Foul Writer’s World

News from this week.

• Microsoft removes IE 8 from Windows 7 shipping in EU.
• EU still hungry for Microsoft cash and decide to go to court anyway
• The end of Twitter and the world was avoided this week, when twitpocalypse came to nothing except if your a Apple user.
• Live Search rebranded as Bing.com to take on Google
• Hopes of many are dashed in Iranian elections and cause widspread discontent
• MadCap release Flare v5. I’ll be doing a review of the changes once I’ve spent more time with it
• FIA / FOTA war of 2009 is intensifying as the FIA continually push car manufacturers further and further away from Formula 1 (The FIA should just get rid of Mad Max Mosley, it would solve so many problems)
• Is Twitter’s dominance at microblogging is under threat from Google?

Madcap have officially launched Flare 4.  However, they have also launched new releases of Blaze, X-Edit and Analyzer.

And if that wasn’t enough, there is also a new and improved Madcap Software website.

Following my Flare release iminent? post a few weeks ago. Tom has announced he is running a competition (for MadCap) to give away a copy of Flare 4 to one lucky winner. To enter the competition just leave a comment in the following post Flare 4 Giveway — Enter to Win a Free Copy by Commenting on This Post

You need to…

In the comments below the post, explain what you feel is an important feature for a help authoring tool and why. Your answer can be short (one sentence), or you can write a novella.

In addition, Paul Pehrson has written a blog post about some of the new and improved features in Flare 4. Take some time to read his post, it includes some great comments and good insight in to what will be available:

• MadCap Flare 4 Preview (aka Ten Things to Love about Flare 4)

I have heard rumours that Flare v4 is nearing release within the next couple of months. Does anyone else know about a possible release timeline for the new version?

I know I have the following wish list that I hope is fulfilled in the latest release:

• Simplified CSS designer
• Snippets implementation improved
• Easier control of text indentations
• Variable use simplified
• Improved responsiveness of application

Work has been a nightmare recently, hence why the updates have been scarce as of late.

I am currently migrating our existing help documentation into Flare. This would normally be an easy task, except that the help documentation I’m migrating was written in HTML that is so badly malformed that I’m surprised a web browser can even show the pages. The help was also generated a few versions ago, and it is easy to see it was written by a developer rather than a technical writer as it is difficult to read and task/ procedures lists are often nested up to four times. The text content also seems to have been placed in a table to apply some sort of layout design. So importing this content to Flare is pointless. Flare usually does a good job of converting what it can, but with these help files it just falls over flat. Because of this I have resulted to saving what I can from the existing help by copying and pasting into Flare what I can and then rewriting what I deem as unfit.

I found an interesting post by Kathy Lawrence that I wish whoever wrote the original help documentation had read through.

Technical Writing in Ten Easy Steps