Flare V5 and Blaze V2 are officially available

As of this morning the latest releases of both Flare and Blaze are now out. New content on the web site, the download and trial version links have been updated, and our email engine is working non-stop sending out download/upgrade links to our maintenance customers. The short, overview list of what is new:

• Seamless DITA Support — no Open Toolkit, no Java development required!
  • Import DITA Maps and documents
    • Single/Multiple DITA file import
    • Conversion Styles Wizard for full conversion control
    • Preservation of image maps, CSH, tables, lists and more
    • Relationship Tables maintained
    • Single-source DITA projects to print and web
  • DITA Single-sourcing and Export
    • Generate DITA from existing Flare projects
    • Specify topic output types using Topic Properties
    • Publish DITA content in any other output type such as Microsoft® XPS and Word™, Adobe® PDF and FrameMaker®, WebHelp, etc.
• Built-in Relationship table support for all Flare content
• New text editor with support for line numbering, color coding and more
• Automatic Thumbnail image support
• Enhanced cross-product integration with support for Mimic and Capture condition tags
• Advanced Global Project Linking with condition tag support for project files
• Enhanced JPEG compression and PDF Support
• Text Redaction — conceal sensitive information from a document before distribution

Much more detail can be found:

Flare – http://madcapsoftware.com/products/flare/whatsnew.aspx

Blaze – http://madcapsoftware.com/products/blaze/whatsnew.aspx 

Also, for those interested, over the next month or so I will be doing some special live web demos that focus specifically on the new functionality in this release. To sign up just hop on over to our demos page at
http://madcapsoftware.com/demos/product.aspx and by the time you read this, there will be a new category of demos specifically for What’s New sessions.

There has already been some public comment on the new release as well, for an early review check out a blog entry posted by Paul Pehrson at http://blog.paulpehrson.com/2009/06/03/pre-release-review-of-flare-v5/ .

Cheers,

Mike

Microsoft Chooses MadCap Flare

Boy, the title says it all!

While I am always pleased when we add new customers, publish new case studies, and win awards, when a name like Microsoft is involved I have to admit to grinning ear to ear. The Microsoft Health Solutions Group has been using Flare and are so happy with it that they agreed to publish a case study with us.

Now, case studies are nothing new (we have many of them available) so what makes this one so different? Any time we can partner with Microsoft it is a cause for celebration.

-Mike

Adding Non-scrolling Regions to Flare Topics

Something must be going around as I have suddenly received several requests for adding non-scrolling regions to topics in WebHelp. If you are not familiar with non-scrolling regions they date back to the days of volcanoes, dinosaurs, and the Microsoft Winhelp format circa Windows 3 and Windows 95.  

The non-scrolling region was an area at the top of every topic where the topic title was displayed and then the topic itself scrolled under the title. The nice bit is that this ensured that the topic title was always visible. When Microsoft moved on and developed the Microsoft HTML Help format they did not include any methods for including the non-scrolling region and adopted more of a web-style interface. Many cried, shrieked, and rent their clothing longing for the beloved non-scrolling region, but alas it was gone…at least, for a while.

Now fast forward to modern Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) capabilities and you once again can get your non-scrolling regions back! To build a non-scrolling region in Flare we will be updating three styles in the project style sheet. No code, no script, no digging around with Notepad, just some simple style sheet changes.

For this exercise I will assume that the project is already using a Flare Master Page to render breadcrumb trails at the top of every topic, and that we want to keep those breadcrumb trails as part of the non-scrolling region. To accomplish this we will be updating the following styles:

H1, or a customization thereof
MadCap|Breadcrumbs Proxy
Body

To start out, we will modify our H1 style. If you have used H1 styles only at the top of topics then you could just change the attributes for this style directly. However, if you have used H1 styles in other locations then you may want to create a custom H1 style for more control. In this example I created a style class called H1.ns, ns for non-scrolling. Once I had this custom style I applied the following attributes.

background color – Choose the color you want for your non-scrolling region
border-bottom – Choose the color you want for the line under your non-scrolling region
left – Set the distance from the left edge of the browser window. This should be 0.
margin – Distance to the edge of the browser window, again, should be 0.
padding – Distance from edge of the block to the actual content, adjust to style requirements
position – This is the critical piece, it must be set to “fixed”.
right – The opposite of left. Should be 0.
top – Distance to the top of the browser window. If you are not using breadcrumbs then 0, otherwise enough space to clear the breadcrumbs.
width – Set to 100% to make sure that your non-scrolling region fills the width of the page.

