DocGuy Training

Yesterday I posted on Flare V4.1 being released by MadCap software. I installed it yesterday afternoon, and it finished just before I left for the day. This morning, I’ve been in planning meetings, so I haven’t had a chance to use new version, however, during my meeting, I was browsing the MadCap forums, and it appears that several users are having trouble with 4.1, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, I recommend you hold off for a couple of days and see what happens.

Forum users are reporting that they get unhandled exception errors when they open projects, but even more alarmingly, they report that text that is added to a <span> disappears from the editor and all output. Most of these users report rolling back to 4.0, so again, if you haven’t made the switch, you may want to wait until some of these early issues are resolved.

Let’s just hope that MadCap issues a different version number for the release, so Support will be able to tell which version users have installed. I remember an update a while back where MadCap updated a recent release, but didn’t change the version number, so it was hard to know which version customers were using.

And lets hope for a quick fix. I believe MadCap will be able to do it. They respond better than any company I’ve ever worked with. They’ll get this under control, and you can benefit from the newest Flare enhancements very soon.

EDIT (12/4/08): For what it is worth, I can’t duplicate either problem in my instance of V4.1, so I’m leaving 4.1 installed. Proceed at your own risk. If you’ve got a project due in the next couple of days, you might want to wait. If you aren’t under a pressing deadline, install it and see if it works for you. The problems reported certainly aren’t universal, so they may (or may not) apply to you.