Structured Framemaker, FDK and XML Blog

The always-readworthy MonkeyPi has started an in-depth series of articles on the promising newcomer, Madcap Flare, which over the last several months his team has been ridden hard and put away wet:

My project team has just completed our first “major” user assistance (UA) deliverable created with MadCap Flare. Actually, it was a set of deliverables, which we’ve been plugging through for the past several months. I’ve talked about Flare before, but now I think I have enough experience with it to offer a thorough assessment of the application.

Rather than dump everything into a single post, I’ll divvy up the review into several posts, according to a semi-standard workflow that most UA developers go through. The interface is the first thing users encounter, and I’ll cover that in this first post. Later, I’ll offer some comments on the experience of using Flare to:

• Create/prep the UA system
• Create content
• Add extra features
• Build and publish the system

…

Just based on this first article, though, for a 1.0 release it sounds like a great start, and a formidable challenge to RoboHelp. Let’s hope that Blaze becomes a similarly impressive alternative to Framemaker 8. The market has needed shaking up for years…

http://monkeypi.net/?p=93