My sample settings looked like this in Flare: 

Heading 1 style adjustments

Our heading 1 is now ready to act as a non-scrolling region. However, we need to make sure that our breadcrumbs act in a similar fashion. We will make adjustments to the same style attributes as we did for our heading 1, but with some minor variations so that the breadcrumbs will render above the heading 1 text. The values that I used for the breadcrumbs proxy are:

Breadcrumb style settings

Finally we need to make one minor adjustment to the body element in our style sheet. We need to increase the margin-top attribute to make sure that none of our topic text ends up hidden behind our non-scrolling region. In this example a value of 50px worked well, but adjust as necessary.

Body style adjustment

That was all that it took! Adjusting three styles and the result was a WebHelp system where the breadcrumbs information and the heading 1 of every topic was in a gray box at the top of the page…

 

…and when you scroll the topic slides under the non-scrolling header region.

 

For those who want to add non-scrolling capabilities to your own projects use these values as a starting point, but experiment and get the look and feel that best fits your needs.

Cheers!

Mike

MadCap Software Wins Red Herring Global 100 Award

What a way to start off the New Year!

MadCap Software has been chosen by Red Herring as one of the most important 100 young companies in the world to watch. What is really special about this award is that it is not industry specific, but includes every industry across the board. Many of the winners were focused on cutting edge technologies from developing alternative energy products, to bioscience, to communications, and more. To make this list the staff at Red Herring definitely saw some industry leading work coming out of the MadCap Software dev labs.

From the Red Herring site:

“For 10 years, Red Herring’s editorial team has diligently surveyed entrepreneurship around the globe. Technology industry executives, investors, and observers have regarded the Red Herring 100 lists as an invaluable instrument to discover and advocate the promising startups that will lead the next wave of disruption and innovation.

Past award winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube.

Red Herring Global is the culmination of a year’s work of scouring thousands of privately held companies from around the world. During this time we have meticulously selected 1200 of the top companies from Europe, North America, and Asia. To end the year with a bang, the Global Top 100 will be chosen from this pool of companies and then announced to the world…”.

The Red Herring site can be found here:
http://www.herringevents.com/global08/redherring100.html

The MadCap Software press release about it is here:
http://www.madcapsoftware.com/company/presscenter/pr20090121.aspx

To wrap this post up I also have to thank the thousands of MadCap MVPs, MadCap trainers, MadCap consultants, loyal customers, fans, users, beta testers, groupies, and even stone throwers. It has been the community feedback that has helped us to grow and define what goes into our products.

Cheers,
Mike Hamilton

No More Massive Downloads

Up to this point whenever we here at MadCap Software have rolled out an update to one of our software products it has pretty much been a complete reinstall of the product. This has meant some pretty significant download sizes, download times, install times, etc. Well, we have a new trick up our sleeve.

For those who downloaded the new versions of Flare / Blaze last week some new technology was included. This now allows us to do incremental updates without the need for a massive download and complete reinstall. This went into practice for the first time yesterday. We rolled out a patch for Flare / Blaze and the download was under 512 kb.

Yesterday morning I opened Flare and I was prompted to download the patch. The download took less than a minute and the update/install about the same. This should open the door for us to be able to be even more responsive with updates and fixes. We no longer will have to wait to roll a bunch of fixes up into a massive download and the users will no longer have to tie up their machines with heavy downloads, it should make for a much better experience for all. So the next time Flare or Blaze prompts you that an update is available, you don’t have to groan any more.

Mike

Speed Up Flare Compile/Generation Times

Many have asked how the time for creating outputs can be reduced. The answer may not be all that intuitive. Those who have gone out and purchased the biggest, newest, fastest, whiz-bangy, multi-core, multi-thread, monster processor their budget can afford are usually rewarded with only a small improvement. How can this be? It is all about balance and data throughput.

General guidelines for the fastest compile times possible include having a well balanced PC. Many users make the mistake of getting an extremely fast processor and are then disappointed when the compile times improve only slightly. The thing to remember with all products like Flare is that at certain points of the generation process the processor is the slow point, but during most of the process it is the speed of the hard drive that is the slow point. Think about how many thousands of files have to be read, analyzed, modified, and then re-written to the hard drive in the typical project generation evolution. Thus the speed of the underlying hard drive system is just as important to generation times as is the processor.

