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Jonathan Gravois wondered: <<Having spent from 12:20 to now (10:00)
cleaning my XPPro machine of a Trojan virus, I am wondering of the
feasibility of Technical Writing on the Macintosh OS X platform.>>
Content creation (i.e., the actual writing) is a piece of cake, and
even most formatting (applying structure etc. to the content) won't be
much more difficult. Contrary to your assertion, FrameMaker is
certainly available for OS-X: you just have to run it in Classic mode,
which works just fine according to a colleague who is a certified Frame
trainer.
The only likely problem will be with Windows-only software such as
RoboWhatever: you'll need to carefully investigate your current and
future needs to see what software you can't run on the Mac. Given that
Microsoft ships a remarkably good PC emulator that runs fine (but
slowly on slower machines) on an OS-X machine with tons of memory, even
this isn't likely a problem.
For that matter if (like me) you despise compiled help and would rather
produce vanilla HTML that anyone with a browser can use on any
computer, you don't even need RoboEtc. Just produce your help in
Dreamweaver et al., and use HTMLIndexer or DevaTools to index it.
Organizational issues are more likely to be a problem, since if you're
a wage slave, your employer may not be willing to make the effort to
include Macs in their support training. Macs do require enormously less
support from the IT department (this is repeatedly shown in studies by
folks like the Gartner Group), but they don't require _no support_, and
particularly if your organization is at all invested in MS Exchange
Server and ActiveX technologies, you may have some problems that are
difficult to solve. OS-X works much better with Windows XP than vice
versa, but it's not a perfect match.
Font issues may also be a bit of a problem. Unicode fonts seem to have
solved most problems, but you'll need to carefully test for things such
as special characters that you use frequently to ensure that there
won't be any problems.
It's also worth noting that Apple's recent announcement that they're
moving the Mac to Intel processors (they already have working
prototypes available to developers, and the first consumer systems
should ship next year) means that anything that runs on a PC will soon
run on a Mac: the operating system hooks are sufficiently different
that this won't be a piece of cake, but you can bet that within 6
months of the release of the first Mac (if not sooner), someone will
have hacked a dual boot system that lets you run OS-X and Windows
simultaneously in separate "windows"--you can already do this for
Panther (OS-X) and Classic (OS 9) on a Mac, so doing the same thing
with Windows should be similarly "easy".
Now Shipping -- WebWorks ePublisher Pro for Word! Easily create online
Help. And online anything else. Redesigned interface with a new
project-based workflow. Try it today! http://www.webworks.com/techwr-l
Doc-To-Help 2005 now has RoboHelp Converter and HTML Source: Author
content and configure Help in MS Word or any HTML editor. No
proprietary editor! *August release. http://www.componentone.com/TECHWRL/DocToHelp2005
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