-24363518492792877882009-08-03T09:21:00.000-05:002009-08-03T09:21:39.250-05:00

In case you're wondering just what we do all day ... or all year ... the LabVIEW 2009 Help system is now available online. It contains the help for the LabVIEW Base/Full/Pro development systems as well as each individual module and toolkit. Bet you didn't know we have so many LabVIEW add-ons! Did you know we make a toolkit to help you develop adaptive filter algorithms? (You know, like if you

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-3577927189911123252009-07-31T11:09:00.006-05:002009-07-31T11:12:59.534-05:00

Yeah, the cat's out of the bag! We're publicly announcing LabVIEW 2009 today. If you're attending NIWeek next week, you'll of course get a more in-depth look at it, as well as a chance to pester developers about it :-)I'm pretty excited about the Enhanced Block Diagram Cleanup feature. I used the first version of this feature a LOT in LabVIEW 8.6 when developing some VIs here for internal use. It

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-46728869714100622022009-07-28T10:06:00.004-05:002009-07-28T10:19:26.596-05:00

From ESPN:Jamie Moyer allowed seven baserunners before recording an out in the third inning. Somehow, none of them scored. I read this bit and did a double-take. This makes it sound like Moyer did the following:Allowed seven baserunners in the third inningDid not record an out until the eighth batter of the inning Did not give up a run during this timeIf you follow baseball, you might remember

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-65591351264449103362009-07-21T11:15:00.002-05:002009-07-21T11:21:55.498-05:00

I'm not trying to start anything political, but I think this is pretty interesting. This is often the end result of documents I write, although we use Adobe PDF Reader to mark comments and distribute them electronically.I like how Vanity Fair has separate literary, research, and copy editors. Often at NI we have to combine these roles into one person.Photo used from http://www.flickr.com/photos/

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13873728.post-68025345101077844642009-04-17T10:49:00.000-05:002009-04-17T10:49:35.502-05:00

Lonely Sandwich talking about how prepositions affect the perception of the App Store: I could say I bought a song on iTunes, but when I speak of it like that, I think of iTunes as more of a network for content rather than an outlet, much in the same way I’d say I saw 30 Rock on NBC or heard my favorite song on my favorite radio station. So does this mean that Apple likes to think of its iTunes

Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13544462798718591052noreply@blogger.com0Austin, TX, USA30.185357529701808 -97.8985462185664830.180720529701809 -97.905841718566478 30.189994529701806 -97.891250718566482