Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
February/March 2007
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter February/March 2007 |
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is a review of presentations that Mike Hamilton gave at the Berkeley and East Bay STC chapters in December 2006. Hamilton also gave a presentation about MadCap Flare at the San Francisco chapter in August 2006 that you can read about in the October/November 2006 ActiveVOICE.
Life doesn't offer many second chances, and in the competitive world of software creation they are rarer still. The team behind MadCap Software got such a second chance, and with their XML-based Flare Help authoring tool they appear to be making the most of it.
In recent months Mike Hamilton, MadCap's Vice President of Product Management, has been visiting Bay Area STC chapters telling the company's story and demonstrating Flare. He was at the San Francisco chapter in August and at EastBay and Berkeley in December.
Before co-founding MadCap, Hamilton was product manager for RoboHelp for most of that product's storied life under Blue Sky, eHelp, and finally Macromedia. As product manager, Hamilton worked with the user community and guided the ongoing development of the various RoboHelp products.
As Hamilton tells it, as of 2003 RoboHelp was a very successful, but aging product. Its basic architecture had been laid down pre-Windows 95, before many of the standards and best practices of modern software design were established. Further development had become difficult: new code tended to break old code, and it was clear that the program needed a major overhaul.
In October 2003, RoboHelp's parent company, eHelp, was acquired by Macromedia. Hamilton says the RoboHelp team expected that this would bring an infusion of energy and resources needed to take RoboHelp to the next level. Instead, Hamilton says, it soon became obvious that Macromedia was not particularly interested in RoboHelp, but instead had plans for several of eHelp's other products, a few of which it wanted to keep and many of which it wanted to kill for various reasons. One by one, Macromedia killed off what Hamilton calls the "little Robos": RoboPresenter, RoboLinker, RoboPdf, RoboScreenCapture, and finally RoboHelp for FremeMaker.
But, at first, RoboHelp was kept and, Hamilton says, the team worked hard to simplify the product lineup and bring it in line with other Macromedia offerings.
Then, in October 2004, half of the RoboHelp team was unexpectedly let go, and the rest were told to document the existing RoboHelp code for development in India. As this was being done, plans changed again. In February 2005, the remainder of the team was let go and RoboHelp development under Macromedia effectively ended.
This is where the second chance came in. By effectively abandoning the product, and letting go of the entire RoboHelp team over a relatively short a period, Macromedia did the team something of a favor.
Finding themselves all in the same boat, the principal team members contacted Bjorn Backland -- the original designer of RoboHelp -- who had been let go in the first round of layoffs. Backland, it turned out, was now working on a visual XML editor. It immediately became apparent that it could serve as a core for a new completely redesigned Help authoring tool. The team quickly realized it faced an unprecedented opportunity, a chance to design a new product to meet the known needs of its old RoboHelp customer base, without having to retain a single line of legacy code. It was an opportunity you would have to be crazy to pass up.
The team quickly formed MadCap. MadCap held its first trade show in March, where it announced that it intended to provide the Help community with an upgrade path. The new product would be named Flare after the universal call for help.
Knowing that RoboHelp was not the only product out there with legacy issues, Hamilton says MadCap determined to produce "the best Help authoring tool ever seen." Flare would be entirely standards compliant. It would be written in C#, use an XML workflow, and run on Microsoft Vista when the new operating system is released. In keeping with its promise to RoboHelp users, Flare would seamlessly import RoboHelp projects and offer a user interface that RoboHelp users would find intuitive.
MadCap released Flare v1 in March 2006 and Flare v2 in October 2006.
(Macromedia has since been bought by Adobe, who has announced that it expects to release a new version of RoboHelp sometime in the first half of 2007.)
Hamilton demonstrated the latest product during his recent talk, and it looks very nice indeed.
Using the latest GUI styling, Flare uses a three panel interface. By default, the left panel contains the project design navigator, the center panel contains the actual editor, and the right panel contains various tools. For those who prefer another layout, every window in Flare can be floated and docked wherever the user wants to place it. Moreover, the product remembers its state when closed so you can reopen the program and pick up exactly where you left off.
Here are a few of the features Flare supports:
Flare also supports full circle single sourcing for Word and FrameMaker.
In the current version, Flare can be used to generate three different kinds of online output (DotNet Help, Microsoft HTML Help, and WebHelp) and two types of printed output (Microsoft Word and FrameMaker). In addition, Flare supports the use of conditions to produce different instances of a given output type to meet different needs.
The product ships with several very well done interactive tutorials -- Touring the Flare Workspace, 6 Steps to Online Help, Flare Compared with RoboHelp, and Single-Sourcing in Flare -- and several movies covering aspects of the program.
For those who know that they will never publish in one of the online help formats, MadCap plans to release a companion product, Blaze, which it says will fill the niche between Word and FrameMaker, both of which are showing their age.
Those who are interested can download a 30-day free trial of Flare from www.Madcapsoftware.com.