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Daily Mac App: Clarify
We're unabashed fans of the folks at Blue Mango Learning Systems; in fact, we did a video introduction to their flagship product, ScreenSteps, after we met with them at Macworld Expo 2008. ScreenSteps has saved countless hours of effort in quickly developing software documentation, but the Blue Mango team realized that it may be overkill for streamlined communications aimed at reducing the frequency of roundtrip email exchanges. That's the origin story of the new Clarify, a simplified take on screenshot-driven document creation that's meant to help everyone deliver clear and easy-to-understand instructions with a minimum of effort. The app is about as simple as can be: take a screenshot or series of screenshots as you walk through your process, then document them with as little or as much detail as you need. You can export to PDF with a single click, save your instructions to Dropbox for third-party review, or upload to the free Clarify-It web service. If you're already a ScreenSteps user, you'll be pretty comfortable with Clarify. It adds a few niceties (a menu-bar screenshot tool, highlight and border controls) while dispensing with the document library and workgroup editing features. It also drops the automatic capture of clipboard screenshots, which I regret; that's one of my favorite ScreenSteps tricks. Still, the Clarify UI is nice and clean, and it's easy to create solid documents in very short order. You can copy and paste your instructions as RTF for use with Word, Evernote or other destinations. If you need to include real-world images (versus screenshots) in your instructions -- say, to help rental tenants find climate controls or light switches in an apartment -- drag the pictures from the Finder, iPhoto or Aperture right into your Clarify document. Clarify is available as a 14-day trial and can be purchased direct or via the Mac App Store. Normal pricing is $29.99 for a single-platform license (Mac or PC), $39.99 for both platforms; however, through October 19 there's a $10 discount offer available. It's true, you could certainly make similar screenshot-driven instructions with Word or Pages, but if you spend any substantial fraction of your time describing tasks step-by-step you can save yourself aggravation and effort by giving Clarify a shot. If you think you need the power of ScreenSteps instead, the base license is $39.95.
ScreenSteps 2.8.7, documentation gets social
ScreenSteps, an app for creating screen-based documentation and a TUAW favorite, has just released a pretty big update and a brand-new social document service called ScreenSteps.me. The desktop update includes, among other improvements, a totally-rewritten screen capture tool that makes the documentation process quite a bit simpler. The coolest part of the new screen capture tool is the ability to remember snapshot positions. If you're repeatedly taking screenshots of the same window or the same section of a web page, you can grab the exact same part of your screen each time. This not only saves time, it gives your documentation more uniform images, improving clarity. Among the other new features is a blur tool in the image editor, perfect for obscuring email addresses and personal information in screenshots. Also, ScreenSteps has added Zendesk as a service with which it can directly interface (the list already included WordPress, MindTouch, Confluence and others). ScreenSteps.me, in beta right now, is a social document service, similar to Skitch.com or Jing, but for documentation. Send a lesson directly from the desktop application and get back a short url and/or styled or unstyled HTML, ready for pasting on the web. It's simple, and it's great for everything from sharing on Twitter to posting to Basecamp or HTML newsletters. You can sign up for the ScreenSteps.me beta right now for free, and you can download a 14-day trial of ScreenSteps Desktop at Blue Mango. A license for the desktop version (good for both Mac and Windows) is US$39.95 for standard, US$79.95 for the Pro version (version comparison). Academic pricing is available.
Blue Mango delivers rapidfire documentation for iPad apps
We admit it, we have a soft spot for ScreenSteps. Ever since we first met the Blue Mango team three Macworld Expos ago (at the urging of TUAW veteran Laurie Duncan), we've been big fans of their intuitive, cross-platform, and dependable little documentation system. It's not so little anymore, either; the most recent updates have added direct support for blogging platforms like WordPress, Movable Type, and Squarespace, and publishing options for Confluence and Google Sites. Now the DeVore brothers have taken the power of ScreenSteps and applied it to a current documentation challenge: creating accessible, comprehensible guides for iPad applications. Their new site, ipad.screensteps.com, is a repository for step-by-step task guides for several of Apple's apps; they plan to add more guides in short order. The idea is to give users a handy resource, while demonstrating for iPad developers that there's an easy way to create and host this type of how-to material. It's a small collection now, but as it grows, perhaps you'll find something to supplement Apple's PDF and iPad-format documentation, and the help files of third-party developers.
