Flare 7.1: What is your fix count?

[samjones6]

Well, I received 9 (nine!) emails to effect "issue ### you reported is fixed in 7.1"

Pretty nice!

I submitted 35 or so in the last few months. %25 in one release is pretty good!

It still takes FOUR SECONDS for the @#$@# insert image form to come up... and the performance of Flare IDE is still horrible.

But there is motion, which is nice.

[whunter]

I am curious, do you only get the email notifications about bug fixes if you have a maintenance plan?

MadCap has logged a lot of bugs on my behalf, but I've never been informed that one has been fixed.

I don't know if I am unlucky or if they only generate the emails for maintenance customers.

[wclass]

I got 2 emails this time but have submitted many more. I submit some via the maintenance contract and some as bug submissions - could be a link there.

[samjones6]

I am curious, do you only get the email notifications about bug fixes if you have a maintenance plan?

Dunno. I have maintenance.

Flare is SO VERY VERY BUGGY that having Flare with no maintenance would be death (for me).

It is the buggiest commercial app I have ever (ever) used, in 30 years in the IT industry.

[RamonS]

So why the heck are you still using it? If I'd be in your position I'd drop Flare. You love RoboHelp a lot anyway, so there is your Flare replacement. Interestingly, most of the issues reported seem to be specific to your system anyway.

[helen]

Zero for me but bugs I have reported have made this release so I'm very happy!

In fact, I'm loving the new option to exclude content unless it's specifically linked, that is a timesaver for me when I forget to set the exclude condition! Fabulous - all fabulous!

[Andrew]

I am curious, do you only get the email notifications about bug fixes if you have a maintenance plan?

MadCap has logged a lot of bugs on my behalf, but I've never been informed that one has been fixed.

I don't know if I am unlucky or if they only generate the emails for maintenance customers.

I don't know what the criteria are -- I'd be interested to find out. They fixed at least one issue I've reported, but I didn't get any e-mails.

[LTinker68]

I submit everything via the bug report form, but I've never made a comparison between the number of bugs submitted and the number of emails received telling me they'd be fixed. I did get one with the v7.1 release.

Perhaps the email is only sent to the person who first submitted it; if others submit the same bug, then they might be added to a tally for that bug to help determine the severity of the bug, but their emails may not be captured and therefore they're not notified when the bug is fixed.

[samjones6]

So why the heck are you still using it? If I'd be in your position I'd drop Flare.

It is true, using Flare is painful. I suffer a lot from Flare. I wish I had stayed on Robohelp.

But I need to hire a consultant to help convert back to robohelp, and I have not had the time to do that yet. (Robohelp does not have a feature to import Flare projects.)

Interestingly, most of the issues reported seem to be specific to your system anyway.

That is mostly not true. There are threads of other users who have the same performance issues I have, and Flare support has reproduced many of the problems I have submitted when testing against my project.

If I actually tallied it all up, I suspect there are ZERO issues my Flare project has that are only seen by me. (E.g. other users and/or Madcap support see the same issues when using my project or another Flare project that uses the features I use.)

The problem is Flare.

[wbrisett]

Sam, I think Ramon was just being a bit overboard. There are some great things to both love and hate about Flare. For me personally the plus side outweighs the minus side.

I am curious though, is it that you think Flare is too "too buggy" that makes you long for RoboHelp again, or is it more of a learning curve thing? I haven't used RoboHelp in years (BlueSky still owned the product then). But there are some very nice things in Flare for extremely large projects like mine (I have over 22,000 topics in it). The ability to combine different projects via WebHelp Plus certainly can't be overlooked either. I honestly think that's one of the best and vastly underrated and used features of Flare.

But it really took me a while to wrap my head around how Flare worked. Even now, there are things I have problems doing via the GUI, so I drop into the XHTML and make changes. But then again, we don't use Flare as an authoring tool, but more of a publishing engine.

Wayne

[RamonS]

It is especially the larger project issue. Not sure if RH is capable of that, but up to X5 it did not scale at all, which Flare does well since the beginning. Looking through the RH forums I see plenty of folks complaining about plenty of bugs in RH. I don't think Flare is any buggier than other software and given how much Adobe cares about RH I am convinced that any TW is better off with a company that makes an industry-leading HAT their core product.
I also wonder why someone would constantly complain about how horrible Flare is and that RH is supreme in all dimensions, yet still continue to use Flare. If there is a tool that suits me better then I choose that tool rather than whine about how bad it is and how great the other one is. After all, most apps offer a trial version. Make use of it and make a wise decision.

[TechnicalDisaster]

I got three e-mails, two for table fixes and one for SharePoint integration. Some of other things I requested were added, but I didn't get an e-mail confirming the bug submission.

[samjones6]

I am curious though, is it that you think Flare is too "too buggy" that makes you long for RoboHelp again, or is it more of a learning curve thing?

It is not learning curve at all. It is pure bugs. The editor actually doesn't work when using the kbd to navigate.... It is amazing no one notices this (two or three bugs I reported of this kind are fixed in 7.1).

