MadCap Flare succeeds RoboHelp

At the STC Toronto meeting of March 13, we were fortunate to have Mike Hamilton of MadCap describing the history of MadCap Flare development.

Mike Hamilton is the Vice President of Product Management at MadCap Software where he is working on the next generation authoring tool, Flare. Before joining MadCap Software, he was the Product Manager for the RoboHelp product line since the days of Blue Sky Software, eHelp, and Macromedia. His background is in technical communication and he cares about quality.

After Macromedia bought Blue Sky Software and its flagship product, Robohelp, support for the product gradually decreased. One of the genius programmers who was laid off in the first wave started to work on a new product, written in a new language. After the rest of the team were laid off, they decided to start over and they found their wandering genius and his new product, which eventually became Flare. Flare is written in C# and stores everything in XML so that no database is needed.

He described the help authoring and documentation tool from MadCap Software called Flare. Flare is a new single-sourcing, authoring tool that empowers technical writers, help content authors, and other documentation professionals to compose content in XML format without requiring any knowledge of the XML language or XML. It is extremely flexible and has overcome some of RoboHelp’s old weaknesses.

Flare is going to be a powerful tool for content management and single-sourcing. Just one of the little things it lets you do is export from the help files back to FrameMaker.

Skeptics Circle #56 at Scientia Natura

Visit Shalini at Scientia Natura for Skeptics’ Circle 56, The Credulity of the Masses.

New big cat species: Bornean Clouded Leopard

The first new species of big cat in 200 years has been identified. Genetic analysis shows that the clouded leopard of Borneo is a different species from others, having separated about 1.4 million years ago. The new leopard will be called Neofelis diardi. Genetically, it is a different from its cousins as the lion is from the tiger.

Clouded leopards, found in China, Nepal and northeast India, were described in 1821 by the British naturalist Edward Griffiths and were the last of the big cats to be discovered.

Stalk-eyed flies

A propos of PZ Myers detailed post about the embryonic development of stalk-eyed flies, I’m linking to Rob Knell’s page of Diopsid images.

Fly phylogeny

These three scientists

• David K. Yeates, CSIRO Entomology PO Box 1700 Canberra AUSTRALIA
• Rudolf Meier, Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, SINGAPORE
• Brian Wiegmann, Department of Entomology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC USA

Have published FLYTREE, an online phylogeny of the true flies. Their introduction states:

The insect order Diptera (true flies) is one of the most species rich, anatomically varied and ecologically innovative groups of organisms, making up around 12% of the known animal species. An estimated 125,000 species of Diptera have been described, however, the total number of extant fly species is many times greater. The living dipteran species have been classified into about 10,000 genera, 150 families, 22-32 superfamilies, 8-10 infraorders and 2 suborders (Yeates & Wiegmann, 1999). The monophyly of Diptera is well established. Hennig (1973) lists 37 autapomorphies some of which form morphologically complex structures such as the specialized mouthparts adapted for sponging liquids.

They also have pictures, species highlights, morphology, terminology, and useful links to sites such as Diptera.