One Shots: Enchanted dryad grotto
The weekends are excellent times for roaming around new areas that haven't been seen and taking on new challenges. Sometimes you can find yourself in beautiful areas such as the one from today's EverQuest II screenshot. This image, sent in to us by Imtithal from the Nagafen server, is of an area that only shows up once a month. Imtithal writes in: This is a screenshot of Enchanted Dryad Grotto in EverQuest II. The grotto comes from a two-day monthly event called Moonlight Enchantments where small solo instances are opened around the game's world. They have quick quests which enable you to get tokens to buy fluff items like furniture. Have you found an uncommon sight in your favorite MMO? We'd love to see it! All you have to do to share it is to email a screenshot of it to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, the name of the game, and a quick description. We'll post it out here for everyone to enjoy and give you the credit for sending it in. %Gallery-9798%
ScreenSteps 2.7 preview and some Holiday savings
We've mentioned ScreenSteps from Blue Mango Learning Systems before. A few times, actually. Version 2.7 is coming up quickly, and it's going to have some great new features. There's also a sale this week that I thought was worth mentioning, check the end of the post for details on that. First, a recap. ScreenSteps is one of the best ways I've found to quickly create documentation for screen-based projects, whether it's company software, a CMS admin panel, or anything else you can document with screenshots. More recent versions of ScreenSteps can embed video, as well. You just snap a screenshot or screencast segment and add markup (arrows, highlights, sequence numbers, etc.) using the built-in tools. ScreenSteps handles creating lessons and manuals which can be templated and output to PDF, HTML, sent directly to a blog or wiki, or hosted online at ScreenSteps Live, where you can maintain a constantly-updated manual for company/client reference. Version 2.7 of ScreenSteps desktop is going to have a couple of shiny new features. The first one I'll mention is aesthetic, but a welcome addition: drop shadows. Markup elements added to screenshots now have the option to include a drop shadow underneath them. This is not just better looking; it helps to call out the markup in a way that clearly distinguishes it from the screenshot itself. I got a chance to test this in private beta, and am pleasantly surprised at what a difference it makes. The other new feature, and potentially a very useful one in many situations, is the ability to copy a lesson directly to the clipboard (video preview here), ostensibly with an email as a target, though the possibilities are a little wider than that. Blue Mango hopes to be able to open the beta to the public in the next few weeks so you can try it out for yourself. Now, the sale. It's billed by Blue Mango as "The Sale that Goes Stale" and, as you might guess from the moniker, it decreases in value over the course of this week. Monday and Tuesday you can get 40% off of any purchase (including ScreenSteps Live accounts). On Wednesday it drops to a still-a-hefty-discount 30% savings. By Thursday it's down to 20%, and Friday, it's leftovers ... 10% off. Stop by the store to check prices on the desktop version ($39.95US-$79.95US, academic pricing available), and ScreenSteps live accounts ($19US/mo-$285/mo). Use the coupon THANKS at checkout to take advantage of the savings.
ScreenSteps Pro adds video embedding and Pages/Word export
ScreenSteps 2.6 is out, and has added two very useful features: the ability to export to Microsoft Word or Pages, and the ability to embed videos into your documents for online publication. We've covered this screen-based documentation application since its initial release, and it continues to be a personal favorite for me and an incredibly efficient way to create and maintain documentation for clients, employees and users. The video embedding is a huge deal for my workflow. I've found through years of working with clients that a PDF or online document and a video serve two very different audiences. Some folks, myself included, have a learning style that does not work with video tutorials. We require text and examples we can scan, search and bookmark. The other half are in a reverse situation; videos jibe with their learning style, but pages of text just cause a logjam in their brains. Ultimately, because I can rarely predict the learning style of a client, I end up creating both; documenting a procedure step-by-step, and then demonstrating it while I record the screen, using the manual I just created as a script. With ScreenSteps 2.6, I can now add a shorter video to each step or lesson, allowing me to serve both audiences a little more efficiently. Embedding video is as easy as copying the embed code from any video service which provides it, choosing the Step > Set Video Embed Code menu option and pasting your code. At this point, the "video embed" is a PR-speak way of introducing a feature which really has much more advanced possibilities. Quite simply, this feature allows you to embed anything you want, and -- at least in HTML exports -- have it interpreted within the documentation as Javascript/HTML. I plan to use this freedom to embed bookmarks in my videos using YouTube's Javascript API. You can also use it to insert code examples with HTML pre and code tags. The sky's the limit. On to the new export formats ... I really should say format, as it's a single option to export a Office Open XML format. This format can be read by and edited in most modern word processors, including Apple's Pages and Microsoft Word. As with ScreenSteps' other export formats, users can customize templates for their OOXML files, allowing strict adherence to standards within organizations with such requirements. It allows for some pretty darn good-looking Pages documents, too. A trial version of ScreenSteps 2.6 is available for download from Blue Mango Learning Systems. See the product page for further details. Pricing comes in two levels: $39.95US for the standard version, or $59.95US for the Pro version (which is required for the video embedding and OOXML export features). As noted by the developers in the comments, video embedding works in both Standard and Pro versions.
