Tag Archives: documentation

How to start and end a letter or email: Salutation and Valediction

Here’s a topic for a moment: formal and informal greetings in an email, or letter, any form of written communication.

For several years I would not use any form of sign-out at the end of an email or message, except in email I would include

-Tom

Now it seems people don’t do that, they leave it to the automatic insertion of a signature.  But then, it cuts out the option of choosing the emotional tone of the close-out.  Granted, I ignored that by the “-Tom” ending in so many messages.  But I’m more aware of it now.

Today I sent a fax, a task I do less than 5 times a year.  Thinking about the proper use of words to convey meaning, while avoiding the dramatic and excess bubbly emotion, I cut it down to:

Attention RECIPIENT
From Tom ****

My address has changed as of May 2011:

from:

52-1000 Somewhere St
Somewhereville, SW  S0M 3W4

to:

20-1000 Somewhere St
Somewhereville, SW  S0M 3W4

Tom *****

I don’t need my name at the bottom, if it’s a short note to announce my change of address.  But I want to close it off, very neatly and cleanly.  Yet, having the name appear by itself seemed an unnecessary duplication of the “From Tom Pace” line at the top.  So I opted for a sign-out greeting.

A sign-out greeting, is called a valediction.  It is the counterpart to a salutation, examples such as “Dear NAME,” or “Attention NAME” or “To Whom it May Concern”.

My emails sometimes include valedictions, and I use valedictions in verbal communication… The one I have used most frequently in written messages came from my adoption of the verbal “take care”.  But several other places and people I’ve seen using “Regards” and “Best regards”.  So I tried it out, and it feels clean but also a bit distant.  So, in the last couple years, whenever I use a valediction in written messages, it will be one I come up with at the moment, to match the tone of the message or the tone of the saluation.

In this above example, I thought about “Yours truly”, “Sincerely”, “Regards”, “Best regards”.

Yours truly is excellent, but feels much older, and it’s mostly a simplification of “Truly, I am yours” or other similar expressions.

So here’s the end result: I chose Sincerely.  It is not a match of the salutation “Attention NAME”  as much as it matches the opening sentence announcement “My address has changed…”.

Sources I referred to for the writing of the valediction are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valediction
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/180872
http://springboardsconsulting.com/sbblog/%E2%80%98cheers%E2%80%99-or-%E2%80%98best-regards%E2%80%99-sign-offs-that-match-the-mood/

Posted in Activities & Adventures | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Today: learning and doing activities. Tomorrow: repeat.

Today has been a day of guitar-playing, reading, interpreting, typing, mouse-clicking, and dragging.

I built a 3D model of the Bahamas islands plus Turks & Caicos islands. I am using it as the sample of a 3D islands world in my iPhone game project. This is fun! Building in 3D is new to me, but things don’t go in one ear and out the other in this sort of subject. There are SO VERY MANY things to learn in Blender, because it’s not a user-friendly 3D modelling program. I didn’t know that when I started learning it, but now I do know it.

I got into using it from someone’s internet article of 3D and 2D graphic rendering engines for iPhone and iPod touch (and I suppose now, iPad). The person had SIO2 and Oolong as the top two ranked options, but in pros-and-cons, listed Blender as a con for SIO2.

But that’s probably because like me, that person had no experience with 3D art and modelling.  Anyway, I spent the latter half of January going through Blender 3D: Noob to Pro, and have progressed about 40-50% through it.  I should really finish, except SIO2 does not fully support everything, and I’m trying to catch up to the 40-50% full competency of SIO2  before going on with more complex Blender subjects (like animated armatures).

So anyway, going through the tutorials in the source code is what must be done, not reading step-by-step how-to documents.  This is a guerilla-style learning.  Gotta get my feet wet by jumping in 100% and swim with the sharks.  Not that anyone associated with SIO2 is a great white shark, more like very pleasant whale shark… that sounds really odd, but I’m tired now.

When complete, this project will be a lot of fun (I hope!).  A lot of ideas come to me when I’m in a lucid state, so immediately in the morning before I am out of bed and just sort of coming out of unconsiousness, I try to figure out what ideas are lurking.. at the edge of thought.  Collect them up!  They’re worth money in the right hands, my hands!

Posted in Activities & Adventures, Technology, Thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Documentation and 3D game engines

I am progressing slowly but surely. The 3d rendering engine for the iPhone that I am using is called SIO2. I am finding it slow going because the documentation is not what I call good. There are no step by step procedures in the tutorials and the reference doc materials are very raw, with no clean summaries,except those on the front page of the website that describe, in point form, the most general capabilities. Those capabilities are great,but after putting in the time to download the engine and try out the tutorials, I am coming to a question: is a pre-existing system better than developing a system in-house, if the existing system is so time consuming that the learning curve is almost as long as the development process?

Here I am frustrated with the lack of good quality and complete learning materials, but the existence of the system is still better than developing my own system. That is because in the time it would still take to devlelop my own thing, the existing thing may (or may not) improve, and in other cases I may find some help that I had not found at first. So the learning of an existing system is better.

This experience is going into the heaping pile of experiences of bad documentation for products I have seen. There is a wiki, and I might start contributing to it.

Going forward in the future, the skill to produce good documentation may become a very valuable transferable skill in the workplace. It seems very boring in some product contexts, ie. Vacuum cleaner manuals, software application manuals, inflatable air matress instruction sheets. Yet this world needs a better, universal, written method of learning that appeals to the reader. Something like google’s API doumentation, and apple’s iPhone and iPad documentation.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

UIKit’s UIView Hierarchy

Tonight I decided to put together a printable document built from the iPhone Dev Center’s reference for UIKit.  This document includes three sections (class name + overview section + tasks section) for UIView, plus all subclasses of UIView that appear in the hierarchy tree diagram in the UIKit framework reference.

That’s a mouthful.

Simply put: this document is a condensed, reader’s-digest version of the class references for every visible piece of an iPhone app (not counting custom crazy OpenGL apps and custom drawn stuff. heh)

There are a lot of things available even before getting into the custom drawn things, so to read it all in a nutshell, I copy-pasted all the text and edited it to fit to pages and be nicely readable.   The document is a PDF.

Click here for the UIView class hierarchy plus UIApplication and UIResponder

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment