The other day I posted about updating the ScreenSteps Live online manual. Today we have to update our Screensteps 2 manual. This update to ScreenSteps actually has a lot of changes but our workflow is going to be a little different so I thought it would be an interesting comparison to what we did with the ScreenSteps Live manual.

We are getting started at about 9 am.

First off, there are a lot more lessons to update so Trevor is going to be helping me. We have basically divided up the material we need to cover and are updating the lessons. The only problem is that we both have home offices so we aren't working "together". If you have used ScreenSteps at all you might wonder - don't we have to work off of the same Library file?

Well, no. Since the topic is dynamically assembled on ScreenSteps Live we can do that all there. I have most of the original lessons on my computer so I will be updating those. Trevor is going to be creating new lessons that apply to version 2.0.3.

To start with, we created a new topic called "ScreenSteps 2.0.3″ on our ScreenSteps Live site. I then created sections to match the layout of the current ScreenSteps 2 manual ("Sections" are just groupings of lessons so getting the groupings laid out helps us organize our workflow a little better). ScreenSteps will let us post directly into these sections. So while Trevor is creating new lessons I am going through and updating the old ones.

10:30 am - I have had a few interruptions to take care of issues not related to this manual but, besides that, things are going pretty smoothly on my end. The updates have been more minor than I expected. Trevor on the other hand is having the same experience that I had yesterday. He is finding lots of little bugs and fixing them. This is because he is documenting all of the new features. So he still doesn't have his first lesson created.

12:20 pm - My part is done. I updated somewhere around 30 lessons. Trevor still needs to post lessons on the new features but he is still trying to resolve a bug that he discovered.

It is now a couple of days later and we are finally just about ready for release. Last night we updated the manual with a few lessons on some of the new features. What was cool is that Trevor was in Salt Lake City and I was sitting here in Virginia and we were very easily able to collaborate on the manual. He posted his lessons, I posted mine. Once we make 2.0.3 live we will just flip a switch and the manual will be live.

We are about to push out an update to ScreenSteps Live that is going to require updating pretty much every lesson in the ScreenSteps online manual. We really aren't changing much of the functionality with this update but we are changing a key user interface element that shows up in almost every lesson. That means that all of those screen images need to be updated. A huge pain right? Well, yes. But not nearly as bad as it used to be before ScreenSteps 2. I am going to tell you how I am doing this to give you an idea of how it works. It is currently 10:34 am Monday morning and I am just about to get started.

Up until now I have always used our http://bmls.screenstepslive.com account to document ScreenSteps Live. But I want to have this documentation update ready before we post the changes to ScreenSteps Live so I need to create a documentation account on my local machine. This will be helpful down the road as well as I will be able to always go back to this account when I need to update lessons.

To do this I need to edit my local hosts file to trick my local server into finding the new subdomain I need to create. I can never remember how to do this. Just fired up ScreenSteps and luckily I have a lesson that I created that shows me how it's done. Just saved myself 5-15 minutes of hunting the internet for how to do this.

11:00 am - I have the new account created and have added some lessons to it so I have some material to work with. Now to get started updating the lessons.

I don't necessarily have all of my lessons for ScreenSteps Live organized into a topic on my local machine since I handle all of the topic organization on the ScreenSteps Live site itself. But I have tagged all of my ScreenSteps Live lessons with "ScreenSteps Live" which makes it really easy to find them. I open up my manual at http://bmls.screenstepslive.com/topics/15 and see that the first lesson is "ScreenSteps Live Overview". It definitely will need an update. So I load it up in ScreenSteps.

11:20 am - Had to get a few things running better on my local computer. Tracked my slowdown to a QuickSilver problem. I really have a love hate relationship with that app. It too often bogs down my system but I still keep coming back to it. Finally got started and noticed a CSS bug right away. No better way to test your app than to document. Going to fix that before continuing the documentation.

