Technically Speaking

TechSmith corporation has released an update to Jing, the free screen capture/video capture tool. I ranted in January about a code change in that release that really bugged me. TechSmith responded here on my blog, and via e-mail, and today’s update addresses that issue (thank you TechSmith!) but introduces a couple more issues for me. But lets take them one at a time.

First, my original complaint with the January update was that when you created videos with small pixel dimensions (because you don’t want to capture the whole screen), when somebody tries to view the video directly (not embedded in a web page), the video expanded to the full screen.

This was a problem for me because one of the VPs in my company has a 30″ screen. If I’ve grabbed a video of a bug that happens in our software, and attach it to the bug report, when the VP tries to view the video of the bug, it is expanded something like 10x its captured size, which is hard to follow and looks terrible.

The release of Jing I installed today fixes that issue! Now when you directly view a Jing SWF file (say it is attached to the bug and the developer clicks on it to view it), small videos don’t expand to the width of the screen. Large videos do, but I can’t figure out where the breaking point is. And frankly, I’m okay with that. It was my small videos (in terms of pixel dimensions) that I was concerned about. So, a big thank you to TechSmith for listening and taking swift action on this issue.

My only gripes, and these are minor, are that first,  I wish the control bar that is added to the SWF file was placed below the capture region, instead on top of the bottom part of the capture region. Take this video for example.

Is there a reason that the controls cover up the bottom part of the captured image? If so, you ought to warn us that the bottom part won’t be visible, so we know to grab a taller portion.

My second gripe is that when I updated to the latest version, Jing lost all my button customizations. I had created several buttons to directly FTP content to my web server in a particular folder, or other buttons to save files on the network share in a specific folder. I’m going to have to remember what those were and re-create the buttons. In the first place, Jing shouldn’t have deleted these, and in the second place, if Jing really needed to delete these when it upgraded, it should have warned me first so that I was at least aware that I was going to lose my user-configured settings.

However, when I updated my second computer, these settings were saved. So there is a chance that this was user error, because for one computer it works like I want it to, but for the other one, it deleted my custom buttons. Ah well.

So my final review in a nutshell: great update, especially if you capture small pixel dimension videos. Great job TechSmith. Be aware, however, that the upgrade *might* totally erase all your custom buttons. Probably it won’t. Unless you do whatever it was I did. Anyway, thanks TechSmith!

I have an evaluation copy of MadCap’s forthcoming release of Capture 4. Stay tuned and I’ll give you an review in a day or two!

Users of MadCap Flare were greeted in their e-mail inboxes today with the announcement of an update to Flare V4.2. If you missed it, it might be because it was buried in a message about the new Feedback Server 2 that is now available. To get all the benefits from Feedback Server 2, you have to upgrade to Flare 4.2. That said, I’m not a Feedback user, so I don’t have a lot to comment about on that front. Instead, I’ll focus on some major improvements in Flare 4.2 that make this upgrade a “must.” The major enhancements that I’ve found so far include:

• Dramatically faster build time for PDF targets
• Smaller file sizes for PDF targets
• Auto Save

Dramatically faster build time for PDF targets

The first thing I noticed when I built a PDF target using Flare 4.2 was how fast it was.  I’ve commented in the past about how important hardware is in getting the best build time from a Flare project, but I’ve become accustomed to the build time for my hardware set. Last week in Flare 4.1 I build three PDF targets, then I re-built them in 4.2.  Here is a break down:

So, a group of targets that were taking me a total time of more than 20 minutes to build now build in less than 5 minutes. That is a significant improvement.

Smaller file sizes for PDF targets

The next thing I noticed when I built a PDF target was how the file sizes are dramatically smaller now. This is another place that 4.2 shows huge strides. Check out these file size comparisons between 4.1 outputs and 4.2 outputs from my current project:

There are going to be a lot of happy customers when they see this! My three PDFs used to exceed 50 MB in size (added to our project’s already large download file). Now these same files only take up less than 10 MB in size. Wow.

