The vendors at the WritersUA Exhibition have been busy! All have been working on new features, and I was allowed to share some of the information yesterday during my session on innovations in Help authoring tools.

Both AuthorIT and Doc-To-Help are working on new versions with updated interfaces that are similar to Microsoft Office 2007's with a ribbon. (It turns out that I'm one of the few who are using Office 2007, and I really like the ribbon.)

Doc-To-Help also announced that they are working on automatic documenter for .NET that works with Microsoft's Sandcastle. The new application will grab the triple comments from Sandcastle to create documentation that can also handle .NET generics.

AuthorIT version 5 will also include publishing profiles. These profiles will control what underlying bits are assigned to a book so that you won't need multiple copies when you want to change the format (for example, if you want to publish both Letter and A4 output, you won't have to use a generic "one size fits all" set of media objects or create multiple books that call the appropriate media objects...the profiles will take care of all that). (Version 4.5 was just released yesterday, with improved localization functionality and new templates for Word and HTML outputs, plus more. And AuthorIT Live, a way to edit content in your database through a browser, is currently in beta.)

WebWorks is working on a new version that will automate DITA publishing by working on top of the DITA toolkit. If you've worked with the DITA toolkit, this new version will make your life much easier. And you'll be able to mix authoring environments (Word, Frame, XML editors).

HelpServer will be incorporating dynamic hyperlink descriptions. They'll use the target topic description to create the hyperlink, and when the description changes, the hyperlink hotspot text will update automatically. They have also worked on a new "assist" application, which uses Java to display "just in time" Help to the user as they work.

Flare has announced several new features over the past few months, like Echo (sound recording), cross-media variables (variables in topics, graphics, and videos that resolve on publication), and image profiles (specifying various publishing settings on the image so that multiple images and conditions aren't necessary). At a dinner Sunday night, they also announced usage reports (for both web-based and local Help files) and a new format for video files (the resulting output is smaller, which means that the output files...like .chms...are also smaller). (And many people are sporting their new shirts these days.)

HelpStudio announced their new widgets, which are powerful snippets that you can use to add various types of content to your Help files. The widgets are coded separately and then called within a topic, where you edit the content itself. And they can be customized to display one way in an online output and another way in a print output...for example, if you insert a drop-down hotspot, you can set all the formatting and the actions for online Help, and then change the design when publishing the same content to Word. It doesn't just become a static version of dynamic content.

Adobe didn't really announce anything new here, although I did hear that a new version will be out way before the end of the year. And the new version will support both Vista and Office 2007.

More news later...now it's time to get to breakfast and the first session!