ScreenSteps 2.5 takes screen-based documentation a step forward
ScreenSteps, the invaluable tool (mentioned here many a time) for writing software documentation quickly and easily, has updated to version 2.5. Among the new features is improved annotation capabilities, including a text tool and keyboard shortcuts for speedy duplication and repositioning of annotations. You can set a status on lessons to remind yourself what's ready to publish, and what needs a little more work. Lesson steps can be more easily manipulated and reordered in the lesson inspector. Also, compiling lessons into full manuals is significantly easier, including the ability to quickly filter which lessons are included at the time of export. I use ScreenSteps extensively in training clients on the websites I work on. It's not expected of me in most circumstances, but a PDF instruction booklet or an HTML export embedded in the content manager does wonders for reducing support calls. If you write any kind of screen-based documentation and haven't taken a look at ScreenSteps, it would be worth its price in the time it could save you. The best part of the system is that you can easily re-use and update manuals without much hassle, allowing a skeleton manual to be quickly turned into a custom manual for a client, or making it easy to add a step you didn't think of until you were in the middle of a training session. You can try out ScreenSteps for free, and pick up one of two versions if you dig it: Pro for $59.95US, or Standard (lacking export of full manuals and support for MindTouch Deki and Confluence export) for $39.95US. There's a full feature comparison on the Blue Mango site.
ScreenSteps 2.1 released, interview with Blue Mango
Screensteps, the software documentation generator we've come to love, has reached an official 2.1 status and has been released into the wild. Well, as wild as software documentation gets, anyway. This gem is a TUAW favorite and I'm personally very psyched about the new upload-to-blog feature, which has come a long way since we first announced it in the beta. The other 74 enhancements, changes and fixes can be found in the release notes. You'd expect software in this genre to be well documented ... you won't be disappointed. In addition to the extensive, ScreenSteps-generated online manual, there are new screencasts available on the updated website. You can also grab a 30-day trial of ScreenSteps Pro on the download page. The Standard version is priced at $39.95 and the Pro version comes in at $59.95 (feature comparison). I happened to have a chance to sit down with Trevor and Greg, creators of ScreenSteps, at WWDC. It's quite by coincidence that I managed to finish editing and uploading the video right before they let me know about the 2.1 release. Our chat is after the jump. [Viddler Link|QuickTime version]
ScreenSteps 2.1 beta: post lessons directly to your blog
When Blue Mango Learning Systems released version 2.0.3 of (TUAW favorite) ScreenSteps, its software for creating screen-based lessons, they added the option to output blog-friendly code for pasting into your own site. But some of us were inspired by the possibilities and cried for direct blog posting. Taking to heart user input, they've just opened up the beta of version 2.1 to the public with the ability to post individual lessons directly to WordPress, TypePad and Movable Type blogs. It works quite well. On a Wordpress install with a basic theme, it comes out looking great, and adjustments are easy to make if you have a more complex custom theme. It adds a new level of usefulness to the software, in that it makes it a breeze to write and post tutorials to your blog. In the early beta tests there were some issues with repeating an existing post with the intention of editing it, but the folks at Blue Mango have been working diligently to smooth out issues. If you spend any time instructing others on screen-based tasks, give it a shot. The developers would love to get your input as version 2.1 comes to life.
ScreenSteps gets blog-friendly
We do love our ScreenSteps here at TUAW. Following up on some great features introduced in version 2, bluemango is releasing version 2.0.3 today with a brand new post-to-blog feature. The feature makes use of a Screensteps Live account to host images, then provides the HTML markup to paste into a blog entry. If you're not familiar with it, ScreenSteps 2 is an application that makes the process of documenting software and on-screen tasks simple and elegant. ScreenSteps Live is bluemango's online complement to their desktop software, allowing users to publish lessons on the web after creating them in ScreenSteps 2. The post-to-blog feature is documented at the developer's own Live account, with instructions for Wordpress that are easily translated to other platforms. The concept is very cool and will aid a lot of people in sharing tutorials and software documentation. The blog templates are also customizable to fit your stylistic needs. I would love to see some closer blog integration and automatic uploading via XMLRPC, ala TUAW favorite MarsEdit. Taking into account that ScreenSteps is not aspiring to be a blog editor, though, and the fact that they're seeking integration with ScreenSteps Live, I think the simplistic cut-and-paste approach fits the bill and provides the flexibility to post the exported output in a broader variety of places. In addition to our own Macworld show floor coverage of ScreenSteps, there are screencasts done by ScreenCastsOnline covering ScreenSteps 2 and ScreenSteps Live. There are free accounts available to try out ScreenSteps Live, and plans start at $12/month. ScreenSteps 2 Standard is $39.95 (pro version which allows the creation of full pdf and online manuals is $59.95) with a free demo and academic discounts. And it's available for Windows, too, for those with cross-platform needs.
Show floor video: Screensteps makes documenting easier
Do you make documentation? Do you constantly find yourself having to explain step-by-step procedures to do things on the Mac? BlueMango Learning Systems has been doing this stuff for a while, and the tedium eventually drove them to create their own tool to make things faster. That's innovation for you-- if you can't find a tool, build one (that's how Plasq wound up creating Skitch). Screensteps is truly handy for anyone needing to illustrate steps, like bloggers doing how-to's, all the way up to professional manual-makers. Scott got a quick demo on an excursion to Moscone West. Video after the jump.
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).
