Marcus Gomez, Freelance Writers

Marcus Gomez & Partners today announced that it has successfully developed an on-board electronic help solution for devices based on the Qtopia platform.

Qtopia is a graphical environment for Embedded Linux devices. It is used with PDAs, mobile phones, web pads and other multimedia mobile computing gadgets. However, there is no common delivery standard for help documentation on this platform. Manufacturers typically provide user manuals in PDF or plain text format, requiring users to scroll through hundreds of pages to search for the help they need.

“The challenge was to develop an electronic help solution that could fit the small viewable areas inherent to Qtopia devices and yet be minimalist enough for embedded applications to support it,” says Marcus Gomez, founder and Principal Partner of Marcus Gomez & Partners. “The result of our work is Konq/eHelp: a new service that converts a static help document into an interactive help system that runs on the Konqueror Embedded web browser.”

Part of the writing consultancy’s business philosophy is to stay close to its customers and the market, and to create value wherever it can. When Anacise Testnology (www.anacise.com) wanted to develop a help system for their Qtopia-based device, the company turned to Marcus Gomez & Partners.

“We decided to give them something that would not only further enhance the product’s usability and greatly benefit their customers, but also be easy to maintain and update,” says Mr Gomez.

In collaboration with the customer’s engineers in Taiwan, the Konq/eHelp system was successfully installed onto the product and proved to be an instant hit among users.

“Users like the idea of knowing that if they need instructions, all they have to do is tap, tap, tap,” explains Mr Gomez, refering to the touch-screen interfaces used by some Qtopia-based devices.

Improving user experiences

“The key to improving the usability of any device is to make it easy to use,” explains Mr Gomez. “One of the best ways to do this is to build highly-accessible instructions for the product’s features and functionality into the device itself. That way, users don’t have to spend hours figuring out how to execute a certain function or be forced to carry print manuals around with them.”

By leveraging Qtopia’s open source platform and in collaboration with engineers in Taiwan, Marcus Gomez & Partners developed an electronic help solution that met all the technical design requirements. The Konq/eHelp system uses drop-down menus and navigation keys, an intuitive user interface and an easily visualised hierarchical structure. Marcus Gomez & Partners also plans to develop a search functionality that will make the system even more user-friendly.

“We are also looking at how we can incorporate some of our other products and services into the system,” says Mr Gomez. “VisualHelp, for example, provides Flash-based animated help documentation. This would be particularly useful for compound help instructions with complex inter-application relationships. Enterprise-wide knowledge management initiatives may also be augmented with the Konq/eHelp working as a foundation for feedback systems.”

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About Marcus Gomez & Partners

Marcus Gomez & Partners is a business and technical writing specialist serving customers all over the world, specifically Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Indonesia, Vietnam and other territories in ASEAN. For more information on the company’s technical and business documentation solutions, call the firm’s BusinessMobile hotline at +6012 238 0508 or log on to www.marcusgomez.com. Alternatively, inquiries may also be addressed to writeus@marcusgomez.com.

Download this copy of SIRIMLink (PDF, 2MB).

The Standards and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia (SIRIM) has appointed Marcus Gomez to write, design and produce its 32-page quarterly magazine, SIRIMLink.

SIRIM Berhad is one of Malaysia’s most respected Research and Development centres and one of the region’s leading industrial research institutes. Wholly owned by the Government of Malaysia, the organisation’s goal is to ensure that the Malaysian manufacturing industry is technologically salient, resilient and cost efficient as the country moves rapidly forward towards an economy built upon knowledge and innovation. Recently, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) asked SIRIM to lead a taskforce to develop Malaysia’s renewable energy resources, which is what the upcoming issue of SIRIMLink will be all about.

Renewable energy is one of the most exciting arenas in R&D today. Because of Malaysia’s unique geography and economy, it is well-positioned to take advantage of the many renewable energy technologies — the country has tonnes of biomass waste generated by its agricultural sector that can be converted into biomethane, bioethanol and feedstock. Additionally, it has miles of shorelines, long hours of sunlight and steady winds, all of which have renewable energy potential.

The first issue of SIRIMLink produced by Marcus Gomez is due to be published at the end of August 2009. In it, Dr Baharum Ismail talks about his Jatropha project in Sarawak, while Dr Chen Sau Soon discusses her work on solar photocatalytics. Also, Azhar Abdul Raof and Hamdan Mokhtar discuss the prospects of bioethanol and biogas from empty palm fruit bunches.

SIRIMLink Issue 2, 2009 may be downloaded here.

Marcus Gomez will start releasing selected women’s magazine articles written by him into the public domain under a Creative Commons Licence. ChickTimes.com will be the publishing partner.

The free content released has already been published in several teritories the world over and will now reside on ChickTimes.com, a women’s portal, which will be its final resting place. Bloggers and publishers the world over are welcome to reuse the articles tagged with “FREE CONTENT” in any way they wish, so long as they credit the source.

Among the 10 articles already released are “Why I hate being a guy,” “The presentation guide for women,” “College life: your first three years” and “The hangover cure for women“.

As many TIMENetters already know, TIMENet has ceased operations. Visitors will be sad when they see the management’s notice of closure atop a wide expanse of sky.

Time dotCom made the decision to shut the popular web portal down earlier this year as part of an extensive restructuring exercise. The portal was deemed to be not aligned with the Group’s business objectives, and all editorial contracts supporting the website have been terminated. We were, of course, informed of the decision in advance, and we would like to thank TIME for its professionalism and the way it handled what must have been a very difficult situation with us.

While we are disappointed with the decision, we are nonetheless proud of having served the illustrious web portal as editorial consultants for as long as we did — nearly eight years, all told. The portal played a big role in our humble beginnings, and supported us through our early years. It was an immensely popular destination for contests, news and movie buffs in Malaysia, and it will be sorely missed.

Having said that, the demise of TIMENet also means that Marcus Gomez is now available to take on other full-time website maintenance contracts. If you’re having trouble keeping your website up to date, Marcus Gomez can help. We possess a sound understanding of Web 2.0 technologies and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, plus enough programming knowledge to be able to independently manage any website.

Interested? Write to us here, or just drop us a comment below and we’ll get back to you soon.

We’re in 2.0!

After almost a year of careful planning and deliberation, MarcusGomez.com is happy to finally step out of the age of HTML 4.0 and move into the the world of Web 2.0.

We’ve made our site a lot more friendly, as you can see. And we’re also expecting you to tell us what you think about it. So, comment a lot, and maybe we’ll tell you what we think of your website when you launch – we are freelance writers, after all.

We’ll (I’ll?) be updating the site regularly with news of our exploits, so do subscribe for RSS updates and we’ll keep you posted. Besides the usual RSS Readers, our feed is now also available via email, thanks to the guys at Feedburner.

We’ve also rethought our product line and come up with ways to serve all our customers better. We are particularly serious about our writing and communications training programmes.