Flare is FULL of bugs. I have submitted (and Flare support has acknowledged and opened cases on) about 40 bugs over a 90 day period.

Bugs bugs bugs. Nothing other than bugs.

I also have to drop to xhtml sometimes, which is, frankly, pathetic.

There are two things I need from Flare:

1) IDE / editor
2) Compiler

The compiler is OK (not great, mind you, Flare support has reproduced multiple compiler bugs based on my submissions). The IDE is nearly unusable due to bugs and poor performance.

[Valiant]

Still waiting on notices for fixes for it in 6.0 or bugs opened 2 years ago - things that never made 7.0, wonder if it's worth pinging them to see if they are in 7.1.

I'll assume we are 0 for 4 in the bug fix department.

[samjones6]

Still waiting on notices for fixes for it in 6.0 or bugs opened 2 years ago - things that never made 7.0, wonder if it's worth pinging them to see if they are in 7.1.

FWIW, there is a big bug that I reported back in Flare v4 (when we evaluated it) that we then also reported in 6.0, that is now fixed in 7.1: "Target option to exclude content not linked directly or indirectly"

(Rephrased, the lack of this "feature" caused my chm files built in Flare to be 3x larger than the same chms built in Robohelp.)

[i-tietz]

It is not learning curve at all. It is pure bugs. The editor actually doesn't work when using the kbd to navigate.... It is amazing no one notices this (two or three bugs I reported of this kind are fixed in 7.1).

Flare is FULL of bugs. I have submitted (and Flare support has acknowledged and opened cases on) about 40 bugs over a 90 day period.

Bugs bugs bugs. Nothing other than bugs.

I also have to drop to xhtml sometimes, which is, frankly, pathetic.

There are two things I need from Flare:

1) IDE / editor
2) Compiler

The compiler is OK (not great, mind you, Flare support has reproduced multiple compiler bugs based on my submissions). The IDE is nearly unusable due to bugs and poor performance.

You cannot really have seen a lot of different software then ... all I have to say (and I frequently do so) is: Microsoft and MadCap are improving their software. Others don't - examples: Lotus (Notes) or SAP or Adobe.

Lotus Notes is available in version 9, I believe. We have version 8.5. In our case it contains tons of company-wide databases and it's NORMAL that you don't find sth you yourself put in there. It exists but the search (index-based) or SQL statements won't find the relevant data. That's just in disputably **** for a database progam - one should think that that is the basic purpose of database software ...
And the handling of dates ... *shaking my head* ... already 25 years ago Excel was able to tell me how many workdays there were in a month ... and doing that it even took public holidays into account ...

And SAP ... I had the honour of working with two modules of R3 for a year ... I really never ever saw software and documentation of that bad a quality ... not before and not since then ... open source software included! ... and I'm in the software business for almost 30 years ...

Framemaker (Adobe) you get in version 10 right now, we have version 9 and tons of things are WORSE than in version 7.2 which we used before. But we had to switch for operating system requirements. The help in Framemaker is rotten (has always been, e.g. not even CSH, field names cannot be found in the help, ... ), the forums and mailing lists don't offer solutions for any of the problems we posted and the support at Adobe itself is not worth a single cent - they don't even answer to the questions we posted but babbled about something in the same area (dictionaries, spelling and hyphenation) but no answer to the actual questions.
If it didn't cost so much time I would convert our FM files into Flare files rather today than tomorrow ...

All the software I mentioned is more expensive than Flare, by the way.

Oh and about the editor: true - it's not Word. My colleagues complained about it, too, coming from RH which used Word then. But Word is in the business for more than 30 years and as I mentioned before: MS is learning and improving ... (and RH had other flaws)
On other threads in these forums users are complaining about the lack of "intelligence" like including an auto-increasing version number into the documents. They would be better off with a software that uses a database instead of files and that lets you insert programmed logic. But again: That is more expensive than Flare ...
So which way is MadCap supposed to go? Stick to files and use Word? Switch to database storage?

No tool can be the jack-of-all-trades - you will have to find the one that fits your requirements best. Maybe you could make better use of your resources looking for it? And maybe you should hope that once you've found it, you also find somebody to pay it for you ...


OH AND : What is IDE? I only know it for harddisks ... obviously not what you mean ...

[RamonS]

OH AND : What is IDE? I only know it for harddisks ... obviously not what you mean ...

Integrated Development Environment, basically a programming editor that goes beyond plain text entry, but has intelligence built in such as autocomplete, templates, syntax check, etc. The Flare editor could be considered an IDE for help content, although I'd call that a stretch.

[i-tietz]

OH AND : What is IDE? I only know it for harddisks ... obviously not what you mean ...

Integrated Development Environment, basically a programming editor that goes beyond plain text entry, but has intelligence built in such as autocomplete, templates, syntax check, etc. The Flare editor could be considered an IDE for help content, although I'd call that a stretch.

Ah! Well FM never had that either ... and Lotus Notes has a spell check since version 7 ...