'Twas another great conference :-)

On day 3, I attended Joe Welinske and Scott Boggan's session on A Design Review of User Assistance in Microsoft Vista. I think they did a good job of presenting Vista Help's new features: the resizable Help pane, simple search as the primary navigation (no index, a minimal TOC, no advanced search), and Guided Help. They also pointed out some of the deficiencies: only Microsoft, OEMs, and corporations can use and customize Vista Help; no popups; can't view more than one Help file at a time. The only thing I think they got wrong is that the Help viewer has been ported back to Windows XP...I see it when I request Help in Office 2007.

One of the biggest changes (for me, anyway) is the new definition for "online Help", which now means "Help when there is an Internet connection". For years, "online Help" has meant any Help file. Get ready to change your mindset ;-) (Offline Help is that which is available when there isn't an Internet connection. Of course!)

The next session I went to was Dana Worley's Migrating from WinHelp to HTML Help Using Doc-To-Help. Dana spent many years creating WinHelp without a HAT, and she tested several different HATs before choosing Doc-To-Help. Her session included statistics on how well these different HATs imported her hand-coded WinHelp projects, taking into account how well the Help worked with her applications (including context-sensitive Help), formatting and appearance, TOC and index, aliases, and popups. Her handouts included charts comparing her evaluation criteria with each of the HATs that she evaluated.

Prof. Geoffrey K. Pullum, Professor of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz, gave the closing keynote. Called Far from the Madding Gerund: Observations About Language, Pullum talked about how it's okay to split infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, and more. He also talked about Microsoft's trademark page, and how Microsoft breaks their own rules (they state, "do not use the Windows trademark in the possessive or plural form...um...isn't Windows itself a plural? They also use the possessive form of several trademarks in various supplemental pages on their site.)

At the end of the keynote, Pullum took questions, and one woman asked that he blog about the various points he discussed, addressing it to Joe (her boss). Pullam did.