Industry Buzz

October 21, 2008

Review of MadCap Blaze

If youre familiar with FrameMaker, and you install the trial version of Blaze, youll quickly see that the program was designed from the ground up as a FrameMaker replacement, with long, complex documents (such as books and manuals) in mind.
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October 15, 2008

What We Learn from Help Authoring Tool Surveys

"Recently the Hat Matrix Blog (aka, the Mad Hatter) published the results of a tools survey that included 590 participants. The respondents were asked what authoring tools they used on a regular basis. They answered as follows:"
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September 26, 2008

CODA 2go wins 1st award!

CODA 2go Online Help has won its first award - best instructional documentation in this year's UK Technical Communication Awards, organised by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC). CODA 2go Online Help is context-sensitive and integrates seamlessly with the Salesforce.com Help. It was written using Madcap Flare.
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September 11, 2008

Day 1 with Flare 4

I installed Flare 4 today and started playing around.

Things that I liked right away...
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September 3, 2008

Flare 4 Giveway Enter to Win a Free Copy by Commenting on This Post

Now, even if you dont win the free copy of Flare 4, I do recommend acquiring a copy anyway. I've been beta testing it and think its a significant improvement from the previous version. For more details, read Paul Pehrsons excellent review of whats new in Flare 4.

I currently use Flare 2.5, and it passed all my time-saving tests with flying colors. Flare 4 sounds even better!

I just downloaded my first copy of Flare, and Im so impressed with the improvement over my previous HAT. After reading Paul Pehrsons review, Im looking forward to Flare 4.0.
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September 2, 2008

MadCap Flare 4 Preview (aka Ten Things to Love about Flare 4)

Version 4 is a great improvement to the Flare product. There are a ton of new features that will help you become more productive and make your workflow better and faster. Ive only covered ten of my favorite features in Flare 4, but there are tons of others.
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August, 2008

Realizing Seamless Translation

Our feature story this month is an exciting case describing how GPRO Technologies has utilized the MadCap Software suite to seamlessly integrate their print and online content creating a consistent experience and reducing project time by up to six-fold.
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August 29, 2008

TechCom Manager: The Newsletter for Documentation Managers

Feature Article: Topic-Based Writing to the Rescue: Project Considerations for Managers

The purpose of this case study is neither to simply rehash the project nor to provide a pressure-cooker story that others can use as a comparative benchmark. This article looks at the decision points within the project and provides an analysis from a real-life, practical approach that other technical communication managers can use when called upon to engage in a rescue project of their own.
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July 25, 2008

Translation Made Easier

In principle, Lingo is suitable for any Blaze/Flare users who wish to reduce translation costs, avoid redundant contents and ensure consistent text quality.
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July 25, 2008

RoboHelp Vs Flare

I figured that Flare and RoboHelp would basically be the same now that RoboHelp has added snippets and variables.

Well, amazingly enough (or not), I was not impressed with RoboHelp at all. Even though Flare is a bit more expensive once you purchase the Madpak and Acrobat, I gave these reason to the client for choosing Flare instead of RoboHelp...
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April 25, 2008

MadCap Support Site: Winner in The Association of Support Professionals (ASP) eleventh annual "Ten Best Web Support Sites" Competition.

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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April 24, 2008

Madcap Blaze's Topic Review Feature: A First-of-a Kind Feature with an Interesting Workflow

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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January 19, 2008

All About Madcap Flare: Podcast Interview with Paul Pehrson, MVP in Madcap Software Forums

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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November 11, 2007

Flare is a tool that I won't easily grow out of. And their expansion into other areas — screen capture, audio, translation, screen demo, and more — makes their product suite compelling.

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.
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August 23, 2007

XPS Technology Showcase

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.
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July, 2007

Localizing Online Help

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.
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June 26, 2007

Review of MadCap Flare

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.
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June 18, 2007

Six Reasons to Love Flare

…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…
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January 16, 2007

RoboHelp 6 Finally Arrives, And Its Craptastic

…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…
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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...

June 13, 2006

21st century replacement for RoboHelp

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...
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March 22, 2005

RoboHelp "Sunset" , MadCap Announcement

"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:"
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April 2005

The Future of RoboHelp?

"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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April 11, 2005

Interview with Mike Hamilton, VP Product Development, MadCap Software

"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."
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March 21, 2005

MadCap Flare Announcement

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.

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