I was looking for a free XML editor to validate a file against a DTD and I found a really good (free-ish) one called Exchanger XML Editor.

It's a Java-based application, so you need Java installed (version 1.4 or higher). But, if you don't already have java, there are install packages for Windows and Linux that include the Java Virtual Machine.

Being Java, of course, it works across Windows, Linux, Mac and other UNIXes.

Download from:

www.freexmleditor.com/fxeeditor/downloads.html
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Not satisfied with producing Flare as a direct competitor to RoboHelp, Capture as a direct competitor to SnagIt (et al) and Mimic as a direct competitor to Captivate (et al), MadCap Software are now gunning for FrameMaker with the announcement of their next big product: Blaze - due out sometime next year.

As a Flare user I know that MadCap have done a serious amount of work on Flare and come up with a serious bit of software. It's still got a few bugs and oddities, but for a brand new product it is extremely impressive. However, maybe that should have been expected. Some of the top people working on Flare used to work on RoboHelp, and were kicked out by Macromedia, and you get the feeling they were on a Crusade to rebuild RoboHelp but make it better and incorporate all the new stuff they would have liked to have put into RoboHelp but had been prevented from implementing by Macromedia's lack of interest in the product. Now, with these other products, you just wonder how they'll get on, without all that experience and religious zeal to spur them on to more super-human feats of development endeavour.

But, with Blaze, in many ways they've done most of the hard work already. There's still a lot to do to take Flare and use it to create an XML-based tool that does everything FrameMaker does - but it's very do-able and the end result could be just what I for one have been looking for for the past 3 or 4 years.

More about Blaze on MadCap's website:

www.madcapsoftware.com/products/blaze/home.asp

and some interesting observations about Blaze and Flare on the monkeyPi blog:

http://monkeypi.net/?p=40

http://monkeypi.net/?p=61

Having finally taken the plunge on Flare and bought the 1.1 version, plus a support package that includes a year of free upgrades, I'm looking forward to version 2.0, which is due out in September.

Madcap's Marketing department have produced a flier describing what version 2.0 will offer:

www.madcapsoftware.com/support/files/downloads/mc_flare_v2.pdf

To quote the hype:

"Flare will be the first true single-sourcing tool with the ability to import and export in both Microsoft Word and FrameMaker formats. Nobody else comes even close."

In the latest itauthor podcast (www.itauthor.com/category/podcasts) I talk about my first impressions of Madcap Flare.

I also mention an error message I got when switching back to the normal view from the tag view:

Mapcap Flare put another demo on their site a while back. This one is about "structure bars" which is Madcap's way of showing the element structure of a document:

http://madcapsoftware.com/products/demos.asp#

My thoughts on this demo are mixed.

My immediate thought was what a dull demo it is without sound. Well, in fact it does have sound, the sound of mouse clicks, but not speaking. Having looked at a lot of screencasts recently (particularly those of Jon Udell) silent demos like this with balloon text that you need to read are just so dull and lifeless. Compare it with Robert Scoble's off-the-cuff interview of, and Office 12 demo, by Julie Larson-Green for Channel9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114720

My next thought was that I was pleased to see the structure feature being touted as a product feature and being included in a well thought-out and nicely designed way. However, I'm also a little bit concerned because one of my fears about Flare is that it feels like it might be being developed with the same dummed-down, "let's keep it simple for the users (they won't understand anything that's not graphical or drag-and-drop)" approach that plagued early versions of RoboHelp. Only latterly did RoboHelp start to escape this "we know better than you, so we'll do stuff for you (whether you want it or not)" mentality. In my experience the main users of RoboHelp (and in the future Flare) are technical authors who know all about XML and XHTML and CSS and JavaScript and header files. I'm a little worried that Flare might be very good-looking application that doesn't offer much in the way of functionality we don't already have. What I'm hoping for is an application that maybe won't be that single-source solution we're all looking for, but will be a key component of a single-source solution.

When it comes to ways of showing the structure of a document that's one thing that FrameMaker 7 does well. I really like the variety of ways FrameMaker has of showing structure: in an expand/collapse diagram, as tagged text, as text with element markers, in the status bar, etc.

I don't want to be negative about Flare before I've even seen it, but we're at this pivotal point as technical authors, with both of our main tools (FrameMaker and RoboHelp) being left to wither and die, and a huge need for a new kind of tool to deliver on the list of requirements that technical authors have for a new tool - requirements we know can be delivered built on XML. When I first heard about Madcap I pinned significant hopes on it being the company to deliver the killer app for our profession. I hope they can, but the more I hear about Flare the more I worry that it's just going to be a new version of RoboHelp, rather than the successor to RoboHelp and FrameMaker.