Recently

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Some good things recently:

  • On the way home from work the other day, I listened to a couple of laugh-out-loud funny Maynard Moose Tales. I especially liked "The Little Moose Who Couldn't Go To Sleep," from Sleeping Beastly and Other Tales.
  • Backed up almost all my personal email onto a CD; had to leave out a few megabytes from a couple of mailing lists, but most of it fit. And it was easy, quick, and convenient. I may use that method more often.
  • Got extended AppleCare protection for my iPod.
  • Finally sat down and sorted all my recent papermail and dealt with a few important financial issues.

Some less-good things (mostly with good things mixed in, though):

  • Found out that Adobe recently shipped FrameMaker 7.1—for Windows and UNIX only. They've said that there won't be a Mac version of this release. They refuse to comment on whether there will ever be a Mac OS X-native version of FrameMaker; all us Mac FM users hoped that version 7 (which came out nearly 18 months ago) would be an OS X version, and Adobe has subsequently indicated that they were working on such, but recent rumors and reports seem to suggest that they may just be dropping Mac support entirely. Grr. It's an awkward program with a horribly clunky UI; it can only do one level of Undo; it's expensive; but it remains the best software there is for writing large documents. And we've standardized on it at work, so if we upgrade to a new version that doesn't have Mac support, I'll have to switch to writing documentation on Windows. Sigh. (Btw, FrameMaker is the only application that I use in Classic mode; everything else that I use is now OS X-native.)
  • Kam departed for a two-month trip to the Yucatan. This is a good thing for the people she'll be helping out, and a good thing for her Spanish-language fluency, but sad for those of us in Califonia.
  • I got a rejection from Gardner. But it was a nice friendly rejection, and unlike with everything else I've sent out lately, I don't feel like the story needs more work before I can send it out again. So I'm hoping to get it in the mail again tomorrow.
  • Assorted hassles at work that I can't talk about—nothing big or awful, just a tight deadline combined with a lack of information about what I'm supposed to be documenting. But this is getting better.

And speaking of work, it's time I went.

2 Responses to “Recently”

  1. Wendy

    Jed, I’ve heard rumors that one can install and run the UNIX version of Framemaker on OS X, provided one installs X-Windows. (I forget, is X Windows now part of 10.3? I’m still using 10.2.) I haven’t investigated this closely, because I’m stuck writing documentation on Windows for a number of other reasons. But it sounds entirely plausible.

    This is not, of course, an ideal solution – you won’t get the benefits of having something that is truly OS X native, and Adobe’s tech support will probably be worse than useless if you run into troubles installing. (This is working on the assumption that Adobe’s tech support isn’t worse than useless, anyway.) But it might keep you out of the clutches of Windows.

    We’re still using Framemaker 6 at work. Does 7.1 add any useful features for folks who aren’t using XML?

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  2. Jed

    My impression is that this doesn’t work — several of the sites I looked at were saying that even if Adobe doesn’t want to produce an OS X version, they should at least port the UNIX version to X Windows on OS X. (Among other things, I would guess that the UNIX installer installs a binary, so it would have to be compiled on a PowerPC to have any chance of running in OS X.)

    It’s possible that you could use the X Windows client on OS X to connect to FrameMaker running on some other brand of UNIX, but I don’t know if Adobe licensing allows that.

    Adobe’s tech support, btw, is indeed worse than useless in every context in which I’ve contacted them. Especially for FrameMaker. There are (or at least used to be) about two dozen different phone numbers depending on exactly what kind of license you have, what platform you’re using, how much tech support you’ve paid for, etc., and none of the departments involved had any way of contacting each other.

    Re FM6 vs FM7: I don’t remember whether the whole-book search feature was introduced in 6 or 7. It’s definitely cool. There are also a bunch of other whole-book features (like renaming files in the book view), but I think those were introduced in 6. I think 7 also fixes a couple of large outstanding bugs (crashing under various circumstances), but I don’t recall for sure. I do remember it looking like it was mostly of interest to XML people.

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