I feel the need to address Allison’s rebuttal also, since Bart expressed my sentiments about the app so well.

I will provide the iPhone in Bart’s analogy – the way we all did it before ScreenSteps came along. Unless, as in your commercials, you used Microsoft Word.

I am perfectly content either taking screenshots with Skitch and annotating them one by one, then dragging them to a folder for use, or taking a bunch of screenshots with the other utility of my choice (which happens to be the default OS X one, which I modified to output to my Pictures folder with a terminal command long ago) and annotating them in a bunch. Then I break out the proper writing tool – Mail for emailing, RapidWeaver for posting to my website or blog, Bean the text editor for everything else – and lay it out by hand. Image centered (I considered resizing part of annotating), then a title if I want one, which I usually don’t, then a numbered description. Then move on. It may be a bit cumbersome, but I have a workflow established that wasn’t hard to make at all.

Compare this with my ScreenSteps experience: What was that app Allison sponsors? Oh yeah, ScreenSteps. Download, drag to my Applications folder, eject disk image. Try to open it with Quicksilver, and oops it hasn’t indexed it yet. Open it with Spotlight. Yes, I know it’s a demo. Sure, check for updates. Whatever. Okay, I need to create a lesson, and the button looks like that. Hey, that toolbar looks weird. Oh, there's the button. Now what? I guess I’ll title the lesson, and add a description. Hey, I wonder if that Clipboard button does the clipboard-watching that Allison talked about. Let’s try that – yes it does. Neat. How do I delete that test? There. Now I need to start getting snaps. First snap – did it work? Let’s check – okay, it did. I guess there’s no feedback, or else I turned my volume down. Time to take the rest of the snaps. Now to annotate them – scroll up – where are the controls? Not under Edit… Oh, click the image. I want to box this, circle that, and add an arrow. Whoops, I boxed the wrong button. Hey, there wasn’t supposed to be an arrow there! I guess this works like Photoshop, with a separate Move tool. There. Oh, I have to name the step? Then what do I need a description for? Annotate the rest… stupid move tool… now how do I save? It must be one of those auto-saving apps. I suppose I want to export. Click the button. Oh, it’s a drop-down, I thought those were supposed to have the little black down-pointing triangle. Oh well, what do I choose? I’m putting it on my blog, but RapidWeaver isn’t a standard blogging platform, so I should probably choose HTML and paste it in. What template do I use? How about Textile, I like that name. Oh, that’s a file. Never mind. Well, blog export then. I need a web account? This doesn’t sound like what I want, but I’ll try… No, I was right. Wow, that toolbar is ugly. Oh, I can change HTML templates? No, that’s not what I need. I guess I’ll export to an HTML file, open it in TextEdit, and copy that to RapidWeaver. Oops, the image sizes are too big. Back to ScreenSteps, how do I resize them… there. Oh, you can set constraints in Preferences? Neat. Preferences, General… Max Width is just what I need. Let’s try 480px. I assume it’s pixels, they have no unit there. I think I’ll sync image names while I’m at it. Now, export again, copy source, paste, preview in RapidWeaver… there! Maybe that other template would be better, but I’m done with that stupid program.

Now, regardless if you read both paragraphs, which is longer? And even getting rid of the first-time stuff, ScreenSteps seems significantly longer. I’m a gigantic hypocrite when it comes to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,â€ but this time I think this philosophy applies. Maybe my slogan should be “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it more.â€

These apps DO use Cocoa, except maybe Skitch, and it doesn’t fake it. It doesn’t have groups, but you can select multiple annotations by just dragging, like in most image editors. These apps don’t individually create documentation like ScreenSteps, but together they do in a way that I happen to like better, both in the process and the final product.

In reference to the output formats, they may be flexible from your point of view, but the first and only thing I wanted was one they didn’t provide, not directly.

Now, here you have two huge points. ScreenSteps’ way of doing both screenshot capture and sequence numbers is something I really, really like. Dragging a screenshot in gets a bit tedious, but creating text entries with “1,â€ “2,â€ “3,â€ “4,â€ etc. in them in Skitch, or the process in LittleSnapper that I won’t even begin to describe, is downright painful. Two things, though, however huge, aren’t worth $40 in my book – and before you start waving “NOSILLAâ€ around, it’s still too much. I recognize that I’m in a somewhat uncommon situation, being too young to have a credit card and a carreer-type job, but if I wanted it enough I could buy it (as I did with Bookpedia, which I’m sure you’ll agree with, and MacUpdate’s and MacHeist’s bundles).

I also agree with you, to a point, about groups, They’re too much effort for staggeringly little gain, but as I mentioned before, Skitch’s multiple-select comes in handy. You can’t even shift-click multiple things, which works in every app— no, just Cocoa. (Even iTunes and Leopard’s Finder, which are made of Cocoa’s predecessor, Carbon, do it a smidge differently. It makes me wonder if Snowy’s Finder will change that…) I also agree about Bart that sometimes – though not often – you do need an arrow to make absolutely clear you’re pointing to the toolbar button that looks like a gear, not the one conjoined to it that looks like a plus.

With 14th (which I leave in normal text only because this comment box doesn’t support rich text), I guess it’s a matter of how much of a typography nerd you are. I’m a gigantic one – you’ll notice that all my quotes are curly (“â€ ‘’) rather than straight ("" ''), and I use all different size dashes (-, –, —) in different contexts. I also couldn’t help noticing that in the sentence after the 14th one, Bart uses an ellipsis (…) followed by two periods (..), suggesting that he just typed five periods in place of the correct ellipsis, and something automatically converted the three to “…â€ for him. Sorry to rat you out, Bart, but it was to prove a point, nothing personal! While superscript might not be a big deal, no numbered lists are just annoying, and especially bulleted lists which are not so easily faked (unless your friendly typography nerd knows that âŒ¥8 (option-eight) makes a bullet point).

And finally (and I do mean FINALLY), I’m split again about the fairness of the review. Bart did start off negatively, and taint the reader’s perspective from the get-go, then doesn’t say anything positive unless I missed something buried in a sea of negativity, but that’s kind of what opinion pieces are FOR. He explains the software well, and that he’s a power user, so I’m siding with Bart on this one. Partly because he wrote this so I don’t have to, partly because it’s really fun to hear you two argue (er, sorry, debate), but mostly because I think he’s right.

WHEW. Now that I’m done with that it seems overly intimidating – I hope I’m not the one to start a flame war or anything. Oh, and Bart? This column is kind of narrow…