Recent News

MadCap Releases New Product Versions (Fri, 03 Oct 2008)

MadCap has released version 4 of its Flare Help Authoring Tool, along with new products Blaze and X-Edit. Flare version 4 features a new reporting engine that show the health and status of a project, supports new publishing formats including direct to PDF, XPS, XHTML, and AIR, and has an improved print publishing engine. MadCap Blaze is a topic-based, enterprise print publishing tool, which MadCap says has the ease of Microsoft Word with the power of Adobe FrameMaker. MadCap X-Edit is an editing tool that works with Flare and Blaze projects, but aimed at occasional contributors. X-Edit aims to improves documentation workflows by allowing subject matter experts to seamlessly review and provide content alongside a documentation team using Flare or Blaze.

CHM Viewer for Linux (Fri, 12 Sep 2008)

xCHM is an open source viewer for Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files. It shows the Table of Contents tree in a tri-pane window arrangement, let's the user print the current topic, and provides the normal history (back and forward) functionality. It allows the user to change text sizes and fonts, and to search for text in all the pages of the file or in the pages' titles. xCHM is released as an Ubuntu package.

UA Conference Europe - September 2008 in Edinburgh (Fri, 05 Sep 2008)

This year's European Online Help conference will take place in the historic and vibrant city of Edinburgh, Scotland. To reflect the current trends towards single sourcing, collaborative authoring, and embedded user assistance, the traditional concept of "online Help" has broadened considerably in recent years. With this in mind, the Conference formerly known as "Online Help Conference - Europe" has been renamed to UA Conference - Europe. The event continues to cover the full range of skills and technologies that combine to assist users, and retains its unique position as the only European conference to focus on software user assistance.

STC Australia Chapter Competitions (Fri, 05 Sep 2008)

STC Australia is hosting competitions in three categories: technical publications, technical art, and online communication. Entries of an appropriate standard are entered in the STC International Competition, and Australian entries have won awards in this competition in past years. In last year's competition, ASIC received a distinguished award for one entry and an excellence award for the other. Entries close on 31 October 2008. Contact Monica Allen at competitions@stc-aus.org.au for details.

WritersUA Software User Assistance Conference in Seattle in 2009 (Fri, 05 Sep 2008)

The 17th Annual WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance will be held in Seattle, Washington, from March 29 to April 1, 2009. The Conference offers the most comprehensive and timely information specifically designed for user assistance professionals. The conference goal is to continue to provide an event with the most comprehensive and timely information specifically designed for user assistance professionals. The event covers all aspects of information and training as a means of support for software users and toward a better user experience.

New Adobe Acrobat Package: Pro Extended 9 (Fri, 15 Aug 2008)

Adobe have released Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, a package that includes Adobe Presenter, Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES, and Adobe 3D Reviewer software. Pro Extended is designed for business and technical professionals creating interactive presentations, as it allows PDF files to include video, voice-over, demos, and interactive quizzes. It also provides a number of form and collaboration features, making it easy to gather feedback, interactively review, and build consensus from a distributed document.

Author-it ver 5.1 Released (Fri, 08 Aug 2008)

Author-it Software Corporation has released version 5.1 of the Author-it authoring tool. The new version has new functionality including Object Variant capability and a Quick Search function. Object Variants are an extension of the Author-it model that allows content components, be it text, graphics, links, or even formatting, to have any number of variations created for them based on user-defined criteria. This allows authors to easily create these variations for whatever purpose they need, and manage them together as a single component. Author-it 5.1 runs on Windows Servers and Windows-based PC's. Current Author-it 5 clients who have maintenance agreements will get an automatic upgrade to Author-it 5.1.

DITA Storm Desktop Released (Wed, 25 Jun 2008)

Inmedius have released DITA Storm Desktop, a standalone XML editing solution based on the DITA Storm Web-based DITA Editor. Desktop allows the user to create and publish DITA documents in a self-contained environment on a single workstation. Installed locally on the end user’s computer, files are accessed, edited, saved and published from local or network drives, regardless of Internet connectivity. With WYSIWYG editing capabilities, authors with little or no DITA or XML knowledge can create valid, structured content. Desktop runs on Mac OS, Windows (including Vista) and Linux operating systems, and costs USD474.

Mimic News from MadCap (Wed, 25 Jun 2008)

MadCap Software announced the availability of Mimic 2.0. MadCap's native XML software simulation application adds new online and print output options, as well as support for MadCap Lingo to facilitate translation. New output formats from Mimic 2.0 include Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR, PDF and XPS.