MadCap have added a new Flare demo at:

www.madcapsoftware.com/products/demos.asp#

I didn't think much of the first one (see Disappointing MadCap Flare demo) but this demo is more interesting. It shows a RoboHelp X5 project being imported into Flare.

I find it quite amusing how much emphasis MadCap place on the fact that some of their guys used to work on RoboHelp at eHelp. OK, you've told us already! We get it! Your whole business plan is predicated on RoboHelp users switching to Flare. Fine. Let's see if MadCap can deliver on their promises.

There's an interesting article about the possible (probable?) demise of RoboHelp at:

www.winwriters.com/articles/rh/

The Help system I was recently working on uses Microsoft's XMLDOM ActiveX control for glossary pop-ups. When the user clicks a highlighted word the ActiveX control parses the contents of an XML file and displays the appropriate definition in a pop-up.

This works fine when you access the Web-based Help directly off the file system (e.g. \\servername\path\to\WebHelp\index.htm), but it didn't work when the same files was accessed over HTTP (e.g. http://www.domain.xyz/path/to/WebHelp/index.htm) and I couldn't work out why.

The solution is something to do with asynchronous loading (the page loads before the ActiveX control - or something like that). Anyhow, whatever the precise reason, the solution is to turn off asynchronous loading. You do this by adding one line to your JavaScript.

So, for me, immediately after the line:

mx_xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");

I added:

mx_xmlDoc.async=false;

and this solved the problem.

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.

Microsoft have changed the design of their "Discussion Group" interface at microsoft.com.

One result of this is that the link I was using to get to the helpauthoring newsgroup (which I included in my posting of 19 May) no longer works.

The alternative is:

www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.helpauthoring

If you're using Internet Explorer, this is a good alternative to the previous version. If you're using Firefox it looks horrible and isn't easy to use.

How like Microsoft to develop an IE-only solution.
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