For contact info, a resume, and some history on me, see the lower portions of this page.
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Address
28371 Camino Dimora
San Juan Capistrano, CA 92675
Phone
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1-714-585-2335
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Matt R. Sullivan
Matt Sullivan has been working in tech comm and content experience since the 90's. He has taught over two thousand content authors how to more effectively produce docs, help, and online training.
He is the author of a series of FrameMaker reference and workbooks, and regularly produces feature videos for Adobe's Technical Communication Suite products. Adobe regularly commissions Matt to produce videos and deliver webinars and you can find his work on Adobe's product pages, as well as in his Tech Comm Tools online courses.
Matt spends his days developing and running online courses. Through his company, Tech Comm Tools, he helps organizations improve their audience's content experience.
Matt holds Adobe training certifications for FrameMaker, Captivate, RoboHelp, Connect, and Presenter. He is also certified in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, and other applications.
He presents on Content Experience topics at various tech comm conferences each year, often on behalf of Adobe. These conferences include the STC Summit, LavaCon, and WritersUA.
Download PDF of Matt's resume (shown below in PNG format)
Prior to Tech Comm Tools
So "last century"...
After growing up in San Diego, Matt attended USC, where he earned his degree in Business Finance. After graduation he worked for a number of years in the commercial printing industry, implementing digital prepress departments for large commercial printers.
It was through digital prepress that Matt got deeply involved with Adobe Systems, and by teaching desktop publishing applications like Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, how he got his start in technical communication.
GRAFIX Training and beyond
After printing, Matt leaned upon his extensive software knowledge to create GRAFIX Training and Consulting, an Adobe Authorized Training Center with offices in San Diego and Orange County, California. He ran GRAFIX Training for nearly ten years.
In 2008, Matt accepted the Director of Training position for roundpeg, inc., just in time for the Great Recession, and also the decline of the bricks and mortar training industry. While at roundpeg he oversaw the shuttering of most of roundpeg's 12 training offices and was responsible for their rise in online training and colocated training facilities. In 2012, Matt went back on his own, this time as Tech Comm Tools to develop a more tech comm oriented business.
Family time
Matt enjoys spending time with his wife Marianne, their daughters Delaney and Taylor and their dog Charlie. He stays active with surfing, golfing, and beach volleyball.
His daughters are both accomplished soccer players, and with his "free time" Matt referees AYSO, USSF, and Varsity high school matches!
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I haven’t used Framemaker since they dropped the Mac-native version. The last thing I created with it was a book with embedded videos that we sold as an E-Book (in acrobat). We’re still selling it, though now, only a handful of purchasers per year. Do you have any good info on a) when the application will return as a Mac-native version and b) opinion on whether that version will do a credible job of exporting for EPUB and HTMLt web pages (nothing fancy or complicated required — the frame maker folks keep trying to convince me to run the windows version under a container on my macs, but it makes no sense given the custom workflows we have developed and keep evolving over the past 30 years. It’s enough struggle to keep up with Apples increasing lack of documentation with updates and new releases, Trying to inject windows into the mix we would take a big hit on productivity — which I’m thinking a mac-native Framemaker would enhance — I’m a former *Nix person since the 1980s and moved to Macs with the introduction of OSX — which, of course, is (surprisingly still) a pretty standard *NIX underneath.
Hi Ronald, quite a bit in that comment, so here’s a point-by-point eval:
-I don’t recall Fm 7 or earlier having the capacity for video, though video, U3d and other multimedia are fairly straightforward in the past 3 versions or so.
-Even if there were a Mac version releasing tomorrow, (and there’s not…) NDA would prevent me from commenting on it. My own speculation, fueled by the release of RoboHelp on the Mac, is that Fm on the Mac may not be a complete pipe dream.
-Fm does a fine job right now of exporting to EPUB and HTML formats, including HTML5 for mobile.
-I have run Fm on a vm exclusively (Fusion) since Fm 11 (5 versions, if you’re counting). That includes webinars, training, official Adobe videos and blog posts, my own reference books, all recordings used in my courses, conference presentations, etc. Until a month ago, I was still doing it on my lowly mid-2013 MacBook pro. It runs spectacularly, even on that 7 year old system.
-My vm is entirely separate from my Mac, and I often will broadcast using the Mac OS, and share my Win 10 apps (mostly Fm, with some Rh, Acrobat, etc. in there as well)
-I’m basically a one man show, so productivity is my #1 concern. I’d be happier, and slightly more productive with Fm on a Mac, but until then, Fm on Win is my main professional tool.
A note to my readers who may see messages related to copyright infringement on my site…they are spam, and include a link to download who-knows-what from a google drive location.
Fortunately for me, all my images are licensed via Adobe Stock, or are generated by myself.
For anyone reading this, please do not download the file link provided here, or in any of the messages that are posted here multiple times per day.
In fact, don’t ever download a file from the internet without having complete knowledge of (and faith in) the poster.
-Matt