Manula Changelog: What's New in the Manula software (Page 19)

We’ve upgrade our server hardware today, resulting in better performance of both the Manula admin system and the live manuals.

Tech blog addictivetips.com has published a Manula review and handy quick start guide.

Abhishek Katariya of ilovefreesoftware.com has written a nice review, which includes a complete step-by-step how-to guide for creating a manula with our Manula software.

A screen shot from his how-to guide:

Abhishek’s conclusion:

The Manula website is a great service for publishing an online manual. The interface is really easy to understand. However, if you want to publish more than one manual then you have to subscribe for more manuals. Based on the features and neat work, you should try Manula website to publish your own manual.

Read the full how-to and review here.

Manula was “scooped” by Robin Good today, on his scoop.it! Web Publishing Tools page.

Here’s what Robin said about Manula:

Manula is a web-based service which allows you to create professional-looking manuals and PDF guides with maximum ease and simplicity.

Manula delivers what it promises. Reliable and easy editing and maintenance of multimedia manuals that need to be published to the web or via PDF and that can be seen across any device. If I had to mention a better alternative for non-tech users, that had no download, and that was as easy to learn or adopt, I would be in difficulty in suggesting one.

Read the full review here.

Another review on a Spanish site, this time on targetpyme.com

Quote:

Aplicación para crear manuales y documentación virtuales
Con la aplicación de Manula, es posible escribir manuales con alto contenido multimedia y elegante diseño, publicarlos online y realizar seguimiento a las lecturas por parte de los usuarios.
También permite disponer de toda la documentación creada en formato PDF.

Read the full review here.

Today Manula was reviewed by Juan David Quiñónez on the Spanish technology website wwwhatsnew.com.

A quote:

Un detalle al que deben dar bastante importancia los desarrolladores en sus creaciones es lograr mantener la documentación suficiente y de fácil entendimiento tanto para otros desarrolladores como para el público en general que finalmente será el que definirá el éxito o fracaso de sus aplicaciones. Así, para ayudar en esta tediosa pero imprescindible tarea donde se combinan calidad y cuidado, aparece un servicio llamado Manula con el que será posible escribir manuales con alto contenido multimedia y elegante diseño, publicarlos online y realizar seguimiento a las lecturas por parte de los usuarios.

Manula is a generic tool for creating online manuals, help files, handbooks, etc.. of any kind.
However, being software developers ourselves, we initially created the Manula application with commercial product manuals in mind, either for software or for physical products.

Public access or restricted access?

In general, if you’re making a manual for a commercial product, you want your manual to be publicly accessible for all users of your product. So that is what the first version of Manula did: make your manual publicly accessible online. That is, accessible for anyone on the internet.

But for many types of manuals, that is not desirable. For instance, if you’re using Manula to create an employee handbook, you probably want this handbook accessible for your employees only. The same holds for all kinds of policy and procedure manuals. You don’t want these readable by anyone online. You want to provide restricted access to those manuals, that is, only to the people who need to see them.

After we heard about the need for “restricted access” from several of our customers and trial users, we got to work and introduced “Private Manuals”.

An interactive online manual is great for most situations, but still, some users just like to download the full manual to their local computer. Maybe because they want to be able to access the manual while offline, or maybe they just prefer to read a PDF manual on their iPad, etc…

So when we created Manula, we knew the first version just had to include some kind of downloadable PDF option, some way to generate a PDF version and offer it to manual readers as a download. Which is exactly what we did for “version 1.0”.

Hi there!

Just a quick post to let you know that today we have introduced a new free subscription plan, that replaces the 30-day trial.

This free, never expiring, subscription plan allows:

• 1 online manual
• 1 author
• a maximum of 20 topics
• NO version management
• NO localization support

We have upgraded all existing free trial accounts to the new free account, so that they will never expire.

( BTW: while you’re on the free plan, you can create multiple manuals, with multiple versions, in multiple languages, but you can only publish your first manual and version, in your default language.
This way you can try out all features of the paid plans before upgrading. )

Let me tell you something about the history of Manula, about how I (Alwin) ended up creating this tool for online help and manuals.

Well, like many software ideas, it started with a problem I was running into myself, at my other software company Collectorz.com.

At Collectorz.com, we create personal collection database software. That is, software for cataloging home collections of movies, books, music, comic books and video games.

We started out creating downloadable desktop software for Windows and Mac, but currently we also offer web-based editions and mobile apps for iOS and Android.
And all those software titles need manuals…