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Post details: RoboHelp hits the blogs...

01/17/07

Permalink 03:19:29 pm, Categories: Help Authoring Tools, 383 words   English (US)

RoboHelp hits the blogs...

Sarah O'Keefe posted a message at Palimpsest about MonkeyPi's review of RoboHelp 6. (She also had some interesting comments on RoboHelp itself, like its lack of XML, and about Adobe and their marketing department. I love reading Sarah's blog.)

So I headed over to MonkeyPi to see what was going on. And MP is obviously on many of the email lists I subscribe to, and obviously gets many of the same RSS feeds that I do, because the entry started by talking about yesterday's deluge because of RoboHelp 6's release.

And my blog entry from yesterday is mentioned at the start of the second paragraph. "One blogger I really respect claimed, "Congratulations to Adobe for getting this out technically ahead of time!". First, thanks for the compliment, MP :-) But second...what I said didn't mean that it's a great, good, or bad product. It means that Adobe beat the estimated delivery date by months (depending on who you believe, RoboHelp was supposed to be released by either the end of March or the end of June of this year. Or maybe never.).

The thing is, I...um...well, I can't actually provide a review of RoboHelp 6 just yet. I was on the beta list, and did a little bit with it when the beta was first released. But then I kinda committed the unpardonable sin of updating my software ;-) Yep, I upgraded to Office 2007...and couldn't get the later betas to install. I haven't been in the mood to install Office 2003 again and now it doesn't matter, given that the beta is no longer.

It's too bad that the kadov tags are still around. Personally, I'd like to see a version of RoboHelp that uses DreamWeaver as its editor, but I was saying that when Macromedia bought eHelp.

We're going to see more information on RoboHelp 6 in the upcoming weeks. Techshoret is holding their TCC conference in Israel tomorrow, and both Rick Stone and Peter Grainge are giving presentations. Others who were beta testers will start using RoboHelp for real projects.

And folks will post more questions about RoboHelp on HATT and TCP and TechWhirl again. The difference is, now folks will be talking/asking/complaining about RoboHelp 6 (where'd the X go, anyway?), instead of talking/asking/complaining about RoboHelp X5.

Life goes on.

Comments:

Comment from: monkeyPi [Member]
Char - Hope you didn't think I was picking on you. ;-)

I also thought it was a nice surprise that Adobe beat its target release date.

Unfortunately - (my opinion only) - it seems like they took X5, added a few minor features, cleaned it up a bit, and released it as (x)6. In other words, I was expecting a new product, and got an incremental upgrade. In the old RH days, this would have been a patch release, and not worthy of a full version number.

I was hoping Adobe wouldn't give RH the "FrameMaker treatment," but it looks that way.

Still, it's RH, and it's slightly improved. That should be good enough to reward people who didn't switch to a competitor's product.

Keep up the good work here! I'm a loyal reader.
Permalink 01/17/07 @ 16:53
Comment from: SOkeefe [Member]
Someone in the office pointed out that I have now achieved my lifelong ambition -- getting the word "craptastic" on our front page.

My work is done.

:-)
Permalink 01/17/07 @ 17:17
Comment from: monkeyPi [Member]
SOkeefe, the real challenge is working it into your next delivery. See if the client or audience is paying attention.

"Click the craptastic-looking Save button here."
Permalink 01/17/07 @ 17:24
Comment from: seanb_us [Member]
Nice review monkey-boy. Thanks for the link, Sarah. Why are you expecting XML from RoboHell though? That's FrameBreaker's sphere of control .... What RH should have done for this release is seamlessly handle native FM binary files.

Cheers.
Permalink 01/17/07 @ 22:51

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