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I wanted to find out how people of different generations use computers, what they use their computers for, how they use them and what they feel about computers and software generally. So who better to ask than three generations of women from my family.

In this, the second in a series of three podcasts, I talk to my 17-year-old daughter, Martha Christie about how she uses computers at school and at home.

Of online help Martha says:

"Those things drive me crazy. I don't think I've ever actually used any of those help systems for anything on the computer. I just don't find them useful at all.
...
There's so much writing to read and I hate that kind of thing. It's like ... if you get like a help manual with something you just throw it away before you start
...
I just can't read through it all. I'd rather just try it and then if it goes wrong I just scrap it and start again."

On the most effective way of learning, she says:

"If you want to learn something, asking a person is the best way to do it."

"I don't think I just want to be told the answer ... Getting something explained to you and getting it shown to you is different from just getting told an answer. Like if I asked a teacher for help and they just told me the answer, I wouldn't be like: 'Oh that's great, thanks' ... The best teachers don't tell you an answer - they tell you how to find the answer yourself."

She makes an interesting point about how when she wants to do something on the computer she'd naturally try and use one of the applications that are already on the computer - even if it wasn't purpose built for the thing she wanted to do - rather than search for, download and install a new application from the Internet.

I also found it revealing that she wasn't aware that most help systems for applications have an index and a search facility.

She didn't like the idea of help videos, because she wouldn't want to sit through a whole video to find out how to do something.

Finally, she's also the only person I know who's ever had anything good to say about the Microsoft Office Assistant dog. 

One of the software applications mentioned in the interview is:

Painter Classic
Metacreations Painter Classic came bundled with a Wacom tablet I bought years ago. Used with a drawing tablet it was a very impressive bit of software. Corel bought Metacreations and the latest incarnation of that software is Painter X (i.e. version 10).

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/gb/en/Product/1166553885783

This is one of the paintings Martha created using Painter Classic, in 2003, when she was twelve:

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I love keyboard shortcuts. Each little shortcut saves you a few seconds and over a year that's a lot less time spent clicking around, choosing from menus and more time being productive. It's all about getting on with the stuff you want to be getting on with, and spending less time/effort just getting there.

So here's a good one. Texter is a little application written by someone at LifeHacker. When you run it it sits in your system tray and replaces predefined sets of characters with longer text. So if you type the same thing several times a day, you can type a few characters and it's automatically replaced by your name as you type. For example, to type Alistair Christie I could just type ac, hit the Enter key and ac is replaced by my name.

If you're a coder you'll probably find this particularly useful as it lets you enter big chunks of code with just a few key presses.

Download Texter from the Download link on the Texter home page.

Important

• Go to the Preferences and turn off Enable Universal Spelling AutoCorrect. It's clearly supposed to work on whole words to correct spelling, but unfortunately it corrects before you've finished writing a word. For example, if you try to write agree, as soon as you get as far as agre it changes the word to agree, which means you end up with agreee. Similarly, if you try to write another you get aanother. This maybe works on some platforms, but on my Vista laptop it's obviously broken. But no matter, Texter is fine without this.
• Replacements don't work everywhere. For example, they don't work in the Run dialog box. From what I've read, this used to work in XP, but doesn't in Vista. Shame, because it would be useful to be able to run a program by just typing a few characters in any application.

After a bit of a lay-off from reading blogs, I've been catching up with what Tom Johnson's been blogging about. One post that caught my attention was a screencast about Jing:

Jing is a cut-down version of Camtasia that provides a quick way to record a screen capture video and audio recording and then share it, for example on a blog. The real benefit of this is that, rather than writing out procedural steps you can quickly record a "here's how it's done" mini-demo and post it - e.g. onto SharePoint - for people in your team or organisation to view.

Makers TechSmith have a simple little animation that explains the benefits of Jing very nicely:

 
Tom Arah has written a review of FrameMaker 8 in PC Pro magazine:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/137286/adobe-framemaker-8.html

For the most part it sounds like users of 7.2 (like myself) wouldn't notice much of a difference. However, the thing that intrigues me is the ability to incorporate Flash movies into documents. When I'd heard of this, months ago, I'd thought: okay but what's the point in that? However, Tom Arah's description suddenly reveals how great that might be:

... this hardly seems like rich media, since the 3D models and vector movies are represented in the FrameMaker document as static bitmaps. Everything changes, though, when you export your document to PDF. Suddenly, when viewed within Adobe Reader, the embedded Flash movie and 3D model spring into interactive life.

Now, suddenly, I can imagine how useful it might be to have a PDF that was designed purely for online viewing and was, perhaps, quite a small document but with a series of inbuilt Flash demos. Anything that's show rather than tell has huge appeal, and this could really transform how we think of PDFs.
 
Screenshot taken from PC Pro website.  © Copyright Dennis Publishing Limited

In my inbox this morning, a blog post from Anne Gentle's just write click blog. She did a presentation called "Wiki-fy Your Doc Set" for which she used Google Docs to produce slides. She's kindly made the slides available at:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=d9kcf59_11dp5wj2

It's a nice example of how to use Google Docs + a blog to disseminate information to a wider audience.

One of the slides has the following useful set of links to wikified documentation:

Adobe Labs: labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Apache wiki: wiki.apache.org
eBay: www.ebaywiki.com
Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN): msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx
Motorola Q: www.motoqwiki.com
Everything Q: wiki.everythingq.com
SplunkBase: www.splunk.com/base
Sun's OpenDS: www.opends.org/wiki
iMIS Community: www.imiscommunity.com