If you haven't had a look at Windows Live for a while, it's worth a look. There's a couple of really nice things on there now. The first one is the one that's had a lot of publicity: Spaces. This is, in effect, your own Web site on live.com. You get to choose a URL (e.g. yourname.spaces.live.com) and your get a personal Web space with a blog, a photo gallery, storage space for saving files that you want to access from anywhere, an event planner and the usual friends list. You can set up the permissions to keep everything private, make everything public, or specify who gets to see your pictures, your blog, your stored files, etc.

The other excellent addition to Windows Live is a replacement for Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, which, until today, was my default application for viewing image files from Windows Explorer and doing a slideshow. It's called Windows Live Photo Gallery. It does all the stuff Picture Viewer used to do, like rotating your photos and doing a slideshow, but it also makes it really easy to adjust your images, including cropping and resizing them.

If you have a look at my recent post on My podcast recording setup, the photos in there were fixed up using Live Photo Gallery. I took the photos in my poorly lit study, beside a very yellow desk lamp, without any flash lighting. The results were not great, but clicking the Auto Correct button worked wonders and made it look like I'd taken the photos beside a window with plenty of natural light. I also increased the brightness and contrast a little and then cranked up the Sharpness setting to the max just so's the settings on the mixer were as clear as possible. Compare a detail from the original photo and the fixed version:

Original:
 
Fixed:
 
The fixed version is quite grainy because of the artificially high sharpness setting I used, but I think the result are really good, considering the original photos were so poor.

I've always used Photoshop for most image adjusting, but for little quick things like this, I'll be using Live Photo Gallery from now on. By the time Photoshop has loaded I could have done my colour correction, cropping and resizing and posted the results to my blog.

For more information about Windows Live, see:

http://get.live.com/wl/all

Looking for good, free text editor? Try Notepad++.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

As its name suggests, it's a Notepad replacement aimed at programmers. I recommended JEdit a while back, but I find JEdit is slow to load and memory hungry. Its interface is also very Java-ish, which seems like a nice change to begin with but after a while it starts to feel clunky and unresponsive and you want to get back to native Windows apps. I still use JEdit for Search/Replace, but Notepad++ is good if you want a decent text editor but don't want to pay for UltraEdit.

Paul Pehrson at http://blog.paulpehrson.com has posted a couple of interesting blog entries on Flare:

• Six Reasons to Love Flare
• Six Persistent Flare Problems

I'd agree with the reasons to love Flare, with the exception of what he says about CSS and the XML editor. 

Flare's XML editor

I'm not sure if Paul uses structured FrameMaker but I suspect not because I find it hard to believe anyone who has used FrameMaker's Structure View could think Frame's XML editor anything but seriously flawed. FrameMaker's Structure View is deceptively simple. It works so well, so intuitively, that it's easy not overlook how well conceived it is, until you start using something like Flare's XML editor and you find that:

• you can't multi-select elements
• you can't drag elements anywhere in the structure, just to other places at the same level in the hierarchy and not always then either
• you can't always select elements easily and it's not always clear when you have selected an element
• cutting, pasting and deleting elements is a multi-click operation
• it demands that you use the mouse all the time, so if you're more productive with the keyboard, hard luck
• I could go on ...

Madcap trumpet the XML editor as a feature of Flare, but in reality it's an unfinished feature. It has the feel of something that they got 75% finished and then decided it was good enough, so they moved on to work on other things and never got back to finish the job.

I would give my eye teeth to have FrameMaker's Structure View grafted on to Flare. Because the editor is the place you spend so much of your time, any little drawback, like having to do two extra clicks each time you want to copy or paste an element, in time becomes very wearying - especially when you have a really intuitive interface to compare it with.

On the plus side, I never ever used to use the editor in RoboHelp, preferring to do all my editing in Dreamweaver. With Flare I do use the editor, and it does the job - but like all things you like you want it to be as good as it possibly could be, and the XML editor falls short in some very obvious ways.

Flare's CSS editor

Not much to say on this other than the fact that Flare's interface for editing CSS over-complicates the task of styling up your content. Endless clicking around, scrolling up and down, expanding and contracting sections and searching round for what you need drives you, inevitably, back to the CSS file to edit it in a text editor.

My Flare projects typically have three or four CSS files and by far the easiest way of modifying styles is just to open the files in UltraEdit and edit the text.

