Podcast 05 – recorded 28 March 2006

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Warning
This podcast weighs in at a whopping 1 hour 32 minutes! Next time round I’ll try to be more concise, and I’ll try to cut out some of the ums and ahs, which should slim things down considerably.

Sound quality
I don’t know what happened with the sound quality, but it’s particularly poor. I recorded it on CastBlaster, in 10-minute chunks, moved these over to Cubase and put them together and added the music. This added some noise but the recording sounded not bad, but after exporting to MP3 the background hiss went way up and, although I tried various output options, I couldn’t improve things. So I tried running it through Clean to cut the noise, but this took forever and at the end I had something that had much less hiss, but apart from that sounded awful, so I decided to stick with the hissy version.

Next time round I might just try sticking with CastBlaster - but I’m not sure I’m up to recording one of these things live, without any editing. We’ll see. But for now you’ll just have to endure the hiss.

Have I put you off yet?

Contents
In this podcast I talk about:

1) Madcap Flare 1.0
Overall, my first impressions of Flare were very positive. I suspect future releases will do more interesting stuff. I couldn’t see many reasons to buy Flare if you already have the current version of RoboHelp, but if you’re new to help authoring and you need to buy an application, or you need to upgrade from an old version of RoboHelp, then Flare’s the way to go.

I mention an error message I got when switching from tag view. See: www.itauthor.com/notes/archives/2006/04/flare_error_mes.html

Some other first impressions of Flare:
www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/archives/0602/techwhirl-0602-00050.html
www.chmtools.com/forum/techwr-robohelp-or-webworks-epublisher-for-word-2000-and-4664.html

2) FrameMaker Day
I talk about attending a FrameMaker Day organised by Mekon, including a Q&A session with Karl Matthews, Adobe product manager for FrameMaker and RoboHelp.
Mekon: http://mekon.com/
Pectora: http://www.pectora.com/
Idiom: http://www.idiominc.com/

3) CVS and Subversion
Subversion book: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
SVK: I mention a Perlcast interview with the creator of SVK: http://perlcast.com/2006/03/07/interview-with-chia-liang-kao/

4) Alfresco and Joomla
Article on Alfresco: www.infoworld.com/article/05/10/31/HNalfrescoopensource_1.html Alfresco demo: www.alfresco.com/products/ecm/demonstrations/ Joomla: www.joomla.org/

5) TIBCO GI ”“ Javascript/Ajax development tool
Audible Ajax podcast - interview with Kevin Hakman of TIBCO: http://ajaxian.com/archives/audible-ajax-episode-15-kevin-hakman-of-tibco
A screencast of Tibco GI by Jon Udell: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/05/25.html

6) ITauthor Frappr map (please add a pin)
www.frappr.com/itauthor

7) Amplifico
On the Podsafe Music Network: http://music.podshow.com/index.php
Website: http://www.amplifico.net/