You can check this very easily. Use a method of tracking CPU loading on your system (Ctrl-Alt-Dlt > Task Manager > Performance tab is a brute force method) and then compile/generate an output from Flare. Watch the CPU usage. If it spends a lot of time over 90% then a faster processor will help you. If it is rarely over 90% then a faster processor won’t help at all.

Finally, the amount of system resources also comes into play. Having an adequate amount of system memory can also significantly improve generation times in some cases (extremely large projects, many other applications concurrently running, etc.). The really good news about system memory is that the prices are falling rapidly. I just upgraded my home office machine to a full 4GB for about $50.

If I were to outfit a machine specifically for the fastest compile/generation times possible with Flare I would look at:

Dream System:
Processor – Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz Quad-Core $299
Hard Drive – Western Digital VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s $169
Memory – 4 GB of DDR3 $99

Median System:
Processor – Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz $190 OR AMD Phenom X4 9950 2.6GHz $170
Hard Drive – Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 320GB Serial ATA-300, 7200 RPM, 16MB $65
Memory – 4 GB of DDR2 $49

Budget System:
Processor – Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz/1066  $119
Hard Drive – Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 320GB Serial ATA-300, 7200 RPM, 16MB $65
Memory – 2 GB of DDR2 $29

In summary, to build a hot rod Flare compiling rig you need to first get the fastest hard drive you possibly can, then add as much system memory as possible (4GB wherever possible, but at least 2GB), and only then if you have any budget left over, look at a faster processor.

I hope that this helps!

Mike

Software Updates Are Here!

New updates were released today for Flare, Analyzer, and X-Edit. Existing customers will be prompted that updates are available the next time they run the applications. If the timing is inconvenient, then go ahead and dismiss the update prompt as you can always do a manual check for updates from the Help menu in the products.

The updates are mostly speed/performance related, or fixes for issues reported by customers. More release data will be posted to our Knowledge Base shortly.

UPDATE: The release notes for Flare 4.1 are here http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/Content/Flare/General/GEN1021F_FlareV4.1_Release_Notes.htm

Cheers!

Mike

PDS / MadCap Software Events in Nieuwegein and Antwerp

I will be travelling with our partner PDS to do two public sessions covering a full introduction to all of the MadCap Software products. These events will be in Nieuwegein, Netherlands on November 11 and in Antwerp, Belgium on November 12. The schedule for these events:

13:30 – 13.45 Registration and coffee
13.45 – 14.00 Welcome by PDS
14.00 – 15.00 Theory Madcap Flare+MadCap tools
15.00 – 15.15 Break
15.15 – 16.15 Demo: Flare 4.x, Lingo & MadCap tools
16.15 – 16.45 Q&A
All your questions will be handeld by RoboHelp & Flare experts.
16:45 –         end of seminar

 These sessions will also include a live demo of the new DITA functionality planned for release early next year. More details can be found on the PDS MadCap Roadshow page. The slides for the event can be downloaded here:

MadCap Software Overview Slides

From Boston on to Germany for the Tekom show

Every year the Tekom / TC World event is held in Wiesbaden, Germany. This has to be the largest show in the world dedicated to technical authoring and publishing. This year the show was from November 5 through November 7 and around 3,000 attendees and three halls full of exhibitors were in attendance.

For several years now we have been helping to staff the booths of our partners and resellers, but with the way we are growing we just have too many partners to support! So, this year MadCap Software had our own booth at Tekom.

MadCap Software booth at Tekom 2008

It was a major challenge trying to coordinate everything from the US, but in the end it turned out great! We met a lot of great people from around the world, did countless software demos, and gave away some free software to the lucky prize winners. We also spent some time supporting our amazing resellers in Germany Cognitas and Help Design.

Now that the Tekom / TC World show is behind us I am heading off to the Netherlands and Belgium for some public events with our parnter PDS.

MadCap at DocTrain East

Boy, the blog has gotten away from me for a bit. It has been a busy trade show season. In fact, I am typing this post from the DocTrain East show in Burlington, MA. Earlier today I had the honor of presenting two in depth Flare sessions to a great group of folks and several asked about getting copies of my slides. Rather than clogging up email inboxes I though it would be easiest to simply post them here.

 Wednesday pre-conference sessions:

 MadCap Flare – An Introduction to Topic Based Authoring

MadCap Flare – Content Control and Publishing Techniques

Thursday night STC presentation:

Software Simulations and Interactive Tutorials

Saturday post-conference session:

MadCap Flare – Controlling Document Look and Feel with CSS