Industry Buzz

This prestigious award showcases excellence in online service and support. The 10 award winners were selected by a panel of judges with expertise in Web support design and implementation, using a scoring system based on 25 separate performance criteria.
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Blaze is a new Framemaker alternative that Madcap Software has just released into beta. With Blaze, you can create printed documentation and publish it to Word, Framemaker, PDF, XPS, and an XHTML book (but not webhelp).
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Madcap Flare is one of the most powerful online help authoring tools on the market today. In this podcast, Paul Pehrson, MVP in the Madcap Software forums, talks about Madcap Flare in depth.
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So for the past week, I've been exploring MadCap Flare Version 3.1 with a lot more depth than I explored the trial version of the 2.0 release last year. I'm thoroughly impressed with Flare. It provides a robust, functional online help tool that simply works. When I say robust, I mean it. The granularity of the style editor is powerful — allowing you to create stylesheets for both online and print formats. Read More >

MadCap Blaze is the ideal solution for easily producing very long documents for print—such as books, manuals, and illustrated guides—using cutting-edge, future-proof solutions. Blaze lets users work in a much easier interface, enjoy more flexibility, and leverage the latest breakthroughs in information technology compared to other authoring and publishing solutions. Read More >

Successful companies know that the effort of translating content from one language to another does not lie solely on the localization teams. The right selection of authoring tools, as well as the content development methodology, plays a crucial role in global technical publication. Read More >

So, where does this leave us? It's pretty clear that MadCap Software is now one of the dominant players, if not the dominant player, in the help authoring field. Starting from scratch, they've created a suite of products that covers most documentation tasks. Their products are standards-based, compatible with the latest version of Windows, and are tightly integrated.

Even if you don't need any of the other tools, Flare certainly merits your attention if online help is your primary deliverable. It's got RoboHelp beat hands down in almost every area. Read More >

…I absolutely love Flare. I think it is a fantastic product. Truth be told, I've only used two HATs, Flare and RoboHelp X3, so my experience is understandably limited. However, I'm so pleased with Flare, in general, that I'm not even interested in considering other tools… Read More >

…Seriously? No GUI changes? No support for dual monitors? No effort to bring it into the Adobe family using dockable tool palettes? Weve decided to stay in 1995?

Okay, these are just first impressions. Calm down, monkey boy. Im sure they at least they got rid of the proprietary Kadov tags, right? Create a new topic, add some fancy stuff view source code, and… Read More >

Updated February 6, 2007

• RH doesn’t work in Vista. There’s a complex work-around, but it’s major surgery, and if you dare hack it to make it work, naturally, it won’t be supported.
• RoboServer systems will also not run on Vista with IIS 7, and there are scary reports of them breaking with IE 7.0.
• There’s no support for Microsoft Office 2007... Read More >
  

Just like Flare is a 21st century replacement for the behemoth RoboHelp, (you have made the switch, havent you?), Blaze is intended to replace FrameMaker. FrameMaker users who have been patient and loyal for the past decade are finally about to have another choice... Read More >

"A powerful tremor rocked the Help Authoring community yesterday at the Software User Assistance Conference when rumors of the death of RoboHelp suddenly gained more traction. Chuck Martin, a writer friend, was there and captured the events on his conference blog:" Read more >

"During the opening segment of the WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance, I made a prediction regarding the future of RoboHelp. The gist of that has been reported in a number of venues to varying degrees of accuracy. To set the record straight, here is a detailed presentation of my information and conclusions about the current and future status of RoboHelp."
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"MadCap Software is a new startup which is tackling the changing online help industry by developing XML-based help software that helps writers create XML-based help content. I spoke to Mike Hamilton, the company's VP of Product Development about the company and how its software fits into the help authoring market." Read more >

MadCap Software, Inc., today announced MadCap Flare, a new XML-based authoring tool that empowers technical writers, Help authors, and other documentation professionals to compose content in XML format without requiring any knowledge of the XML language or XML programming. MadCap Flare features a unique visual editor that allows users to compose content similar to how they would in Microsoft® Word™. The software maintains the content in pure XML format, allowing users to easily reuse and repurpose the content to virtually any format, standard, device, or operating system.