MadCap: Alternatives to Framemaker, WebWorks and RoboHelp for XML docs and Help?
MadCap Software will release Blaze, an editor built from the ground up for XML document authoring, as a rival to Framemaker later this year. They’re already shipping development builds, and you can sign up for an evalutation version…
They also already ship Flare, an XML-based help authoring tool.
MadCap’s web site has a bit of a Macromedia look/feel to it– my first thought was to wonder if this was some kind of stealth product launch from them. However, the products appear to be based on Windows and .Net and Flare appears to require Word 2003…
I try to keep track of this stuff, but I haven’t heard of these guys before today’s news reports. If anyone has experience with early MadCap Blaze evaluation builds or MadCap Flare for help authoring, comments would be welcomed… we’d even gladly run a guest review or first impressions piece.
Last open question: what did they do to expose this for developers? If these tools are built in .Net, let’s hope they expose/document the APIs needed for extensions…
–The Source
See http://wordpress.com/tag/madcap-flare/ for a series of short blog posts with impressions of various aspects of the Flare suite.