ScreenSteps 06/13/12

ScreenSteps combines screen capture, image editing & document authoring. Finally, a painless & quick Help file creator!

It’s understandable why you may have put off doing documentation on all of your in-house video editing procedures.

It’s a laborious (often thankless) process that involves Photoshop, Acrobat and a desktop of messy screenshots.

ScreenSteps Desktop remedies this situation by consolidating all these functions in one app.  The short demo video on their homepage shows you how simple it is to use the app.

The simple image editing tools in ScreenSteps are great for people that are intimidated by the depth of Photoshop.  In ScreenShot you can add arrows, letters, boxes and text.  You can even blur out sensitive information in your screen captures.

But the export features is where the app really shines.  Once you’re done creating your documentation, depending on your version (more on that below) you can publish to one of their many supported formats including:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Content Management Systems
• HTML
• PDF
• Word
• Pages

As far as the single user is concerned there are essentially 2 main versions of ScreenSteps: Standard and Pro.  The former is $40 the latter is $80.  Standard is perfect for doing basic procedure documentation.  Pro is for when you need to have documentation that has more detail and categorization – like a manual.

The developers also make a simpler version of ScreenSteps called Clarify that creates speedy, one-off communications instead of creating documentation.  It takes the essential parts of ScreenSteps and streamlines them.  It’s $30, which is even cheaper than the standard version of ScreenSteps.