Foul Writer’s World

I am rushed of my feet at the moment. I’m the ony Tech. writer in the office at the moment and the wife is away on holiday leaving me stuck with the house work and the two cats.

Anyway, my weekly notes follow:

• Currently waiting for my Flare 4 upgrade license key so that I can start using Flare 4.
• Trying out Camtasia for the first time and liking what I see. May allow me to produce some better walk-throughs and is probably easier and quicker to produce content than the Captivate and Presenter options that Adobe supply.
• I have been looking at the possible usefulness of Swype. Should make writing on small touch screen displays more intuitive.
• Looking forward to seeing how the World Wide Web Foundation can make a difference to the internet.
• Fed up with Apple. I swear its launch cycles are getting smaller and smaller and each cycle sees less and less innovation.
• I am in love with my Sony PRS-505, currently reading a classic, 1984. Everyone that tries it wants one.

Apparently Adobe are soon to launch their Prerelease program for Captivate 4. Silke Fisher (Captivate Product Manager) recently announced:

The engineering team is busy working on Adobe Captivate 4 and the beta is going to start soon. We need testers with many different backgrounds and system configurations for trying the new features and providing feedback (you don’t have to be an existing user to participate).

So if your interested in trying out the new version of Captivate and helping improve the product, sign up for the Prerelease program:

Prerelease Interest Form

Remember by registering your interest there is no guarantee they will accept you into the program.

MadCap officially announce the release of Mimic 2. Mimic is

… a straightforward software simulation tool that lets you quickly and easily create movies of software or systems without any programming knowledge.

I must admit that I didn’t like Mimic 1. Maybe that was a bit harsh. It is not that I didn’t like it, I thought it was a very good attempt at a 1.0 product release. But I’m an Adobe Captivate user. So I found Mimic 1.0 basic, yes it did a good job of recording screen and placing callouts, etc., but it didn’t have the little touches that make Captivate good. Besides working for the company I do, the main benefit of Captivate is its ability to create questions for use with SCORM, PENS and other assessment and Learning Management Software. This just wasn’t possible with Mimic.

While I don’t think they have added the ability to create question content, I am hoping they have been able to add some of the neat touches that make Captivate a favourite. Like the ability to merge Flash files, create great looking playbars and most importantly, make it easy to use.

I will be looking in detail at Mimic 2 next week and I will let you know what I think.