Robohelp 7 is out

Robohelp 7, the most important release of Robohelp for Adobe is finally released. You can download the latest trial version, the one i am using, from the Adobe Downloads section. It seems like today, is the first time, that the Download trial link works. No reviews for Robohelp 7 or even the Adobe Tech Comms blog has been updated with any information.

It is hoped that Robohelp 7 will let Adobe regain some lost ground to frenetic competition like Author IT, Helpstudio and Madcap Flare which have been really putting on the heat in this market space for this decade old product.

This version finally supports Vista and Office 2007, looking at the What's New
topic in the offline Help section.

I'll be waiting for the reviews for Robohelp 7 to be up soon. But it looks like this is the first post about Robohelp 7. There have been no formal announcements from Adobe yet. Looks like i'll be able to post my impressions on it first. here goes...

My first impressions
Major cosmetic overhaul, with architecture improvements as the team's product manager and adobe blog has probably mentioned before.

• Redesigned installer ( at least from the trial version i have)


• Redesigned launch screen. Very adobe like.


• New help project samples, wow!
  But I think these maybe more for suitable as robohelp product project demos instead of examples of good, usable help files.


• Newly redesigned icons,file type icons, launch screens, very Adobe-like. Looks like they listened to those comments about robohelp 6's dated shareware days look.


• The offline Help file appears to have been rewritten and redesigned.
  Major restyling work. Aesthetically, to be more Adobe like, i presume. Nice. The context sensitve help looks redesigned, brand new and smooth.
  The writers appeared to have some formatting issues with the step numbers after conversion - dog food code?


• Lots of pods (actually these fundamentally provide the same functionality of the previous old panes, except these are removable, draggable like the developer windows in Visual Studio 2005)


• There is a nice Flashhelp Vista Skin in one of the sample projects.


• Lots of dialog boxes have been redesigned, including Options and the Output dialog boxes.


• No more Kadov tags as promised...


• Redesigned HTML code viewer too.


• Native unicode, double byte characters support...finally after ALL these years, i can type Tamil, English and Chinese all in the same project finally.


• Coloured tabbed workspaces. If you mess things up going nuts dragging pods and panes around remember, File - Load Default Environment.


• Single Source layouts.


• User defined variables.


• Version control support with Source Safe 2005. Previous versions needed VSS 6.

There's much more to this release of course, just my first impressions.

In the last 4 years, I've been using versions of Robohelp 2000, X5 and v6. This is an important release from Adobe to take note of.

This is a real poor analogy but...

If Adobe puts gears on this Robohelp thing like Microsoft did for IE 3.0 in 1998, Madcap Flare....