Computer system?

Subject: Computer system?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:02:22 -0400


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".

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Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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Computer System: From: Jonathan Gravois

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