The Creative Tools on the Mac – Just Incredible
It's still the first week of my new job at The Shop, and when my sole co-worker left me alone two jobs ago, I started to maintain an RTF file on my Mac of all the little things I might need to pass on to the next guy. It started with what he gave me, and I really expanded it. What I didn't realize until long afterwards, was that I should have been using VoodooPad, Acorn and FlySketch to build up this document.
Thankfully, I do learn from my mistakes, and at my last job I started with VoodooPad and it turned out wonderfully. Well, I'm only a day and a half into this new job, and already I have a lot of important information in the VoodooPad document for the new job. It's simply amazing how easy VoodooPad makes this. It's like TextEdit with linking and embedding and then to augment it with Acorn for graphics and images... well... it's just amazing.
The last time I did a lot of multi-media writing is the papers I wrote as an Asst. Professor at Auburn, and even that was on a Mac - just different tools. With the tools available to me now, it's amazing to think how wild and impressive my papers could have been. Sure, they really don't publish based on the "cool stuff", but documentation is writing for an ignorant user (you, in the future) and as such, the nicer and easier you make it to read the happier your user will be.
It's just about the most perfect development/documentation generation system I've ever used. It just takes my breath away. I have to giggle every now and then.