Disappointing MadCap Flare demo

I got an email yesterday with an invitation to view an online demo of MadCap Flare.

When I first heard about MadCap back in March I thought it sounded very promising. With the slow death of FrameMaker and an extremely uncertain future for RoboHelp, the time is surely right for someone to arrive on the scene and produce a killer app for technical assistance. MadCap Flare sounded promising.

However, things have been very quiet, so I was pleased to hear about the demo and I went straight to have a look at it, eager to see how far along they'd got.

Unfortunately, the demo is not encouraging. It sticks to the user interface, which is ... well, a user interface. You seen one GUI these days, you pretty much seem 'em all.

What I wanted to know is what MadCap Flare can do. Is it the application I need to write MAML-based help for Windows Vista? Will it be the single source solution I've been searching for to allow me to produce application User Assistance and printed documentation from the same text? Who knows?

All MadCap are saying is: it'll be great, it'll be just what you need, you can switch from RoboHelp, it's got a nice looking GUI (that does all the stuff GUIs do - see the demo) ...

Maybe they'll deliver the goods. Maybe Microsoft have something up their sleeves. Who knows? Not me!

MadCap's demo page is at:
www.madcapsoftware.com/products/demos.asp

Maybe by the time you read this they'll have added a more interesting demo.