MadCap Blaze

[quills at airmail.net]

I have been waiting with baited breath ever since the rumors of MadCap Blaze came forth, that a replacement to 
FrameMaker was in the works. I just downloaded the public beta.

Has anyone else done so? If so I wonder if anyone else shares my disappointment.

Blaze appears to be a variant of Flare. It isn't an authoring tool so much as a conversion tool. It seems not to know 
if its main thrust is HTML or XML, and it seems to lean heavily toward HTML.

I think that this product sufferes from delusions of adequacy. I am not a fan of MadCap Flare, it's interface is 
convoluted and difficult to master, and those same features have been duplicated for Blaze. I really don't see much 
difference between the two products.

Now I see that the printed media solution is Press. 

It makes me wonder if MadCap is trying to emulate the Interleaf model, multiple products for a single solution. 
Mulitple prices for a single solution. Interleaf at the very least produced solid SGML. It had a fairly good GUI and 
method for assigning formatting tags. FrameMaker was simplier, monolithic and cheaper.

With what MadCap is doing they seem bent on producing a series of products that are more complicated, and more 
expensive than FrameMaker and any other conversion tool with it.

Does anyone else have a simliar view of this, or a different experience?

It feels like Blue Sky happening all over again.

Scott
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