Auto Save

MadCap has finally introduced a feature that is sure to please long time Flare users: Auto Save. You can set Auto Save in the Tools | Options setting. When enabled, by default, Flare will auto save your topics every 10 minutes. I set mine to five. Back when I was using Flare 3, this would have been huge, huge, huge, because I had serious stability problems with Flare (due to some problems with my computer, it crashed at least once per day). I now have a different system, and combined with my Flare 4 upgrade, I’ve had a serious improvement in application stability. I don’t think Flare crashed even once on me during all of January.

Auto Save is a fantastic improvement, but I’m even more thrilled with the overall stability of Flare, which seems to be much better in the V4 line than it was in the V3 line. But if you’re stuck with some kind of problem like I had on my old machine where some conflict causes Flare to be unstable for you, then you’ll really get bang for your buck for this feature. (Especially since it is a free upgrade for all Flare V4 users.)

Conclusion

I am thrilled with this release of Flare. The improvements for my projects are significant, and I’m not even a Feedback customer. If you are a Flare 4 user, upgrade today. If you aren’t a Flare 4 user, what are you waiting for? Join us in the 21st century. You’ll be glad you did!

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Disclaimer: If you aren’t aware, I’m a Flare Certified Trainer, and have been certified MAD (MadCap Advanced Developer). I’m also a MadCap MVP  (volunteer administrator) in the MadCap forums. I’m an avid Flare user and advocate, but not a MadCap employee.

TechSmith produces a couple of tools that are important in my tech writing workflow including Snagit (probably the best stand-alone screen capture software available, in my opinion) and Jing (a simple program for sharing quick screen captures and screencasts (video).

I complained last week about Jing’s latest release, and how when I capture small videos and play the SWF file directly, the video scales to the browser viewport size. So videos that I had captured at 300×200 pixels were being displayed six times their size in my web browser, and like 10 times their size on my boss’s monitor.

I’ve had an extended conversation with TechSmith’s support department over this issue, and then yesterday I received an e-mail from a developer who is working to resolve the problem.

We’ve now written back and forth a couple of times, discussing ideas to resolve the problem.

I’ll wait until the next release of Jing to decide what I think about this whole issue, but I wanted you to know that what I think TechSmith is getting right, so far, is  how they are handling my complaint. I feel like my concern has been not only heard, but is being acted upon.

In the end, TechSmith will have to make a decision on how to proceed based on what they think is best. But at least I know that my voice has been heard and considered.

Thanks, TechSmith.

You’ve heard me say it before, and you’ll hear me say it again: I really like MadCap Software. In case you just joined us, MadCap produces my main authoring tool, MadCap Flare. I use Flare to create single-sourced online and printed help for a variety of products.

Several times every week, I will be working on documentation, and I’ll use a feature in Flare (for example, conditional snippets), and I stop and literally say, “Wow. I love Flare.”

Now, you might expect a MadCap MVP (i.e. volunteer forum moderator) and a MadSkills Certified Trainer (which isn’t my day job) to like the company that produces the software. I’ll admit I have a bias. But I became a MVP because I loved the software enough to contribute to the MadCap forums regularly. Then I was invited to join the MVP group. And I didn’t set out to be a Trainer. MadCap actually contacted me, because they know how much I know about and like Flare, to see if I could pick up a training session that the other trainers were unavailable to take.

In any case, when I see a blog entry like this, I have to be even more grateful for the fantastic people in MadCap’s support department. In the post, MK Anderson talks about an unresolved customer service incident with Adobe that has been going on since August (4+ months!). And we’re not talking a complex custom feature request. We’re talking about getting a valid product key, even for a newly upgraded product.

I compare that to the customer service I’ve personally received from MadCap software, and the comparison is stunning. I have bronze-level support from MadCap. Yet, several times, MadCap has CALLED ME on the phone to better understand a technical problem I’ve reported. All my support requests have been resolved within a few days (though some of the resolutions were “we’ve filed a bug” — which is all you an say for some issues). MadCap Support doesn’t give up on difficult to find issues; once there was a bug being reported by a couple of customers, but MadCap couldn’t track it down. They worked with the few customers reporting the issue until we discovered repeatable steps to encounter the issue, then they fixed it that same day. Try getting that kind of support from Adobe.

So here is a shout out to all the fabulous people at MadCap Support. Thanks guys for a job well done! You are a big, big part of what makes using MadCap software a great experience.