Filed under: Macworld, Software
ScreenSteps
The best part of Macworld, aside from the various TUAW groupies, is getting exposed to apps that I had no idea even existed. It is an even sweeter experience when the newly discovered app is actually useful to me. That's definitely the case with ScreenSteps. This little gem of an app makes creating documentation a breeze and I can see it soon becoming a very valuable arrow in my blogging quiver.Imagine you need to make a walk-through showing someone how to turn on a feature in Safari. Normally you would need a screen capturing app, a text editor, a image editor, and Safari running to get this done. Lots of switching back and forth, and lots of time later you have what you wanted. Enter ScreenSteps. It is smart enough to watch your clipboard for any screen grabs you make, and it enters them in a document. Just snap away, switch to ScreenSteps when you're done and there are all your shots waiting for you to type in some text. ScreenSteps also has some rudimentary image editing, and a host of graphics you can add to your images (to circle buttons and what have you).
Once you have this ScreenSteps document you now need a way to share it with folks. You can export it either as a PDF, as valid HTML (with templates that you can customize), or share it on ScreenStep's hosted service.
ScreenSteps comes in two flavors: regular goes for $39.95 while the Pro version that lets you create an index that lets you group together a number of ScreenSteps documents will set you back $59.95 (a full comparison can be found here).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Simon Arch said 6:17PM on 1-16-2008
Man, where were these guys when I was making user tutorials at Earthlink?
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mentalsticks said 6:26PM on 1-16-2008
that's the great thing about the Mac's shareware community: lots of great, specialized apps for anything.
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Carl said 1:55AM on 1-17-2008
This is genius! I'm definitely going to be buying this (I've got a whole bunch of documentation / help files to write). This will definitely be saving me time.
I love it.
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KiltBear said 2:51PM on 1-17-2008
$40 to save yourself from having to drag serially number pictures sitting on your desktop (cmd-shft-4) into a word processing document? No thanks.
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Esvenson said 9:06PM on 1-17-2008
I just downloaded and it captured one screen, and then fritzed out. In fact, the web page with their tutorial went down. I deleted the program so that in the future I won't wonder what it was supposed to do. Too bad. I would have liked this if it worked.
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Trevor DeVore said 11:38AM on 1-18-2008
Hi - Thanks for downloading and trying it out and I apologize for the trouble. We aren't aware of any issues with the online manual or the screencasts page. Were you seeing some kind of error message on the site or would it just not load?
Also, I realize it isn't your job to figure out why the software or website didn't work but if it isn't too much trouble we would appreciate hearing about the problems you experienced at support@screensteps.com so we can fix any issues.
Trevor DeVore said 2:12AM on 1-19-2008
We checked our web logs and it looks like our web server got a little overwhelmed with all of the screencast requests the day this was posted. That may explain why the video wasn't loading for you. We have moved the screencasts to S3 now so hopefully there won't be any issues in the future.