Scott Downie

Technical Writing for the Mass Market - I wrote the "Multimedia" chapter (#14) in New Riders' Windows 98 Professional Reference.

Technical Writing for the Mass Market - I wrote the "Working with MIDI" chapter in Que's Windows 98 Multimedia.

The help system for which I won a number of Society for Technical Communication awards was the Apple Guide help for Timbuktu Pro. This was more than just a contextually aware help engine. Apple Guide could actually draw marks on the application itself, eliminating the need for screen shots. It also offered up only the chunked pieces of textual help that were immediately relevant to solving the problem at hand. This is a screenshot of the main Apple Guide panel.

This is another example from the Apple Guide help for Timbuktu Pro. In this case, Apple Guide is telling the Timbuktu Pro application to circle the Master Passwords options in the Preferences panel. If the user had not opened the Preferences panel beforehand, the Apple Guide would have opened it for him! I planned out the Apple Guide flow, coordinated work with the software developers to make sure that the proper hooks were in place, and wrote all of the Apple Guide code and content.

ALTEC Example - I worked at the University of Kansas' ALTEC part time while I was finishing my Master’s in Interaction Design. I quickly created web portals that educators could use for a variety of purposes. My platform of choice was Zope/Plone, although I also worked on .Net-based sites too. This screenshot is of a typical Altec Plone site.

Specify and Lifemapper Sites - At the University of Kansas' Biodiversity Research Center (BRC), I was hired as an Application Interface Developer, but I served in a number of other capacities as well: Documentation supervisor, software engineer, and even second-string network guru. One of the BRC's main applications was Specify, a museum-collections database. This is the Specify software site's home page from the Specify site I developed.

Specify and Lifemapper Sites - At the University of Kansas' Biodiversity Research Center (BRC), I was hired as an Application Interface Developer, but I served in a number of other capacities as well: Documentation supervisor, software engineer, and even second-string network guru. One of the BRC's main applications was Lifemapper - an ambitious attempt to map the world's species to their native environments. This is Lifemapper home page, circa 2004. I contributed a number of sections to this site.

My web-based online-help experience goes all the way back to the beginning of the modern Internet (circa 1995).