I’d heard about Evernote from colleagues but I’ve never been much of a note-taker except in planning and requirements meetings. In fact, in those meetings, I tend to be rather nutty about the volume of notes I take. Mostly because there’s always a question about something later on…and hopefully, I have the resolution in my notebook. As time passes at an employer, my notebooks stack up – available at a moment’s notice.

Note-taking in my private life – not so much.

But when I got my iPad, I began to see the value of it as a notebook. I was using the iPad’s Notes app but features were limited. No tags, no sorting, no bullets, nothing. The image below is an example of a series of notes I took during a MadCap Mimic tutorial review. I had had Evernote by this time….but I forgot to use it on this day.

There are a number of things I don’t like about the notes/comments above:

• The date on the note is the date the notes were last edited, not the date of the meeting.
• No formatting options like the ability to strike through an item or mark something as done.
• No sorting capabilities at all

I needed more! When I did a search for a notes app in google – Evernote popped up as a great tool. It came in at the magic price of FREE!

One of my first uses of Evernote was to solve an issue with taking photos on my iPad – the tagging and sorting of images. Part of my role running a canine rescue organization is to take photos of the dogs and post them to the website. Without photos, dogs don’t get adopted!

I was fine with taking the photos, where I struggled was remembering which dog was which.  It was brutal…because let’s be honest here….most beagles are black, brown, and white…and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for distinguishing markings!

<heroic music>So, Evernote to the rescue! </heroic music>

I created a note for each dog and then took photos – thereby sorting the photos. I don’t come up with brilliant ideas all that often, but I count this as one in that small category. Here’s a screenshot to document my moment:

When it came time to post the dogs to the website, I had them sorted so I knew who was who. Not bad for a first effort!

Since then, Evernote has allowed me to discontinue my use of notebooks. I attend meetings and assign tags to the notes. I can make lists, even lists of to-do items.

And then I can check things off the list!

The tagging and sorting options are pretty cool. I can sort by the following:

• Date Created
• Date Modified
• Meeting Title
• Notebook (if you have several)
• City and Country

Here are my notes sorted alphabetically:

When you tag items, you can then sort stuff by those tags: either Name or Note Count. This screenshot shows my notes sorted alphabetically by tag.

Conclusion

Evernote is a fantastic tool for note taking, whether you’re in a client meeting, a demo, or just making notes for yourself. And at the magic price of FREE, it simply can’t be beat.

If you’re a tech writer or an online help developer, you know that documentation, help, and training always always always are left to the end of development and then done in a rush. In almost 20 years of work experience, my current employer is the only one I’ve worked for who actually builds help in to the regular development schedule.

Now, having said that, I don’t mean that there is room left in the schedule for help development and testing…I mean that I am expected to write help as the software is being coded.

The challenge to this help development model is: how do you write help for features that don’t exist yet?!

I’ve come across a number of options and I’d like to hear from you when and from what sources do you write your help.

Help From Working Software

This is the dream scenario where I have software on which I can push buttons and actually write help based on what is happening on the screen. I have had this experience a number of times and I can’t find the words to describe how wonderful it is.

Of course, there’s the issue that buttons may change or some of the UI may change…but there’s nothing like writing help for a working app.

Writing help from software that works is efficient, requiring the fewest number of edits, and rewarding.

Layouts

This is what we call them here….a full-color, annotated set of layouts built by our graphic designer. These layouts take the requirements, use cases, and wireframes and turn them in to tools from which the programmers, and in many cases, the help developer build their code. An example of a layout is shown here:

I’ve left out the notes on the right side of the page – but you can see where the designer has annotations for the programmers. These annotations discuss button behavior, contents of pull-down lists, styling of numbers in fields, etc. Note, also, the placement of Context Sensitive Help tags (the question marks) early in the design process.

Are they as easy to use as working software? No. But they provide a framework from which a help developer can begin writing.

The assumption that comes from working with layouts is that the resulting software or application may not match the layout exactly. This could be caused by a programmer not referring to the layouts (which never happens, does it?!), time running out on the release and finessing doesn’t happen, or finding out that a part of the layout is simply not feasible. And when any of these happen, either the help has to change OR the software code has to change OR the layouts and help are edited to fit the new reality.

When you write from layouts, you must set the expectation that you’ll be rewriting something some where along the line. And don’t even consider using screenshots! That would be an exercise in futility and frustration. Screenshots should wait until after testing, if possible, to reduce the chances of having to replace them because the UI changes.

Wireframes

This is, really, the worst case scenario. Writing help from wireframes is not recommended and not an efficient use of a help developer’s time because the design and UI hasn’t really been hammered out yet. However, you may be called upon to write help from wireframes. And if so, I’m sorry. It’s no fun.

There will be tons of edits, lots of rewriting, new topics created, old topics thrown out – just overall chaos and mayhem.

The only advantage I can see from working from wireframes is that it gives you something to work with. I’ve had to write help from wireframes and I used them almost exclusively to build a rough skeleton of the help. I can create topics from them, build a TOC, roughly identify locations for CSH tags, and just work towards some semblance of help.

Have you ever written help from wireframes? Layouts? What kind of time are you given to write help for software? I’d love to hear from you.