We here at Blue Mango Learning Systems love excellent customer support. So when we heard that Corey Ganser, the customer support manager at MindTouch, had organized SupportAwards.org we jumped on board as a sponsor.

SupportAwards.org was established to give recognition to Customer Support/Service departments and representatives across the world. Basically you can visit the site and nominate a company and/or individual that has provided you with excellent customer service. The top 10 nominations will be pooled together and voted on. The winner receives the coveted R.E.C.S.S. (Recognition for Excellence in Customer Support and Service).

I just nominated pair networks, my web hosting service of over 12 years. They have always been very attentive and taken care of any issues quickly and efficiently. Who has helped you? Head on over to SupportAwards.org and nominate someone.

Those of you interested in the development tools we use to create ScreenSteps may be interested in a new webinar course we are offering on Professional Application Development With Revolution.

There are 4 sessions included with the course and you will walk away with a solid foundation for building applications using Revolution and the GLX Application Framework (a free, open-source framework we provide to the Revolution community). Tomorrow (July 31st) is the last day for the Early Bird discount. We would love to see you there.

Find out more

For those of you who weren’t able to attend our webinar last Friday, “Why Your Documentation is Useless and How to Fix It”, we have posted a video recording. The video includes both the presentation portion as well as the question and answer period.

This is by far the best resource yet for really understanding the documentation philosophy behind the tools we create at Blue Mango. Check it out if you want to learn how to create documentation that is like an MP3 library, created in bite-sized chunks and assembled with velcro (that will all make sense after you watch the video).

The webinar is about 1 hour long and 150 MB in size. We have also prepared a PDF version of the slides. Your can register to download the recording by following the link below:

Download the webinar: Why Your Documentation is Useless and How to Fix It

To help you prepare for this weeks webinar, “Why Your Documentation is Useless and How to Fix It” we have prepared three short audio clips.

These audio clips will give you a quick introduction to some of the concepts we will be covering in tomorrow’s webinar and will help you get more out of discussion.

1. Part 1: Is Your Documentation a Cassette, CD, or MP3 Library? – 3:43
2. Part 2: Developing Documentation in Bite-sized Chunks – 3:09
3. Part 3: Is Your Documentation Connected With Cement or Velcro? – 4:14

For those of you who aren’t aware, in tomorrow’s webinar we will be teaching you how to create more effective manuals and documentation. Here’s the overview from the sign up page:

Traditional documentation is dead, and has been for a long time. When was the last time you actually read a manual? Manuals are dead because in a Web 2.0 world, documentation is still being created using 1.0 methods and tools. In this webinar we will teach you methods and techniques that will help you create useful documentation in a Web 2.0 world. You will learn:

1. How to modularize your documentation to make it easy to create, organize and update.
2. How to start looking at documentation as an ongoing process instead of project.
3. How to prepare your documentation to be used in the customer support process.

If you haven’t registered for the webinar yet, it will be held tomorrow, Friday, July 17 at 2pm Eastern. You can register here.

Update 6/24/2009 5:53 PM: Looks like Twitter is getting things resolved. We will keep the discount going through tomorrow as they catch up.

Update 6/24/2009 5:01 PM: Seems that Twitter is having trouble adding new followers today. We will extend the promotion until Twitter gets this resolved.

To celebrate the recent release of ScreenSteps Pro with Word Export we are running a special Twitter promotion today, Wednesday, June 24th (though if you use the coupon tomorrow it will probably work as well). Basically, follow us on Twitter and you will get a coupon good for 50% off! Here is how it works.

That’s about $40 off of ScreenSteps Pro and $20 off of ScreenSteps Standard!

If you aren’t following us on Twitter:

1. Follow us on Twitter.
2. We will direct message you a coupon good for 50% off ScreenSteps Standard or ScreenSteps Pro.

If you are following us on Twitter:

1. Just direct message us asking for the coupon.
2. We will send the coupon back to you via a direct message.

Yes, this is a blatant attempt to get more followers on Twitter, but it is also a great way to get ScreenSteps Standard or Pro at a great price.

You can compare versions of ScreenSteps Standard and Pro here.

Or, if you have no clue what ScreenSteps is, you can learn more here.

We just uploaded a new version of the 2.6 Preview. This will be the last preview that we post before release and there are two new features that most of you will find really useful.

