Audacity is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.
How it is useful to technical communicators:
Audacity can be used to add/edit audio when working on video assignments. It provides more audio manipulation techniques that are not available through video software.
Where you can learn more about it:
You can learn more about Audacity and download the software through the Audacity website.
Other software like it:
Adobe Audition
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML markup language created by IBM and used by many technical communication groups. DITA content is most often created as a task, concept, or reference topic.
How it is useful to technical communicators:
DITA is useful to technical writers and their businesses because it allows for single-sourcing and content reuse. DITA also allows the writer to focus solely on the content as formatting is determined by the output format.
Where you can learn more about it:
What is DITA and why should you care?
DITA Open Tool Kit (for creating DITA outputs)
Other software like it:
PureText is a program which removes formatting from webpages and other documents to paste as plain text without going through Notepad. This program does not install and is easily started from whereever the user has placed the file by double-clicking on the icon.
How it is useful to technical communicators:
Many a times we need to copy content and paste it to our workspace. In order to remove formatting we need to copy and paste it first to a notepad and then to our workspace. PureText saves this time. Instead of copying it on to another editor we can simply use a different key press combination to paste text which is cleared for formatting.
For applications like Microsoft Word an Adobe Framemaker, where formatting takes a little more time, PureText comes handy as it pastes content with the formatting style which exists on the line that it is pasted to.
Where you can learn more about it:
Other software like it: