While working on another feature (which I will talk about someday soon) for ScreenSteps we decided that is was time to implement a status setting for lessons. A lesson can now be assigned a status of one of the following:

• Ready to publish
• Needs review
• Not finished/needs revision

The status of a lesson is pretty useful if you are the only person working on a manual as it helps you keep track of what needs work and what is finished. The feature becomes really useful when you are working on a manual as a team though. Now as you pass lessons around using manual/lesson packages or ScreenSteps Live everyone in the group can keep track of what stage each lesson is at.

In addition to helping you track the progress of a lesson you can also use the status of lessons to filter which lessons are exported when exporting to PDF or HTML.

Here is a video of me changing the status of lessons in a manual and then displaying the PDF and HTML export dialogs with the new lesson status filter feature. We are still working on the UI but the video should give you an idea of what is coming.

We ran into a problem recently. We used the new skinning feature on ScreenSteps Live to make our manuals page have the same theme as our standard ScreenSteps site. That was great but there was a problem. We had a manual on our ScreenSteps Live account that didn’t belong there. ScreenSteps users that viewed our manuals would feel right at home. But the users of the other project would feel out of place.

And What About Lessons Just For Us?

We also weren’t sure where to post lessons for our internal use. And since we weren’t sure where to post them we didn’t post them. Obviously some tweeking was in order.

A Space For Everything - More Than Just a Tweek

What started out as a tweek has turned into something that is going to represent a major upgrade to the functionality of ScreenSteps Live. Sometime in the next couple of weeks we will be releasing a new feature called Spaces. This is going greatly simplify the way permissions on ScreenSteps Live are managed and help you get the right content to the right audience.

There are going to be two types of spaces:

• Manuals Spaces
• Lesson Buckets

Manuals Spaces

With Manuals Spaces you will be able to assemble manuals for a specific audience. For example, if you had three different products you could set up a manuals space for each one. Each space can then have its own custom styling, its own links, etc.

Lesson Buckets

Don’t want to organize your lessons into a manual? Use a lesson bucket. We are going to use this for all of our internal documentation. We will set up a lesson bucket that only Trevor and I have access to. Need a reminder on how to make a new branch from an old Git commit? Dump it in the bucket. Need to document how to process a purchase order? Dump it in the bucket. We think it is going to be a great resource for us.

Controlling Access and Presentation with Spaces

All access permissions will be handled at the space level. If you make the space public then anything in that space is public. If you want to control access, make the space private and assign readers to the space. Anything that shows up in the space will be available to the reader. You no longer will have to manage permissions at the lesson or manual level. Want someone to see a lesson? Drop it in a space that they have access to.

You will also be able to custom skin each space. This will allow you to tailor the look and links for each space to meet the needs of each target audience.

There is more coming with this update. We will be posting more information about this major upgrade to ScreenSteps Live in the coming days and weeks. Until then, get ready to put everything in its proper space.

We have been using http://search.twitter.com (previously summize.com) to see what people have been saying about ScreenSteps. It is pretty cool. If you want to see what the latest opinions of ScreenSteps are on Twitter then click here.

“That needs to be documented.”

This oft repeated phrase can cast a dark cloud over an otherwise sunny day. The process of sitting down at the computer and wrestling with multiple programs for a few hours while you create and publish documentation is not for the faint of heart.

Perhaps the only phrase to rival it is:

“This documentation needs to be updated.”

The more visual your documentation, the harder updating can be. If you created videos you may feel like crying in the corner for a while before you sit down and record again. Or if you enlisted the help of screenshots you have your work cut out for you as you replace images and reapply annotations.

I’m here to tell you that you needn’t suffer so. ScreenSteps is here to help and now it publishes directly to MindTouch Deki, the open source collaboration and integration platform.

You see, ScreenSteps is different then other documentation tools you have used. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of some documentation software, but it will allow you to create and publish documentation faster than ever before.

With ScreenSteps you naturally go through the process you are documenting, capturing still images of each step along the way. With each new image you capture a step is added to the ScreenSteps’ lesson open in the background.

Once you have all of your images you can quickly add titles, instructions and image annotations. Need to update a lesson? No problem. Just click the image replace button and capture a new screenshot. The step image is replaced and the editable annotations are left intact.

