I’ve got some bad news if you’re a die-hard RoboHelper. No, Adobe isn’t shelving RoboHelp, nor are they reintroducing kadov tags.

I’m being switched to Flare.

Once you’ve come out of cardiac arrest, let me explain.

I’ve said before that I’m not married to any particular tool; I don’t carry around a sign or a mentality that says, “If you don’t use RoboHelp, go jump off a bridge!” The whole HAT wars thing is a bit tiresome. I don’t have any particular feeling toward Adobe, though I’ve heard their customer support leaves something to be desired. And MadCap’s idea of what qualifies as a separate software application bothers me. But they haven’t committed some personal offense against me. (Though back when I evaluated Flare v1 and received a call from MadCap, the person sounded a little offended that I declined to purchase it.)

Taking HAT wars a little too seriously?

So since I don’t have some conflict of interest, it comes down to the tools themselves—and what our team is doing. We just hired two new User Education team members, and one is Flare MVP Paul Pehrson, AKA DocGuy. He sits next to me, and in a discussion about Flare that he and another colleague had the other day, let me tell you that the dude knows what he’s talking about. He told me he hasn’t used RoboHelp. The other new guy has used both and prefers Flare. And Tom Johnson is already using it.

Our manager thus made an executive decision as managers will, and we’re all getting some Flare licenses. My help and possibly other documentation projects going forward (except quick reference guides) will be done in Flare, and some of my existing projects can move over fairly easily, I think. The only problem seems to be a couple of context-sensitive help projects. It would take a refactor of the help calls in the respective applications because I’m pretty sure Flare’s CSH doesn’t use a JavaScript function called “RH_ShowHelp.”

I imagine John Daigle and Rick Stone will be sad to hear about this switch, though I talked to John about the issue once, and he agreed with me that you choose the tool that gets the job done for you. I’ve been a member of the RoboHelp forums since September of 2005 and have five hundred some-odd posts under my belt (and here, you thought it was too much fast food). It seems a little ironic that just today, I was pointing someone in the forums to my Adobe Devnet article on managing localized projects in RoboHelp 8. Of course, a guy can (should?) be knowledgeable in multiple competing tools.

When my colleagues were talking about Flare that day, they joked that it must be hard for me to hear them. I quoted Charlie Brown: “I can’t stand it! I just can’t stand it!” But in reality, I look at it as a reason to learn another tool. I doubt I’ll become a regular participant in the Flare forums both because I’ve got quick access to DocGuy’s brain and because that niche is probably well filled. When I was getting confident in using RoboHelp, you had Rick Stone and with thousands of posts and a couple others with a few hundred (Colum “Not Colin” McAndrew is another contributor), but not much in between. Mostly, people go there to get answers and never become regular contributors. I understand if they’re too busy or lack confidence in their familiarity with the software. I have an interest in helping people that goes beyond just writing help text for a living. So I subscribed by email to certain forums and started answering questions.

Really, the reason I started with RoboHelp in the first place is that the original plan for the project I was hired to work on was to use the Flash-driven site map for context-sensitive help. But it turned out that the site map wasn’t robust enough for what we wanted to do that RH offered out of the box, and the Flash developer who had put it together wasn’t on the project anymore. A related app had a RoboHelp system, and there was an available license, so I went with it.

I’ll say once again that I have no interest in being a private or anything higher in the HAT wars. When you like a product so much that you start to think it’s a one-size-fits-all solution for everything including window washing and world peace, it’s time to take a step back. And don’t get me started on the concept of product evangelists.

Okay, Flare, you’re on. Impress me.

Did this post seem like a lot of name-dropping? Not intentional.

Related entries (auto-generated):

RoboHelp and Flare: Room at the Table

A Little More about RoboHelp and Flare

The Technical Communicator Getting Involved in User Forums

How a Team Member Woke Me up to Snippets

Help Security: An Elusive Team Standard