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Subject:RE: RoboHelp vs Flare From:<laura_johnson -at- agilent -dot- com> To:<Megan -dot- Bruce -at- us -dot- bosch -dot- com>, <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:11:59 -0700
I switched from RoboHelp to Flare several years ago, and like Flare much better. The use model is cleaner and makes more sense to me, there seem to be fewer bugs, the support and discussion forums are excellent.
It's also worth knowing a bit about the history of the product. RoboHelp was sold or transferred from one company to another several times before landing at Adobe. In the course of those transfers, most of the RoboHelp development team was shaken loose (laid off or quit), and they formed Flare. Flare is a reimplementation of RoboHelp, in a sense, wherein the dev team got to fix the problems they'd become aware of and modernize the architecture and implementation of the software. Meantime, RoboHelp languished with scarcely any enhancements for several years. What this suggests to me is that RoboHelp's internals are old, crufty, hard to enhance, and supported by relative newbies, whereas Flare is a new architecture supported by devs who are both experienced and excited about the product. (I've met some of them at WritersUA and they do seem energetic and charged up about Flare.) Mind you, that's a subjective opinion fed by a bunch of assumptions, but if I'm right, it means that Flare will get new features faster and will be stabler (less buggy) over time - the payoff of better software architecture.
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