Data modeling freeware recommendations

[Technical Writer <tekwrytr -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

WEKA. Are you actually modeling the data or just creating a graphic of the results?
 
http://www.tekwrytrs.com/
Instructional Design - Educational Technology - Information Architecture
Technical Documentation - Enterprise Websites - Online Content
Specializing in Adobe Captivate - Adobe Flash - and Adobe RoboHelp tutorials



 
> From: techwr-l-request -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: TECHWR-L Digest, Vol 63, Issue 7
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:00:01 -0700
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> 
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Create and publish documentation through multiple channels with Doc-To-Help. 
> Choose your authoring formats and get any output you may need. Try 
> Doc-To-Help, now with MS SharePoint integration, free for 30-days. 
> http://www.doctohelp.com
> 
> ---
> 
> 
> Today's Topics:
> 
> 1. QT help? (Mary Moore)
> 2. Data modeling freeware recommendations (Kelly Parr)
> 3. Re: QT help? (Lee Fisher)
> 4. They say there is no such thing as a dumb question
> (Roberta Hennessey)
> 5. Re: They say there is no such thing as a dumb question
> (Keith Hood)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:13:15 -0500
> From: Mary Moore <mmoore100 -at- hotmail -dot- com>
> Subject: QT help?
> To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Message-ID: <SNT127-W207ED8671A4634BD21AEA0E90E0 -at- phx -dot- gbl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> 
> The developers I'm working with use something called the QT Framework to develop their GUIs. QT has its own help framework, as described here:
> 
> http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qthelp-framework.html
> 
> 
> Has anyone worked with this before? What do you use to author the source files? My client has FrameMaker 9 and RoboHelp 6 available as authoring tools. (They don't have the full Tech Comm suite.) Has anyone used FM as the authoring tool?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:52:26 -0500
> From: "Kelly Parr" <kparr -at- Vertica -dot- com>
> Subject: Data modeling freeware recommendations
> To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Message-ID:
> <D5BEDD267E3D2348ADBA4FD9263CD3D60D751FB5 -at- evilbill -dot- VerticaCorp -dot- com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Can anyone recommend a free/cheap data modeling tool for Windows XP? 
> 
> 
> 
> It doesn't have to be comprehensive, as I am not diagramming a large
> database schema-I need it to illustrate the 7 example databases we ship
> with our product. All dbs are relatively small, comprising 2-4 fact
> tables and 5-10 dimension tables each. 
> 
> 
> 
> I could use Visio, but I'd rather use a tool that was designed for this
> kind of work, and a Google search returned too many options!
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks much,
> 
> Kelly
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:23:28 -0800
> From: Lee Fisher <blibbet -at- gmail -dot- com>
> Subject: Re: QT help?
> To: Mary Moore <mmoore100 -at- hotmail -dot- com>
> Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Message-ID: <4D2B4EA0 -dot- 6080301 -at- gmail -dot- com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> On 1/10/11 7:13 AM, Mary Moore wrote:
> >
> > The developers I'm working with use something called the QT Framework
> > to develop their GUIs. QT has its own help framework, as described
> > here:
> >
> > http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qthelp-framework.html
> >
> > Has anyone worked with this before? What do you use to author the
> > source files? My client has FrameMaker 9 and RoboHelp 6 available
> > as authoring tools. (They don't have the full Tech Comm suite.)
> > Has anyone used FM as the authoring tool?
> 
> Yes. Vim. No. :-)
> 
> Use QTHelp to generate user help, as you mentioned.
> http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/qthelp.html
> 
> Use Qdoc or Doxygen to generate dev docs from source comments. For 
> Doxygen, look for the QHP_* and QH* tags to integrate with QtHelp.
> http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/index.html
> http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/config.html#cfg_qhg_location
> http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qdoc/
> 
> Note that as of v4.4, they changed their doc toolchain.
> http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qq/qq28-qthelp.html#htmlfilesandhelpprojects
> http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qhelpengine.html
> 
> The source code for Qt is available, you can see how the Qt tools use 
> their own doc tools internally. Besides Qt-provided examples, there are 
> many open source projects that use this toolchain, and you can see how 
> they use QtHelp in their code.
> http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3Aqt4+label%3Acplusplus
> 
> QtCentre has some forums that might help with Qthelp issues.
> http://www.qtcentre.org/
> 
> Sorry, I don't know how to integrate FM or RoboHelp with the Qt 
> toolchain. There is a Vim script that integrates Qt Help strings. :-)
> http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3351
> 
> HTH
> 
> PS: Nitpick: QT is Apple's QuickTime, Qt is the Nokia toolkit in question.
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 4
> Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:20:21 -0500
> From: Roberta Hennessey <rahennessey -at- gmail -dot- com>
> Subject: They say there is no such thing as a dumb question
> To: tech writer tech writer <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTinndoSkDa50fZK+J99csppHgASnGqV4W7qPgs+v -at- mail -dot- gmail -dot- com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> I hope this is not the first dumb question. Snide comments not taken
