ScreenSteps is a very neat little program written in Revolution, that allows you to create documentation and tutorials for your software. Recently Greg and Trevor DeVore, makers of Screensteps and owners of Blue Mango Learning Systems, attended Macworld. Here is the live report, fresh from the scene.

Macworld
January 22nd, 2008

We just got back from Macworld last week and what a week it was. After many late, late nights getting ScreenSteps 2 and ScreenSteps Live ready we were finally ready to go Tuesday morning at 11am. Well, at least mostly. This was the first time we had really exhibited at a large show so we were doing a lot of learning on the job.

It went great though. The reaction of people who saw the software was really overwhelming. With ScreenSteps 1 I think we had created something that was interesting. It was a decent program and could be a big time saver. But it wasn't great. With ScreenSteps 2 we wanted to strive for greatness and at least get to really, really good. I don't know if we have achieved great software yet but, judging from people's reactions I think we are a lot closer to really, really good.

The scenario would go something like this: someone would walk by and ask what we did. We would say, "We have a tool that helps you make really quick visual instructions for doing things on your computer. Is that something that you need to do?" They would either respond yes or no but almost everyone was intrigued enough to see a quick demo.

And the demos were very quick. We would do a lesson and have the images captured, annotated and ready for publishing in under 30 seconds.

If they had said that they did do documentation they were ecstatic. If they had said that they didn't do documentation they almost always said, "Oh! I have to do that all the time."

We had several people each day who said that seeing ScreenSteps had made it worth coming to the show. I'm not kidding.

It was also great to see existing customers. We talked to several users who were using ScreenSteps in ways we had never imagined. One user even brought us a thank you card and cookies. The card said that ScreenSteps was the best software that he never knew he needed.

Scott McNulty came and interviewed me for TUAW  and did a nice write up. We got so much traffic on our site and people viewing the video that the videos stopped working for awhile. We moved the videos over to Amazon's S3 service and everything seems to be working great.

All in all we were totally exhausted by the end of the week but also totally exhilarated. When you are working on this stuff you never know how people are going to react. Being able to interact with customers and see their excitement was really an amazing experience. We already can't wait until next year. Until then we have a lot of work to do to incorporate all of the great feedback we got from people.

If you want to see the online version of the 30 sec demo (OK, it is actually 3 minutes long) that got people so excited you can see it here.

You can buy Screensteps through the RevSelect program, here.