RemarkablyCreative.com

Together 2.2 Update Released

Reinvented Software released Together 2.2 today, adding great new functionality to one of my favorite tools.

Together is my personal digital "cabinet of wonders" -- a secure storage space for everything from random scraps of information to archived copies of completed projects. There's no end to what I can stick in there: photos of books I want to read, titles of movies I want to rent, PDFs of web pages I want to read later, links to intriguing blog posts, logos I've completed in Vector Designer, slideshows I've created in Keynote, video clips, banners -- you name it.

Creating Documentation the Easy Way with ScreenSteps

When I started my career, I did a lot of high-speed documentation creation. It wasn't uncommon, in fact, for my unscrupulous boss to advertise software classes, wait to see how many people would sign up, buy the software on a Wednesday, give it to me Wednesday night, and expect me to deliver a customized, fully-illustrated manual (and teach from it!) on Thursday morning.

Yesterday, I sat down to create yet another user manual -- this time, for a multi-million dollar videoconferencing system that, remarkably, seems to have been sold to The Company without so much as an instruction book.

I admit I've been procrastinating a bit, mostly because I dreaded doing all the cutting, pasting, and writing associated with this particular project. But thanks to a remarkable new tool -- ScreenSteps -- I was able to create an attractive, comprehensive fifty-two page instruction manual ... with full-color screenshots and step-by-step procedures ... in less than five hours.*

My Creative Software Toolkit

Here’s a quick peek into my creative software toolkit: the programs I depend on all day, every day, to turn around jaw-dropping multimedia … in record time … and on a budget, no less!

Presentation Software

Keynote. Everything PowerPoint can do, Keynote does better … but Keynote is far, far more than Apple’s answer to PowerPoint. The included templates are more elegant than any I’ve ever seen for the Microsoft product. Slide to slide transitions are brilliant, eye-catching, and smooth as glass. Almost every day, I use Keynote animation and effects features to produce jaw-dropping mini-movies that would once have required a film crew and a dedicated computer workstation to produce. Oh -- and it never, ever crashes. Nirvana! (Apple, part of the iWork suite, $67.99 at Amazon.com)