Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
October/November 2006
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter October/November 2006 |
RoboHelp. The name conjures images of working through the challenges of writing online help in its infancy, then discovering the wonderful tool, a full-blown macro for MS Word for Windows that actually automated the tedious bits. Since then, it matured and grew while the product line was bought and sold repeatedly until it arrived at Macromedia, where it was cannibalized and killed, never to be updated again, and its development team was shattered and scattered.
But wait! It's far messier to do in the flesh-and-blood soul of the product than to kill the name of the product. At the STC meeting on August 16, Mike Hamilton, VP of Product Development for Madcap Software, told us that the team is reassembled and hard at work on bringing the successor product, Flare, to the world.
As a help-authoring tool, Flare provides a good comfort level for those help writers who used RoboHelp for years, but it brings new tools and features to expand and enhance online help for both writers and users.
And the company and product names? Mike told us that the crazy group of developers naturally led to "Madcap" and that a traditional signal for help when one is at sea is to send up a flare. He admitted that the naming is a trifle obscure, but also mentioned that if you need to provide your help file in print only, there's another product, Blaze, that's a subset of Flare. However, he didn't share whether that's as in blazing a trail for the user or as in starting a signal fire. I guess that we'll just have to figure it out for ourselves.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, RoboHelp has become an Adobe product. The next edition of the ActiveVOICE will include an overview of the updated Adobe product line that incorporates RoboHelp and other products acquired from Macromedia.