> personally.
> 
> I am being asked to scope out a project - documenting an online help for a
> GUI application. I have used
> Webworks to create online help from an existing document (Frame or Word),
> but I have never created help
> for a GUI that is already in place. The GUI application is done in Java but
> no one here uses the Doxygen method,
> etc. and there are no plans to do so.
> 
> I think the documentation will be relatively simple - but I'm not sure what
> type of tool would work best for this
> group, and which one would be one they could upkeep. I imagine it will be
> process of mapping the context
> sensitive help to locations in the GUI.
> 
> Any books, blogs, websites, ideas from anyone on how to begin to scope this
> effort? Any and all advice
> appreciated.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Bobbi
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Roberta Hennessey
> Technical Writer
> (978) 835-4282
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 5
> Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:16:03 -0800 (PST)
> From: Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>
> Subject: Re: They say there is no such thing as a dumb question
> To: tech writer tech writer <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, Roberta
> Hennessey <rahennessey -at- gmail -dot- com>
> Message-ID: <402997 -dot- 13841 -dot- qm -at- web36305 -dot- mail -dot- mud -dot- yahoo -dot- com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
> 
> Some stuff off the top of my head, from experience with help systems from long ago:
> 
> The very first thing you should do is find out if the product you have to document is stable or if there are upgrades or revisions coming in the near future. Try to pin down exactly when they are going to incorporate all visual changes to the interface. You don't want to start writing help pages and then find out they're going to change everything next week. And you don't want to find out too late that they will be still changing the images on the controls right up to the morning of the day when the new version is supposed to be released.
> 
> After that, decide/ask what level(s) of help should be included in the final product.? Will you have context-sensitive help that is actually mapped to screen features? (I would strongly recommend you try to avoid doing that, if you can.)? Will you have to produce both window-level feature help and how-to procedures, or only one of those?? Should the help be indexed? If the answer to that question is yes, how extensively?? If you do window-level help, how many windows will you have to document? To what level of complexity should the help pages be cross-referenced?
> 
> For doing window-level help, I think a good planning figure is 8 hours per window documented.? That's just hours to write the help page; that doesn't include proofing/editing, and function testing. That figure will be lower for less-complex windows.
> 
> If you're going to do how-to procedures, you will have to experiment hands-on with the software to find out what it really does.? There WILL be differences between the specs and reality.? Allow half a day to make an outline of the procedures that need to be covered. Give each procedure in the outline a complexity rating from 1 to 4 (4 being worst - longest and takes the most explaining). Then multiply each rating by 2 hours.? That gives a rough idea how long it would take to experiment with the actions, note the results, and write numbered steps that accurately show your findings.
> 
> If you're going to use Webworks to boil down Word or Frame source files, allow at least 12 hours for troubleshooting and tuning style transitions.
> 
> When you get to the point of testing the help functionality (checking links from the TOC, the cross-references, etc.), figure 2 minutes per link. You can count the number of links by doing a text search in the source files and finding the number of instances of the code that starts a hyperlink.
> 
> Include a couple of days for technical review.
> 
> And remember to always Scottify your time estimate - always add 10% to allow for unexpected sickness or other problems.
> 
> 
> --- On Mon, 1/10/11, Roberta Hennessey <rahennessey -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> 
> From: Roberta Hennessey <rahennessey -at- gmail -dot- com>
> Subject: They say there is no such thing as a dumb question
> To: "tech writer tech writer" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Date: Monday, January 10, 2011, 3:20 PM
> 
> I hope this is not the first dumb question. Snide comments not taken
> personally.
> 
> I am being asked to scope out a project - documenting an online help for a
> GUI application. I have used
> Webworks to create online help from an existing document (Frame or Word),
> but I have never created help
> for a GUI that is already in place. The GUI application is done in Java but
> no one here uses the Doxygen method,
> etc. and there are no plans to do so.
> 
> I think the documentation will be relatively simple - but I'm not sure what
> type of tool would work best for this
> group, and which one would be one they could upkeep. I imagine it will be
> process of mapping the context
> sensitive help to locations in the GUI.
> 
> Any books, blogs, websites, ideas from anyone on how to begin to scope this
> effort? Any and all advice
> appreciated.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Bobbi
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Roberta Hennessey
> Technical Writer
> (978) 835-4282
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Create and publish documentation through multiple channels with Doc-To-Help. 
> Choose your authoring formats and get any output you may need. Try 
> Doc-To-Help, now with MS SharePoint integration, free for 30-days. 
> http://www.doctohelp.com
> 
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