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 (Sat, 25 Oct 2008)

This year's European Online Help conference took 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" was 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. The next UA Conference - Europe will be held in 2009.