Below are a few messages from my blog’s sponsors. Check them out and see if any interest you. Many of them have upcoming webinars. News from Madcap MadCap Software is pleased to present free live webinars from industry experts covering a variety of topics essential for today’s technical writers.  Sign up today to advance your professional skills and learn about the latest trends in technical … more »

Students and others trying to break into technical writing are always wondering what tools they should use. The latest tools survey from WritersUA seems helpful in answering this question. The survey concludes that some of the most popular tools for technical writers are Adobe Acrobat, Camtasia Studio, Adobe Captivate, Dreamweaver, Madcap Flare, Framemaker, Photoshop, Robohelp, Snagit, and Visio. Of these tools, Flare scores highest as … more »

Each technical communication conference I attend, one of the activities that attendees look forward to is strolling through the exhibit hall, perusing the various tech comm booths, picking up freebies and fliers, listening to vendor pitches, and generally taking in the tech comm world of products. With that in mind, and as an opportunity to give more visibility to my sponsors, I offer a regular … more »

In my previous post, I introduced faceted classification and faceted navigation as alternative methods for organizing help content. In contrast to topic-based hierarchies, faceted navigation provides multiple paths into the same content. These multiple paths increase the likelihood that users find the right content. Peter Morville and Jeffery Callendar, two information architects, call faceted navigation “arguably the most significant search innovation of the past decade.” Because of its importance in … more »

In this videocast, I talk with Neil Perlin at hyperword.com about the trend toward mobile outputs for help and other information deliverables. Neil had just given a demonstration of a mobile output from Flare, and he mentioned to me that mobile was a direction he wants to specialize in. We recorded this video in the Expo hall at the STC Summit in Dallas.

A case study from Madcap Software, STC Summit info from Scriptorium, and SnagIt’s versatility.

Read the latest messages from Dr. Explain, Scriptorium, Snagit, and Madcap Software.

Alistair Christie recently published a podcast about Unscripted Screencasts and Flare Extensibility. In the podcast, he considers whether scripts are necessary for corporate screencasts –  a good topic for exploration and testing. But he also gets into something a little more interesting: extending Flare with jQuery. jQuery is the new Javascript. It provides smooth functionality that shows and hides components, slides objects around, and animates … more »

Scriptorium is presenting a free webinar on the DITA features in Madcap Flare this Tuesday at 11 a.m. EST. Here are the details: Presented by Sarah O’Keefe, this webcast demonstrates using MadCap Flare to create WebHelp from DITA-based content. Topics covered include: Importing DITA content into Flare Map file handling Cross-references and links Relationship tables Conrefs Conditional processing By the way, you can keep up … more »

I read a blog post the other day that I can’t stop thinking about. In the Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt writes, The main issue for me is between authoring static in-house documents using single-sourcing methods before publishing, or capturing information sources dynamically after publishing from online social networks, linked data sources, and knowledge mashups. The myth of single-source authoring is that it actually … more »

One of Flare’s shortcomings is the inability to easily embed video files. However, if you use the Camtasia Studio’s Express Show format as your video format (and you choose the SWF option), you can insert the video into Flare by inserting the video as if it were a picture. Here’s a two-minute screencast showing the processing for inserting a video into Flare. You can also … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 15 min. In this brief podcast, I discuss the results of the podcast poll that I published on my site earlier this week. I mostly wanted an opportunity to try out my new Behringer mixer/preamp, and the results of the poll served as perfect fodder for a podcast. In this 15 minutes of audio, I … more »

Right now I’m immersed in an online help project in which I’ve been using Madcap Flare. Here a few tips I’ve picked up in the past month or so.

Have you ever told a project manager that the instructions he plans on releasing with an application — instructions written by an intern who is here for a three-month stint — are complete junk and that it would be an embarrassment to the organization to give them to users? When you tell a project manager that, surprise, you win yourself a new documentation project. That’s … more »

LugIron recently praised a video response that a vendor made to a customer, calling it “an outstanding example of Social Documentation at work.” The customer loved the video, especially given that it was personally created by the company founder. Ten years ago, such a quick response wouldn’t have been possible except at a large time cost from the company. But with the software tools today, … more »