When I want to change a font size, or a background colour, I can just type in the new font size or colour, I don't need to fiddle around with the mouse to select the size or colour I want.

I guess it depends what you're looking for, but personally I want to be able to do things quickly and easily. A user interface should facilitate you and help you to be more productive. It shouldn't slow you down, which is what Flare's CSS editor does.

But - to end on a positive note - the good thing about CSS in Flare is that the look of almost everything is driven by CSS, which allows you huge flexibility to determine the appearance of your final output. Apart from a few features of the navigation panes, pretty much everything can be customised to look just the way you want it to look. So if it's important to you to be able to produce something good-looking and different to everyone else's online help, then Flare's definitely worth investigating.

I'd really like to be able to say that Flare is a single-source solution that allows you to produce great online help and great printed manuals from the same source documents. Unfortunately it just isn't true. That Holy Grail of tech authoring still seems just out of reach.

Flare gets pretty close to allowing you to single source, but it still has the following major issues that prevent you from outputting PDFs (via integration with FrameMaker).

1. PDF bookmarks

   There's no effective way of controlling what becomes a bookmark in you PDF. When I output direct to PDF I get some bizarre results. This precludes being able to issue the PDF to a customer. I have to output to FrameMaker, specify the bookmarks and then output the PDF myself. This might not seem too much of a hassle, but the fact is that it means Flare just isn't doing what it claims to be able to do. What I want to be able to do is make a quick change in Flare and output the PDF without having to do anything in FrameMaker at all. At the moment this just isn't possible.

   For those of you debating the value of taking out a Support contract with Madcap, you might be interested to know that this is an issue I queried with Madcap a couple of months back and I still haven't had any word on a resolution of this issue. Is a fix going into the next release. Who knows?

2. Cross-references to another part of the same chapter

   The problem here is that if you have a multi-chapter document, and you create a cross-reference to somewhere in another chapter, it works fine - but if the cross-reference goes to somewhere in the same chapter, the link does not work.

   The reason for the problem is identified in this forum correspondence:

   http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?p=18143#18143

   There are two solutions (both ugly):

   a) Output the chapters to MIF, edit the MIF, remove the XRefSrcFile value for the broken links, save the MIF file to FrameMaker format again and generate the PDF.

   b) Search for broken cross-references in FrameMaker, edit the cross-reference, specify the correct marker that it should be pointing to, save the file and generate the PDF.

   Both of these are time-consuming and, again, you need to do this each and every time you make any change to your source files. So, say a button name changes and you need to change a single topic file, this means this one-word change could take you half a day to implement and produce the corrected PDF. That's unacceptable.

3. Hyphenation

   Flare always turns hyphenation on. There's no way of specifying, in the CSS within Flare, whether you want hyphenation or not. So all paragraphs get hyphenation, even when they're unjustified.

   Even headings get hyphenated, which just looks ridiculous.

   And because FrameMaker isn't very smart about hyphenation - that is, it doesn't adjust the word and character spacing in a line in order to avoid hyphenation where possible - it means you get a lot of hyphenation, some of it incredibly clumsy.

   Again, this is something I queried with Madcap weeks ago, under my Support contract, and, despite going back to ask them what's happening, have heard nothing to give me hope that this will be fixed soon.

Conclusion

All of this is very disappointing. As I've said before, I'm a fan of Madcap and I'd like them to do well, but all evidence from them lately leads me to believe they're too busy rushing forwards to the next thing, and trying to stick to their masterplan of producing an Adobe-beating authoring suite, to spend time getting their products to work correctly.

Sadly, this is the same old story we had from eHelp of old. A basically good product, but with lots of really annoying issues for which we, the users, had to work out tortuous workarounds. Would I recommend people buy Flare? Yes, I would and I do. However, I always have to tell them that this is a new product and it still has several very annoying new-product issues.

The trouble is Flare is no longer a new product. It leaves me wondering: how long before I have to stop forgiving Flare on the grounds of being a new product and recommend it - if indeed I do continue to recommend it - on the grounds that it's the least annoying authoring tool available right now.

7-Zip is an open-source alternative to WinZip. It has a Windows user interface, but the reason I came across it is that it has a command-line interface that allows you to include it in a DOS batch script to create scheduled backups to zip.

As well as zip file, you can also create tar file.

Website: http://www.7-zip.org/

User interface: