What is the best tool for creating user guides with screenshots on a Mac?

Question

Following what started here . http://stackoverflow.com/questions/141769/what-is-the-best-tool-for-creating-user-guides-with-screenshots-on-windows

i need to create a user guide and quickstart for a rails app i will deliver in just a couple of days, need something quick, good, and if possibly free.

of course leopard and snow leopard able.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

ScreenSteps may do what you're looking for. There's a 30 day trial.

Minor quibble:

• MAC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC%5Faddress (and a few other acronyms)
• Mac: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh

Answer 2

on a Mac, you can get a screen cap by hitting Shift Cmd 3 you can get an individual window, or region with shift-cmd-4. Hit space and select a window, or just drag to capture a region.

Answer 3

Personally I'd take screenshots using the built-in Mac OS X shortcuts and make the guide in Pages (or whatever text editor you prefer):

Cmd-Shift-4 then Spacebar : You can point and click at the window or menu and it will take a screenshot of that window, menu or other GUI element with shadow.

Cmd-Shift-4 then drag a rectangle on the screen : Capture the selected area.

Cmd-Shift-3 : Full screen screenshot.

Using these shortcuts saves the output directly to .png files on your desktop. You can then open them in Preview if you like to add annotations such as text, arrows, boxes, etc. to point out specific parts of the screenshot.

Answer 4

disclaimer - ScreenSteps Developer here

ScreenSteps will do exactly what you are looking for. It isn't free but there is a sale going on this week. Basically, ScreenSteps lets you capture screenshots and then automatically turns those screen shots into a step-by-step guide. It is really focused on task-based documentation.

The whole idea with ScreenSteps is that you setup your documentation to be useful in a support situation. You create "lessons" that answer "How do I" questions, such as "How do I create a new account". It is very fast and lets you export to HTML, PDF, Word, Pages, WordPress, TypePad, MindTouch, Confluence and ScreenSteps Live.

You can see an example of what the content looks like on ScreenSteps Live here: http://help.screensteps.com

The methods described above of copying into Pages will work fine and are definitely cheaper. ScreenSteps just makes the whole process much easier.

And BTW there is a sale going on this week.