Make step-by-step video tutorials

They say a picture paints a thousand words and ScreenSteps attempts to make building tutorial videos as easy and logical as possible.

Straight from the start, ScreenSteps guides you through the essential procesures you need to take in order to build your tutorials. ScreenSteps presents you with a main menu, linking to online tutorials that help you get to grips with it. I’d highly recommend taking these first as it can be a rather tricky app to work out on your own.

The recording process takes the format of a record, capture and annotate system that allows you to build up a tutorial logically and clearly. The aim, of course, is to keep the words to a minimum since the screen-grabs are supposed to tell the story. Once you’ve completed it, ScreenSteps lets you export to a wide variety of formats including HTML, XML and PDF. You can even post directly to blogs and wikis such as WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, MindTouch and Confluence.

The whole process is supposed to take around 5 to 10 minutes, although much depends on the complexity of the tutorial you are building. While it’s a fairly simple app, you’d be unwise to use it without taking the tutorials first as grabbing screen shots can be particularly awkward at times.

ScreenSteps is a decent attempt at creating a way of building graphical tutorials that can explain how to do something far better than a lengthy manual.