Capturing Screenshots on the iPad – An Efficient Workflow

It has been just over a week since we started our iPad documentation project so I wanted to give you a little update. So far we have just over 40 lessons posted. You can see the examples here: http://ipad.screensteps.com.

To determine our lesson material we have just written down questions that came up for us when using the iPad applications or things that we discovered that we thought would be non-obvious to most users.

The process for creating capturing images on the iPad and getting those images into ScreenSteps is a little different than what you would do for a desktop application. But the workflow we have developed has turned out to be pretty efficient. Here is what we did:

Screen Capture

To capture images on the iPad you press the Home and Power buttons at the same time. The screen flashes and an image is stored in the Photos application.

Most of the time a single person can handle this. But occasionally it can be necessary to have two sets of hands to get a screenshot. For example, this image where I am dragging slides around on the left can be a bit tricky with one person since you need one hand to drag the slides, one hand to press the Home button and another to press the Power button.

If someone else is around have them capture the image while you drag the image and it will be much easier.

NOTE: When you are capturing something like this where you are dragging slides or objects, the objects will snap back to their original locations when you initiate the screen capture. It will appear that you aren’t able to get an image of the screen while the drag is going on. You can. As the example above shows, the image gets taken before the objects revert back to their default positions.

Importing Images

Now that you have captured the images you need to get them off of your iPad and into ScreenSteps. If Photos is set to sync with your iPhoto application then your screenshots will start showing up in your iPhoto albums. That isn’t what we wanted. Instead we used Image Capture, a handy utility that you can find in your Applications/Utilities folder. With Image Capture you can selectively download images to different folders on your Mac as well as directly delete the images from your iPad.

On our Macs we created folders for each lesson we were creating. We would then use Image Capture to import the images we needed into those folders. You can keep your iPad connected while you are capturing and importing images. This makes the whole process go very quickly since you don’t have to keep re-syncing the iPad to get your images.

As the Image Turns

We found that we took most of our screen shots in landscape mode. This means that the images will come in sideways. ScreenSteps doesn’t have a tool for rotating images so we setup an Automator script that would rotate the images 90 degrees.

Authoring and Publishing

At this point our images were all prepared. We then created a new lesson in ScreenSteps and dropped the images from the Finder onto the lesson in ScreenSteps. ScreenSteps imports all of the images and creates a new step for each one. At that point we just needed to crop, add annotations and text and the lesson was done.

We set up separate manuals for each application on ScreenSteps Live. Once the lesson was completed, we published it to the appropriate manual on the ScreenSteps Live site.

Recap

So, to recap the whole process went like this:

1. Capture images on the iPad
2. Create a folder with the lesson name on the Mac.
3. Use Image Capture to download the images to the folder.
4. Use Automator to rotate the images.
5. Drag the lessons in the folder onto a new ScreenSteps lesson in ScreenSteps Desktop.
6. Author just like we would any other ScreenSteps lesson and post the results to ScreenSteps Live.

Though the screen capture tools on the iPad may not be anything fantastic, they are clearly good enough that you can create visual step-by-step guides fairly quickly if you implement the right workflow.

Update

Here a few of the best examples:

• Keynote for iPad: Using Magic Move
• Keynote for iPad: Grouping slides
• Numbers for iPad: Copying a formula across multiples cells
• Pages for iPad: How to mask an image
• How do I set up Gmail on my iPad to send from a non-Gmail address?
• How do I add an address in an email message to my Address Book?