Yesterday's announcement about RoboHelp 6 has spawned multiple emails to different lists and several blog entries because of the version number. So I went looking in my favorite spot for RoboHelp release information, Rick Stone's RoboWizard.

Combined with my memory (which, granted, has some holes sometimes), I now present the following information.

RoboHelp version 8, also known as RoboHelp 2000, was released in...yeah, 2000. I remember this version well, because I wrote a book for Sam's Publishing in 1999 called "Teach Yourself RoboHELP 2000 for HTML Help". It was released early in 2000, right after the software itself.

RoboHelp 7 was released in January, 1999. This is another version I remember well, because we started 1998 with RoboHelp 5. In 13 months, Blue Sky Software released RoboHelp 5, 5.5, 6 (there it is!), and 7. It was hell being a RoboHelp trainer that year, because we were all updating our materials every 2.5 months trying to keep up.

I don't know why Adobe dropped the "X". After all, it's a lot easier to refer to X5 as opposed to RoboHelp Office X5. We can't just refer to "6" and hope that folks actually know what we're talking about. I'm thinking that maybe marketing got involved...by calling it "RoboHelp 6", they've just about guaranteed that the tool name will also be included.

It's just a thought ;-)

Sarah O'Keefe posted a message at Palimpsest about MonkeyPi's review of RoboHelp 6. (She also had some interesting comments on RoboHelp itself, like its lack of XML, and about Adobe and their marketing department. I love reading Sarah's blog.)

So I headed over to MonkeyPi to see what was going on. And MP is obviously on many of the email lists I subscribe to, and obviously gets many of the same RSS feeds that I do, because the entry started by talking about yesterday's deluge because of RoboHelp 6's release.

And my blog entry from yesterday is mentioned at the start of the second paragraph. "One blogger I really respect claimed, "Congratulations to Adobe for getting this out technically ahead of time!". First, thanks for the compliment, MP :-) But second...what I said didn't mean that it's a great, good, or bad product. It means that Adobe beat the estimated delivery date by months (depending on who you believe, RoboHelp was supposed to be released by either the end of March or the end of June of this year. Or maybe never.).

The thing is, I...um...well, I can't actually provide a review of RoboHelp 6 just yet. I was on the beta list, and did a little bit with it when the beta was first released. But then I kinda committed the unpardonable sin of updating my software ;-) Yep, I upgraded to Office 2007...and couldn't get the later betas to install. I haven't been in the mood to install Office 2003 again and now it doesn't matter, given that the beta is no longer.

It's too bad that the kadov tags are still around. Personally, I'd like to see a version of RoboHelp that uses DreamWeaver as its editor, but I was saying that when Macromedia bought eHelp.

We're going to see more information on RoboHelp 6 in the upcoming weeks. Techshoret is holding their TCC conference in Israel tomorrow, and both Rick Stone and Peter Grainge are giving presentations. Others who were beta testers will start using RoboHelp for real projects.

And folks will post more questions about RoboHelp on HATT and TCP and TechWhirl again. The difference is, now folks will be talking/asking/complaining about RoboHelp 6 (where'd the X go, anyway?), instead of talking/asking/complaining about RoboHelp X5.

Life goes on.