Of course writing your documentation is only part of the equation. You need to publish it as well. With the release of ScreenSteps 2.1.2 we are happy to announce MindTouch Deki support. No need to upload individual images and write markup by hand. ScreenSteps does all of the work for you so you can quickly add and update your documentation in MindTouch Deki.

So cheer up. With ScreenSteps documentation gets done.

So, you have been using ScreenSteps to post lessons to your blog. Pretty cool right? You are just cranking out those lessons. But, now you have so many lessons, you would really like a way to manage and organize them. You also want to let other people on your team post lessons. You want your lessons to show up in your WordPress site but you want an easier way of managing and organizing the content.

If that describes you then you are about to become a happy person.

We are excited to announce the first release of the ScreenSteps Live plugin for WordPress blogs. Manage all of your ScreenSteps Lessons on ScreenSteps Live and have all of it show up in your WordPress site. Here are couple of highlights:

• Use a simple admin interface to control which manuals show up in your blog.
• Use WordPress permissions to display manuals to everyone or only to those who are logged in.

You can get the plugin from GitHub:

ScreenSteps Live WordPress Plugin

The video below shows how easy it is to get up and running with it. The plugin even comes with an API key to an example account so you can see how things would look right away without having to signup for a ScreenSteps Live account. If you like what you see then signup for a ScreenSteps Live account and try it out with your own content.

We get a lot of questions about what ScreenSteps Live is. Here are some examples:

“Is it .Mac for ScreenSteps Lessons?”

No.

“Is it just a file sharing service?”

No.

“Is it a blog for ScreenSteps Lessons?”

No. But we did say that once which was a bad marketing move on our part - completely the wrong category to put ScreenSteps Live in.

And our favorite:

“Why would I need ScreenSteps Live when I can already export lessons as HTML or post them to my blog?”

The answer to that takes just under 5 minutes and can be seen in the video below.

Last night we released version 2.1.1 of ScreenSteps Standard and Pro. Here are some of the highlights:

• Text undo has been improved.
• You can now post ScreenSteps lessons as pages on WordPress, TypePad or Movable Type blogs.
• In ScreenSteps Pro you can now post to a Confluence wiki.

A couple of other minor fixes and improvements that you can read about in the release notes.

You can download the latest updates by selecting Help > Check for Updates in ScreenSteps or by downloading it here.

You can also watch a quick video of posting a lesson to Confluence below.

The ScreenSteps Live API uses REST to retrieve manuals from your ScreenSteps Live account via xml.

Urls

The request urls are pretty simple. Currently the following requests are supported:

/api/manuals	Retrieve a list of all public manuals for an account
/api/manuals/:manual_id	Retrieves the table of contents for a single manual. The manual id can be the id number for a manual or the permalink that you set up on ScreenSteps Live.
/api/manuals/:manual_id/lessons/:lesson_id	Retrieves the content of a lesson in a manual. Also retrieves basic information about the manual (title, and id) as well as the title and id of the next and previous lessons in a manual.

By default only public manuals will be retrieved. If you wish to retrieve a manual that is protected then you can add the “?show_protected=true” parameter to the end of the url.

Required Headers

The following headers are required when making a request:

Date	The current time and date in http format (e.g. Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:24:47 GMT).
Content-Type	Should be set to “application/xml”
Authorization	This is the authorization string that you will need to compute for each request (explained below)

Authorization String

Read the rest of this entry »

We are very excited to announce the beta of the ScreenSteps Live API beta. What does this mean? Now you can upload and manage all your lessons at ScreenSteps Live but embed the content into your own website, web app or desktop application. To help you see the potential we have created a couple of screencasts, one demonstrating the API with some PHP example code and another demonstrating a Rails plugin we have developed that makes integrating ScreenSteps Live content into your Rails app almost effortless.

You can get the PHP code example and Rails plugin at our GitHub site:

• PHP example code
• ScreenSteps Help Rails Plugin

Currently the API is in beta. We have setup an example account for you to play around with if you like. The details for this are in the screencasts. If you have a ScreenSteps Live and would like to have the API enabled for you please drop us an email at info at screensteps dot com and we will get you setup.

Here are the two screencasts:

PHP Example Code

Full Size Video

Ruby on Rails ScreenSteps Help Plugin

Full Size Video