New ScreenSteps 2.1 Public Beta
Over the weekend we released an update to the 2.1 public beta. This update includes further enhancements to the new post to blog feature as well as the long awaited improvement to image quality in PDF files when viewing at actual size. We have also improved support for proxy servers. You should now be prompted for your proxy server username and password if a proxy server is detected.
You will also see a new Welcome Center window when you first launch ScreenSteps. In our company blog you can read about how we are using some new features of ScreenSteps Live to do this.
For those of you wondering, posting to a blog using the https protocol does not work reliably yet.
You can use Help->Check for Updates… or you can download the installers here:
Here is a list of changes:
- New Welcome Center.
- Images in PDF output are no longer fuzzy at actual size.
- Export to blog now supports accounts with multiple blogs.
- Export to blog now allows you to assign a category to a lesson.
- Lesson tags are now posted to blogs.
- You can now publish a lesson to a blog as a draft.
- Added authentication dialog for proxy servers.
- Tooltip now appears when hovering over URLs in fields.
- Improved error handling when posting to ScreenSteps Live.
- Editing fields resize correctly again.
- Lesson color in topic outline now updates correctly depending on whether you add or delete steps while editing.
- Fixed a bug where the step instructions editing field would lose focus when tabbing from a step title field to step instructions, the step title had been changed and the user had “Sync Image Names to Step Titles” enabled in preferences.
- Better ScreenSteps Live error reporting when logging in.
- If you exported a PDF document using a template with a logo, removed the logo from the template and then exported again the header of the PDF was still allotting space for the logo.
- Fixed a possible divide by zero error when viewing a lesson.
- Finally got rid of the 1 pixel offset that would occur in the Tags/Manuals lists when they were first populated.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:41 am
Quote: “Images in PDF output are no longer fuzzy at actual size.”
Interestingly, I saw no improvement from the current release version to the beta. Here is my test: I opened Google in Safari (I’m on a Mac) and captured the logo and search box using your tool. I also made a copy using Grab and pasted it into Preview. I saved a PDF from ScreenSteps and saved a similar PDF from Preview.
In both cases, the image displays larger than the original–even when actual size or 100% is specified. The images can be reduced to approximate the original size, but the degradation of the image, especially the smaller type, is still quite noticeable.
I didn’t try taking the screen capture through Adobe Acrobat to see what quality I could get there. I did try viewing both test files in both Preview and Adobe Reader. I could live with a bit of fuzziness if the size stayed correct. Google’s usual logo is 276 X 110 pixels. The PDF version seems to be about 30% to 40% larger.
While the logo was on the clipboard, I pasted it into a new MS Word document and saw the same resizing issue when I saved it as a PDF. I’m guessing this is some common library call to generate PDF output that everyone uses that’s wonky. Saving the document in native word format and re-opening it returns a perfect replica of the original screen grab.
Bottom line: PDF as a format seems to have some unexpected (to me anyway) limitations.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 am
When you open the PDF with the Google logo in Preview select “Actual Size” from the contextual menu that appears if you right-click within the viewing area. Your image should then display at the same size as it appears on the Google website. Oddly enough selecting “Actual Size” from the View menu does not give the same result.