I start­ed using FrameMak­er 6.0 back in the late 1990s. For many years, the new ver­sions of Frame seemed, well, bor­ing. Espe­cial­ly when you com­pared it to oth­er tools like Dreamweaver.

FrameMak­er 10 is dif­fer­ent. Released a cou­ple of weeks ago, I found the pre­view video almost excit­ing. With more and more peo­ple watch­ing online videos (think YouTube) and few­er peo­ple read­ing, Adobe appears to have rec­og­nized that even tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could use some pizzazz.

The lat­est ver­sion of FrameMak­er enables writ­ers to embed online videos or online demon­stra­tions dur­ing author­ing. This dynam­ic con­tent will then play in the final PDF.

What’s the ben­e­fit to tech­ni­cal writ­ers? It makes it eas­i­er to deliv­er doc­u­men­ta­tion that offers mixed media. For exam­ple, a hard­ware writer can write how to repair a part using the old stand­by: sta­t­ic pro­ce­dur­al con­tent. But he or she can now also add a 3D mod­el of the part that can be zoomed in on, spun around, and even pulled apart by a click of the user’s mouse.

Soft­ware writ­ers can also ben­e­fit from Frame 10. Writ­ers can aug­ment a pro­ce­dure with a relat­ed Cap­ti­vate video on the same page.
For users, this type of tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could make things clear­er and def­i­nite­ly more engaging.

I know what you might thinking—these online videos and 3D mod­els are not exact­ly easy or quick to pro­duce. True. But if you’re lucky enough to already have online demos and mod­els and you’re upgrad­ing to Frame 10, I think this is def­i­nite­ly worth exploring.