11:30 am - OK - all fixed. Back to work. Just noticed another display bug. Fixed it. And one more. This is turning into more of a display bug testing session than a documenting session. (This is actually almost always true. We find that we do our best bug testing when documenting our software using ScreenSteps.)

11:40 am - Now I really am going to update this lesson.

12:00 pm - Found another display bug. Fixed and ready to go again.

12:53 pm - Well, the internet went down (thank you Verizon) so I stopped to get some lunch. Internet is back up and the first lesson is finished updated. ScreenSteps Live allows me to replace the old lesson on ScreenSteps Live or create a new one. For this one I am just writing over the old one.

1:05 pm - Just updated an posted the 2nd lesson. Had to replace a couple of images in the lesson but ScreenSteps' replace image feature made that a breeze. Updated and posted.

1:10 pm - Two more lessons updated. One just had an old ui element on the left of the screenshot so I cropped it out.

1:50 pm - OK. I have updated and posted about 18-20 lessons. Almost all of them needed new images but replacing them was super easy. This next set of lessons has more significant changes so we will see how long that takes me.

2:40 - Done!

So, I started this morning at about 10:30 and finished a little after 2:30. More or less in 4 hours with a lunch break in there. If you look at my log you will see that most of the time was spent fixing bugs, getting my internet back up, etc. The actual updating of the lessons took very little time.

Let's compare this to how it could have been. If I had only been doing text documentation I would have finished in less time. But I never would have found those bugs. The simple fact that ScreenSteps makes me get images helps me find errors in the app right away.

If I had been creating videos I would now be ready to jump out the window. I would have had to start my video over at least 100 times - each time something unexpected happened.

I probably will still do a video at some point. But ScreenSteps has helped me scope everything out and make sure the flow actually works. And this documentation is all going live the same day as the update. That would have been impossible without ScreenSteps.

Just wanted to let you know that we have released a public beta of version 2.0.3 of ScreenSteps for Mac and Windows. If you would like to try out the latest features and provide feedback and bug reports you can download the installers at the following urls:

• Lesson Palette for dragging lessons onto sections in a topic
• Duplicate lessons
• Duplicate topics
• Reveal Library folder
• Open recent libraries
• Export topics and tags as packages - great for moving lessons between libraries
• Global hot key for screen capture on Mac OS X.

To see the full change log check here.

We have been getting a lot of questions lately about the videos on our site. I just use a few simple tools to create them:

Recording: iShowU

It is simple and fast. All it does is recording. No effects or editing but it works well for what it does.

Screen Highlights: Mousepose

This is a great little app for highlighting the screen. You should also check out OmniDazzle though I have never used it.

For editing I am just using QuickTime Pro. I highlight the areas I need to delete and delete them. Then I use the QuickTime Pro "Export for Web" feature. We used to host the videos on our site but when TUAW linked to us we got so many video views that it brought the site down. Now we host the videos on Amazon S3 and it seems to work pretty well.

There is a new app out that I am going to take a look at when I get a chance called ScreenFlow. It looks great but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.

BTW - We also get people asking if ScreenSteps records video. It most definitely does not. These little 4-7 min. videos take several hours to create. Screen recordings are a major pain. That is why we created ScreenSteps. We use video as a quick intro and then fill in all of the other documentation with ScreenSteps.

ScreenSteps 2 has now been released for Windows. We have also pushed a 2.0.2 release for Mac. This update fixes a lot of bugs and adds some very useful enhancements, including:

1. Improved PDF Export (Images are clearer)
2. Split Lesson at Step contextual menu option. This is handy if you decide after the fact to split up your lesson into smaller bits.
   
3. Split Step at Text. This is really cool, especially for updating old documentation you might have. See this lesson.
   
4. Import and Export ScreenSteps Lesson Packages. This allows you to move lessons between libraries and share them with other users of ScreenSteps. See this lesson.
5. Insert tabs in text fields. You can now option-tab (Mac) or alt-tab (Windows) to insert tabs in your Step instruction fields.

You can download an update or free trial here. You can also read the full release notes here.