Embed Video From Other Sites

Now you can include video content from sites like YouTube, Viddler and Screencast.com. ScreenSteps 2.6 allows you to insert HTML embed code for step media. This embed code will be used instead of the step image whenever you export to HTML, Blogs, Wikis and ScreenSteps Live.

For PDF and Office Open XML you can specify a URL that will load when the step image is clicked on.

To embed video just right-click on a step or step image and select “Set Video Embed Code”.

Set Starting Sequence Number For Steps

The Sequence annotation tool is a really innovative way of quickly labeling parts of a step image. Now in ScreenSteps 2.6 you can specify the number that Sequence annotations will start on for a particular step. This allows you to span your sequences across multiple images.

You can set the starting number for a step’s Sequence annotations in the Sequence annotation property inspector.

Last Chance To Get Pro At Lower Price

Don’t forget that with the release of ScreenSteps 2.6 the price of ScreenSteps Pro will go up $20. If you have been thinking of purchasing or upgrading, now is the time to do so. See this post for more information.

Download the ScreenSteps 2.6 Preview

http://www.bluemangolearning.com/screensteps/downloads/preview/

A few weeks ago Kevin Miller, Bill Marriott (both of Runtime Revolution) and I put on a webinar that introduced the new Data Grid in Revolution 3.5. The data grid was originally developed for ScreenSteps so that we could provide our customers with a much more responsive UI when working with large libraries and lessons. We were thrilled when Revolution decided to integrate it into their core product.

Given the extremely positive response by attendees, Greg and I thought people might be interested in seeing how ScreenSteps 2.5 uses data grids throughout the application. So we’ve added a new webinar to our webinars page entitled Using Data Grids in Revolution 3.5. In the webinar we will show you:

• The various UI elements created using the data grid.
• The techniques used to create some of the visuals.
• The techniques used to hook the data grids up to data from SQLite, stacks, folder contents and the web.

We also plan on providing ample time to answer questions people might have. So join us on Thursday April 30th if you want to improve your data grid chops.

Sign up for webinar

We are happy to announce that we are going to be exhibiting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco from April 1-3. If you are attending the conference be sure to stop by the Long Tail pavilion where we will be hanging out and showing people how to get the most out of ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live.

This is the new ScreenSteps Blog. We will be posting announcements regarding ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live, tips for using both of them both, and general ideas on teaching and documentation. We hope you find it useful.

The other day I posted about updating the ScreenSteps Live online manual. Today we have to update our Screensteps 2 manual. This update to ScreenSteps actually has a lot of changes but our workflow is going to be a little different so I thought it would be an interesting comparison to what we did with the ScreenSteps Live manual.

We are getting started at about 9 am.

First off, there are a lot more lessons to update so Trevor is going to be helping me. We have basically divided up the material we need to cover and are updating the lessons. The only problem is that we both have home offices so we aren’t working “together”. If you have used ScreenSteps at all you might wonder – don’t we have to work off of the same Library file?

Well, no. Since the topic is dynamically assembled on ScreenSteps Live we can do that all there. I have most of the original lessons on my computer so I will be updating those. Trevor is going to be creating new lessons that apply to version 2.0.3.

To start with, we created a new topic called “ScreenSteps 2.0.3″ on our ScreenSteps Live site. I then created sections to match the layout of the current ScreenSteps 2 manual (“Sections” are just groupings of lessons so getting the groupings laid out helps us organize our workflow a little better). ScreenSteps will let us post directly into these sections. So while Trevor is creating new lessons I am going through and updating the old ones.

10:30 am – I have had a few interruptions to take care of issues not related to this manual but, besides that, things are going pretty smoothly on my end. The updates have been more minor than I expected. Trevor on the other hand is having the same experience that I had yesterday. He is finding lots of little bugs and fixing them. This is because he is documenting all of the new features. So he still doesn’t have his first lesson created.

12:20 pm – My part is done. I updated somewhere around 30 lessons. Trevor still needs to post lessons on the new features but he is still trying to resolve a bug that he discovered.

It is now a couple of days later and we are finally just about ready for release. Last night we updated the manual with a few lessons on some of the new features. What was cool is that Trevor was in Salt Lake City and I was sitting here in Virginia and we were very easily able to collaborate on the manual. He posted his lessons, I posted mine. Once we make 2.0.3 live we will just flip a switch and the manual will be live.