Only Today Matters! (see Topics and Drivel for yesterday's views).


Tuesday, November 18, 2008

So much for keeping up with the blogsters

We have been buried at work trying to get out a new release on a fast track schedule. Like Agile wasn't fast enough. Me and my com-padre cow-orker have been trying to go it alone on this one rather than split the job amongst the whole group. The problem is that we have two main products, a bevy of small ones, plus just as much hardware and training across 6 writers and a training developer. The writer who concentrates on the hardware teams up with the training developer to split hardware and training, and they are buried plus nagged to pieces by UL compliance, who seem to charge us $250 per comma moved/removed/added.

Two of us work on the 9000 and three on the 800, with one of the three helping out on training, which has to cover every software release plus the new and old hardware.

Bottom line is that we all scramble. So my time for developing Flare and Frame updates and style sheets and anything new comes in small spurts. I had some breathing time when Flare 4 came out but that has disappeared. We have a deadline just before Turkey day, and then another early in December for the SDK and connected program (SDK partner products).

The good news is that have been able to use the Flare global project I built as the basis of a couple of projects and it is working, although the styles are not finished yet and therefore the PDF output looks a tad crude next to our frame books. I still have much to figure out. Some aspects of building a book out of that print TOC still need some thinking. But overall I am pleased and looking forward to the result.

But I am not ready to roll out a global project to the group and tell them to incorporate it into our current Flare Help projects, or convert any books.

So I don't have any juicy new discoveries or exciting stories to tell. I am hoping that by mid december I will be able to point to a beta delivery of web help and a book from the same project, and compiled help and a book from another project. But right now I have to focus on writing a lapfull of readmes and updating a ton of odds and end features across 30 chms and a dozen books. Fun stuff.