ScreenSteps 1.1.1
http://www.screensteps.com/
Price: $30.00
As a past educator, and someone who still provides training for people with whom I work, I am always interested and looking at applications that will assist me in helping others in some manner. ScreenSteps, though basic on the surface, is a powerful application that can save you an amazing amount of time in creating instructional materials. Quite simply, this application helps people create instructions of steps for others to follow, so that they have a better understanding of how to do something.
For those that don't know, this can be a long and time-consuming process. Typically, as I write instructions in Microsoft Word, I take snapshots of dialog boxes or other screen shots that are relevant for the user to see. I drag those screenshots into Word, have to change the format, then change the wrapping of the object, and then resize and position the image. Though the steps sound simple, they can be quite exhausting, especially when you have to retake a screenshot, which requires repeating all the above steps. I would say a 2-page tutorial could take me 30 minutes or more using this process. With ScreenSteps, the same process took only 15 minutes, and this is while I learned how to use the program for the first time.
ScreenSteps website, http://www.screensteps.com/ has great instructions on the application as well as examples of what can be produced with this application. I strongly suggest looking at these to examine the high quality output you can expect from this application.
I demoed this application at our last Macintosh User Group Meeting and I think most people could sense my enthusiasm with this application. I haven't felt this happy about a program in a long time. Not just the simplicity, but the ease of use and the intuitive feeling that made everything work with this application. To give you an idea of how well our demo went, the first prize drawing of our meeting has a a choice of what they can pick, instead of picking an airport express. This alone speaks pretty highly of the application in my mind.
So what makes this program so great and easy to use.
1. Take a screenshot (using any application you currently use, or the built in finder). Have this picture copy to the clipboard. When it does this, the picture immediately gets sent to screensteps, even when its in the backgroud.
2. Add a title to the picture and instructional steps for what the user is supposed to do.

OK, so you didn't crop the picture correctly, or you want to highlight a section of the photo with a red circle for something to highlight the button for your user to click on. This is no problem for screensteps, simply double click on the photo to enter the image editor. Here you can highlight a section of the image with a circle or rectangle in any color. You can draw arrows to emphasis locations, or simply crop the image. My favorite tool in the image editior is the sequence annotation. You can click on different areas of the screen, and as you click you will get a circle with a numbered step on it, starting with the number one. This makes it really easy to combine steps for users to click on 1. then 2. then 3. etc. Not only is this feature extremely useful, it is intelligent as well. If you label something with the number 3, but decide it shouldn't be, you can delete it and the next time you click, it will be represented by step 3. Not only that, say you have already labeled steps 1-5, but later decide that step 3 is irrelevant and delete it. ScreenSteps knows to make step 4 as step 3, and step 5 as step 4, automatically. I absolutely love this feature, which will make editing a cinch later on should something change.
ScreenSteps will export in two formats; HTML and PDF. PDF looks like a normal document, with 2 options to how your documents look. One of my favorite features of this program is how after saving your .pdf, the first thing you are going to want to do is to look at it to see how it looks as a document. Well ScreenSteps knows this, and after saving your document, switches focus to the Finder and immediately highlights the document you just saved. All you have to do it double click on it. In other applications, such as Word, I could see how this would be a pain, but it fits perfectly with ScreenSteps because I will want to proofread my document everytime. The HTML output is quite nice as well, I haven't experiences any we browser errors on either Mac or PC.
To see some HTML samples on both Mac and PC, check out my ScreenSteps website. You can see a tutorial on Mozy for both platforms.

Another user emailed me recently on how he uses ScreenSteps, in a much different way then I do. He has used it to not only create instructions for himself on how to do things, but he has used it to demonstrate to others (including me) and errors that he was getting in various applications.

This application is well worth the money, not only in terms of what it does, but the customer service is outstanding. I had a couple of questions about things in ScreenSteps, and I got answers very quickly from the team at ScreenSteps. Thanks for this awesome application, I give it 5 Tek Speks logos.