Finding New Ideas For Software

In the movie "¡Three Amigos!", the people of Santo Poco find themselves at the mercy of El Guapo and his band. Near the end of the movie, the amigos (Dusty Bottoms, Lucky Day and Ned Nederlander) are looking to free the villagers from this evil villain. Ned Nederlander asks "This is not a town of weaklings! You can use your strengths against El Guapo. Now, what is it that this town really does well?". After giving the question some thought one woman responds, "We can sew!"

One might think that sewing is not a skill that would help in the fight against an evil villain, but the three amigos find a way to use sewing to their advantage. The villagers band together and sew enough outfits identical to those worn by the Amigos for each inhabitant. With everyone in the village looking like one of the amigos, they create an illusion of the Three Amigos being everywhere at once whereby the band of El Guapo is completely surrounded. El Guapo is defeated and the village lives happily ever after.

There is a lesson that software developers looking for new product ideas can learn from the Three Amigos. Take a problem you face and use your skill set to create a solution. If you need a solution to a particular problem, chances are somebody else does as well.

This is how ScreenSteps came to be. A number of months ago Greg (my brother and business partner) and I were looking for an idea for some consumer software. At the time we were primarily a service company producing e-learning content for medical ultrasound software. We created and delivered this content in our Blue Mango Learning System (BMLS) application.

Based on our work in the ultrasound industry and our experience in documenting our own projects we knew that companies create visual documentation if it can be:

• Created quickly
• Updated easily

If either of these tasks becomes too time consuming, then the quantity, quality and timeliness of the documentation suffers. So, like the people of Santo Poco, we knew how to sew.

How ScreenSteps Approaches the Documentation Problem

We decided from the beginning that ScreenSteps would automate much of the process of creating a lesson. The more decisions you have to make (or are allowed to make) the more time you take to finish. With ScreenSteps we wanted people who weren't making documentation to make it. We wanted people who dreaded making documentation to embrace it (or at least feel less dread). The feature set for version one was tailored to that audience.

Another decision: we wanted screenshots to be the central focus of ScreenSteps. When creating documentation we prefer screenshots over video because editing can be time consuming and a screenshot is easier to update when the software interface changes. We also feel it is easier to skim pictures and text than a video.

There is one benefit of using video to document, however: you can turn on the recorder and just work through a task naturally. Conversely, when taking screenshots, you have to capture your image and then insert it into a document. To allow people to work more quickly we created a ScreenSteps feature called Auto Snap.

When Auto Snap is turned on, anytime the image on your system clipboard changes (through use of a 3rd party screen capture tool for example), that image is added to your ScreenSteps lesson. This enables you to work through the task, take screenshots as you go, and then add the titles, instructions and annotations later on. This bit of workflow takes a lot of dread out of the documentation process.

Making Feature Set Decisions

Inevitably you have to make decisions about what features to include and what to leave out when you ship a product. One of the decisions we had to make was in regards to text formatting. When it comes to text formatting, ScreenSteps is not Microsoft Word. It isn't even TextEdit or WordPad. It allows you to type a title and instructions for each step--with the ability to add bold and italic formatting as well as hyperlinks to text. We don't even let you change the text size.

We could have added the ability to change text color and size without much trouble. When creating documentation it is important that the styles through your lessons match, however. If we allowed the ability to randomly change text properties without the ability to set global styles then it would become difficult to update colors and fonts across multiple lessons.

Given that the purpose of ScreenSteps is to easily create and update documentation, we decided it was worth waiting to implement the feature correctly in a future version. Precise control over text formatting wasn't necessary given the purpose of ScreenSteps.

Drawing on the Revolution Community

Revolution is an incredible development platform with an amazing community surrounding it. The resources and tools provided by the Revolution community were key components of ScreenStep's development:

• Animation Engine: We have incorporated Malte's AE code in the next version to test when users click within annotations.
• Galaxy IDE: The creation of Jerry Daniels that we at Blue Mango Learning Systems can't live without.
• Quartam PDF Library: We used the Quartam library created by Jan Schenkel in order to output PDF versions of lessons.
• The Revolution Mailing List: A seemingly endless supply of tips and tricks.
• Ken Ray: I have yet to find a problem he doesn't know the solution to. I'm trying really hard though.
• Scott Rossi: Created the user interface graphics.
• Dar Scott: Wrote some external commands to help watch for changes to the system clipboard.

By drawing on the resources available in the Revolution community we were able to make our idea for ScreenSteps a reality and a much better product than it otherwise would have been.

To read a version of this article created in ScreenSteps click here.

If you want a copy of ScreenSteps you can buy it today. Until 15th March Runtime Revolution is bundling ScreenSteps free with new purchases of Revolution Studio. Get more details here.