MadCap Software Forums

I am on 7.1...

The only update I saw was one in the Aug/Sept frame, that had almost nothing in it.

Are the madcap guys fixing bugs, or just working on loads of new features ?

Thanks!

There is a v7.2 patch - http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/Content/Fl ... _Patch.htm

Thanks!

That is, sadly, what I was afraid of. In the whole life of 7.x there has been woefully little bug fixing.

Flare would seem to be a dead product.

Madcap usually puts out a new release of Flare annually, with lots of new features. I imagine they are working on finishing up V8.

Personally, I wish they would put some more efforts into bug fixing rather than enhancements. I didn't upgrade to v7 because I didn't *need* any of the new enhancements and they still haven't fixed some bugs that are important to me. I am hoping they get fixed in v8 but who knows.

samjones6 wrote:That is, sadly, what I was afraid of. In the whole life of 7.x there has been woefully little bug fixing.

Flare would seem to be a dead product.

7.2 came out several months ago, not too long after 7.1 came out.

I'm curious how you've concluded that "Flare [is] a dead product"? From my vantage, I see no evidence of that whatsoever. Quite the contrary, I think.

>> I'm curious how you've concluded that "Flare [is] a dead product"?

Well, here is how:

Back in May of 2011, I sent a letter to Anthony Oliver, CEO of Madcap software. In this letter, I listed about 50 bugs which I had reported that had been acknowledged by Madcap as bugs or needed features (simple, small features, mind, like hotkeys on screens that lack them). I included the Madcap bug #, etc.

I also documented with demonstration videos etc how Robohelp is dramatically (like 3x or 5x) faster to navigate, create content, etc.

Anthony wrote back, assuring me that Madcap was engaging that my input was being engaged actively, and that the madcap VP of product would be contacting me.

In the 6+ months since then, maybe two or three bugs were fixed, and I was never contacted.

We would feel better if Madcap was fixing bugs actively, and ours just didn't make the cut. But that is not the case. The big fix pace is just so slow that we find new issues far faster than Madcap closes old ones.

This is the sign of a dying product: The newly discovered issue rate exceeds the companies resolution rate.

(Unfortunately, we are stuck with madcap, having converted a large complex project to it.)

samjones6 wrote:>
I also documented with demonstration videos etc how Robohelp is dramatically (like 3x or 5x) faster to navigate, create content, etc.

I think this is more user experience and preference than anything else. We experimented with RoboHelp along with Flare and Webworks for generating our DITA content and our experience was that RoboHelp was the least user friendly of the bunch in our tests. However, the two of us who did a majority of the testing were experienced using Flare and Webworks and had very little experience using any modern version of RoboHelp (I haven't used it regularly since it was still part of BlueSky). That's not to say your statement is incorrect with people that have the same level of experience, but your results didn't match ours. We stuck with Flare for corner-cases and WebWorks for a majority of our PDF content generation.

Wayne

samjones6 wrote:This is the sign of a dying product:

Hardly. A dying product is when the company says they're declaring end-of-life on a product, like Adobe did years ago for RoboHelp. They then changed their minds, but I imagine their response to issues around that time was nil.

samjones6 wrote:The newly discovered issue rate exceeds the companies resolution rate.

I also disagree with that, or rather, that rate could be applied to any company, including Adobe and Microsoft. And since you have no idea how many other bugs are submitted by other users, there is no way you could tell what their overall resolution rate is. I think just the fact that the V.P. responded to you puts MadCap ahead of Adobe. I have no idea if Anthony is still with the company (I don't visit their main website much), but there are numerous factors that could come into their not fixing some bugs. Not that I disagree that there are outstanding bugs out there that I'd wish they'd fix, but you're not taking into account any other factors that could contribute, such as some issues that could be inherited from the operating system or the .NET framework, both of which would be issues with Microsoft and may be beyond MadCap's ability to fix or work around. And things you're reporting as bugs may not be reproducible by MadCap, may require so many man-hours to fix that the ROI is low, is a low priority because few other users have reported the problem, or just can't be fixed at this time.

Again, not saying that there aren't bugs that definitely should be fixed, but MadCap's response to issues is still way faster than many other software companies.

LTinker68 wrote: Again, not saying that there aren't bugs that definitely should be fixed, but MadCap's response to issues is still way faster than many other software companies.

I have a lot of bugs that have been reported and verified by Madcap. However, I also realize that I'm doing DITA which isn't a large percentage of their user-base (same with WebWorks by the way), so when bugs appear and priorities are set, I'm sure DITA bugs get filed a bit further down the list.

Wayne