by: Ben Minson MadCap Flare was developed (at least initially) by the group that built RoboHelp, now an Adobe product. When MadCap released the first version of Flare, they wanted the interface to be easy to grasp for RoboHelp users to reduce the pain of switching. I played with the trial version of Flare 1 [...]

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Formats come, and formats go. Remember when WinHelp was the dominant format on Windows? Then, HTML Help came in and stole the show. Now, both seem to be something of a memory. Well, at least WinHelp. While talking and listening to various people at DocTrain East 2008, I was surprised to find out that there [...]

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DITA is becoming very serious business. There’s now a DITA Help subcommittee at OASIS. The purpose of the group is four-fold, but their most important goal in my opinion is to: remove the obstacles to effective use of DITA for Help systems through the creation of best practice guidelines, cookbooks and worked examples, and to [...]

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Madcap Software issued a press release today, and all I have to say is wow! As Sharon Burton of Madcap mentioned in her blog: We also have some product announcements. I’m not saying anything but this is going to really upset the competitors in the industry. The stuff we have planned over the next year [...]

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Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m an avid user and staunch supporter of free and Open Source software (FOSS). I could list all of the apps that I use, but that would be a lengthy blog post in itself. There’s a lot of great FOSS software out there. But one area in [...]

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It’s no secret that I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of MadCap Blaze for … well, for a long time now. It looks like the release will be happening sooner rather than later — sometime in March or April. Last week, my colleague Keith Soltys took part in an online demonstration of Blaze. Keith’s written [...]

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