I’ll be honest, I’ve only recently discovered HTML image maps and it just so happens that there’s a handy tool in Flare for creating them. To me, image maps hark back to a long forgotten time of whacky, off-the-wall web design. You don’t see many examples of them these days. I worry that there is a reason for this I’ve yet to discover. Anyway, here’s how I made some nice interactive images in Flare using HTML image maps and some JQuery plugins.

Making the switch from an On-Premise product to a Software as a Service (SaaS) product has its challenges for technical teams, but there are also things to consider when it comes to Documentation.

Collaboration is one of the challenges tech writers face. I avoid using MS Word as Word docs tend to pick up formatting issues as they skip from one individual to another. Confluence has become a powerful tool for colaboration, and with wiki pages, you get a nice, simple WYSIWYG editor. I find myself collaborating a lot through wiki pages and I wanted to be able to copy text from a wiki directly into Flare.

The Problem:

Recently, I found myself documenting a browser UI. The devs provided a nice test environment for me to play around with and take screenshots etc. The problem was, they had named my test user ‘Chris’. Real names don’t belong in documentation these days, for data protection reasons. But I think it looks better to have generic names like, Administrator or Username.