At Blue Mango Learning Systems we primarily develop two applications:

• ScreenSteps Desktop Software: This is developed for Mac and PC. Trevor handles all of this and uses Runtime Revolution as his development environment.
• ScreenSteps Live: This is our hosted compliment to ScreenSteps Desktop. It is all coded in Ruby on Rails and I handle all of the work on that side.

Distributing a product for Mac, PC and running a hosted web service is a lot of work, especially when there are only two people in your company. Therefore we have had to choose our development tools very carefully. For us, the most important aspect of any development tool is our ability to quickly iterate over a product until we feel that we have it "right". Really, for us, all other considerations fall way behind. If we can't iterate efficiently then we are going to move on to another tool.

Ruby on Rails has proven to be a great tool for this type of development. There are a lot of people getting into Ruby on Rails so I thought some of you might be interested in my experience. I think that ScreenSteps Live is an interesting case study in the benefits and drawbacks of Rails, so over the next couple of months I will be posting some of the things that I have learned as I have dived into the Rails world.

First, a little background on myself as a programmer and ScreenSteps Live as a web app.

ScreenSteps Live Struggles to Come To Life

I have no background as a programmer. Well, almost none. We first got the idea for ScreenSteps Live back in late 2006 or early 2007. At that time I had never even attempted to program a web application. I knew some basic html, enough to throw up a web page, and enough php to do some basic includes. But nothing beyond that. I also had programmed some smaller desktop apps with Revolution but only after extensive help from Trevor.

But we needed a web app. Trevor wasn't going to have time to do it so we decided to outsource. I won't go into all of the details on this but our first attempt didn't work out so well. Suffice it to say that after 2 months we had nothing and were out a few thousand dollars. All I can say is be very meticulous in checking out the people you are hiring to develop your stuff. We weren't and it came back to bite us in the form of lost time and lost money.

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Over the last few weeks we have been shifting the primary focus of ScreenSteps Live to manuals. In doing so we have been looking at ways to easily integrate the manuals you create into a variety of different applications.

One feature we recently added was the ability to fetch a list of manual lessons that has been filtered by tags. For example, if I have a manual for my web application I can tag all of the lessons that discuss managing users with "user management". I could then add some javascript (supplied by ScreenSteps Live) to my user management screens that displays all lessons from my manual tagged with "user management". As I continue to add lessons and make updates based on user feedback those lessons pertaining to "user management" would automatically show up in my web application.

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Just wanted to let anyone who follows this blog and is interested in ScreenSteps information that we have launched a new ScreenSteps blog at www.screensteps.com/blog. We will be posting ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live related information there from now on so we invite you to come on over and subscribe.

This is largely a maintenance release that fixes some crashes that people were having on Windows and some funny errors on Mac. We're sorry if you ran into any of them but this release should fix them. We also slightly modified the spell checker to make the interface a little clearer.

You can download the latest version here:

http://www.screensteps.com/downloads

Or check out the release notes here.

Post to Basecamp Screencast

We just posted a screencast that demonstrates how you can use the new "Export to Blog" feature and a "Basecamp" template to post ScreenSteps Lessons to Basecamp (Note: you must have a ScreenSteps Live account). If you are a Basecamp user then you will definitely like this.

Post to Basecamp Screencast

Download the Basecamp Blog Template

ScreenSteps 2.0.3 for Mac and Windows is available for download today. This is a free upgrade for all registered Standard and Pro 2.x users.

This release really has a lot of improvements that we think you are really going to like. Here are some of the highlights:

• Publish to Blog feature (requires a ScreenSteps Live account). Definitely the easiest way to publish a lesson to your website or blog.
• Duplicate Lessons and Topics.
• Drag and Drop of images onto lessons.
• Global key command for capturing an image (Mac only).
• Better tools for managing multiple libraries.
• Embed links to full size images in your html output.
• Dragging and dropping of lessons onto topics using the new Lesson Palette.

You can now also export full topics and ScreenSteps Packages for moving between libraries.

If you are interested in seeing a great review of the new features check out this screencast produced by Don McAllister at ScreenCastsOnline. If you have seen any of his screencasts you know what an incredible job he does and he definitely doesn't disappoint this time.