Speed Up Documentation & Lesson Creation With ScreenSteps

Bob Rudis — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:32:07 +0000

Image is everything when preparing application documentation for manuals or creating a lesson for a training class or a self-paced module. An annotated series of screen, window or dialog boxes is much easier to understand than a simple list of actions and OS X users have many tools to choose from, including ScreenSteps 2
(from Blue Mango Learning Systems). ScreenSteps takes a holistic approach to solving the problem of capturing, organizing, annotating and exporting/publishing complete lessons. After starting a “lesson”, screen captures are stored in sequential order. You can begin annotating at any time and add markup/highlights to each step of your lesson as your workflow warrants. The entire lesson project – including all files – is completely managed by ScreenSteps, so no need to gather up all the capture files on your own. Publishing/presenting is a snap with HTML and PDF output options. (Complete details on all application features in All About ScreenSteps 2.)

ScreenSteps goes even further by creating a place to share your work with the community at ScreenSteps Live (something aking to “Flickr for Lessons”). A quick example is this brief lesson on how to create/update a Pages table of contents. Lessons can be tagged (gotta love this semantic web of ours) and can be made private (feature coming soon).

Despite the application being available for both Mac and Windows platforms, the developers did a great job making ScreenSteps 2 “fit in” on both, though they seem to have a definite affinity for OS X.

ScreenSteps 2 comes in Free, Standard ($39.95) and Pro ($59.95) options and ScreenSteps Live is completely free, with a paid/ad-free option coming in the near future.

If you have any experience with ScreenSteps 2 or ScreenSteps Live definitely drop a note in the comments.

[Via Sean Sperte's Geek & Mild blog.]

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Speed Up Documentation & Lesson Creation With ScreenSteps