I created Flowshare (https://flowshare.io/) to make creating step by step guides with screenshots and annotations as easy as recording a screencast.
As a reader, I find screenshots and text much easier and faster to follow than watching a long screencast. As a creator, recording a screencast is much easier. Flowshare gives you the best of both worlds.
You can search existing guides at: https://flowshare.io/search
Here is an example of one the most popular guides:
https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-block-spam-invitations-from...
I'm including a link to the chrome extension which is used to create guides: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flowshare-how-to-g...
Would love to hear any feedback/suggestions.
the hacky way to print to pdf for now is to print the web page and save as pdf.
This. I absolutely despise video as a medium for learning something, especially something technical. This looks really nice and I hope it's a huge success.
Confluence does not make this process easy, but I can usually kinda-semi-sorta force my way through. With much effort.
Just today I was looking at some Windows setting that moved and it took me extra time to find the new location of the setting. The easy answer is some kind of report/moderation process where you refresh the screenshots, but at that point I might as well just google for up-to-date tutorials. Have any innovative solutions?
shift+command+3 and then open in preview is literally the most use workflow on my macbook!
That said, there are some issues here:
1. When you first go to the web page, there is nothing to tell or show you that what you're looking at is not an SPA, and you can actually scroll down to see more content. This is particularly problematical on iOS and iPadOS, where such affordances are vital visual clues as to what you can do.
2. A SaaS for private guides is fine for some, but I still need a way to self-host private guides. Ideally, I'd actually create the content locally, then be able to upload or share that file with others, where they could then view it locally. Creation and viewing on a shared resource like a web page should be an option, but not the only method available. And for creating guides inside of a browser, Chrome should not be the only option available.
3. When you're creating a long document, you want ways to hide other steps, so as to keep the initial document small and easy to comprehend at a high level, thus allowing the reader to expand only the steps they currently need. Confluence allows me to create collapsible elements that hide the various screenshots that I am attaching to the document I am writing, and the same would be very welcome here.
4. I'm not seeing any way to create a good section of text before or after the graphics. It looks like what you've got is just one screenshot after another, but without any way for me to provide some explanatory text before the screenshot, or any way for me to provide some additional notes after the screenshot.
5. The options for annotating a screenshot seem to be extremely limited. I've only seen small square-corner boxes around some buttons or other, and so far the only color options I've seen have been magenta. I want round-corner box options. I want arrow options. I want single and double-headed arrow options. I want different shapes of arrow options. I want thicker border and line options. I want more color options. I want the option to grey out or shadow out everything but the one thing I want highlighted. You don't have to give me a full copy of PhotoShop or GIMP, or even a full copy of macOS Preview, but I definitely want a lot more annotation options than you've shown.
6. Make your collection names and tags clickable when viewing multiple flows. If I'm looking at the main "Search" page which shows a bunch of examples below, I should be able to click on the "mail.google.com" link and have that bring up all flows in that collection. If I click on the "onboarding" tag, that should show me all flows that have that tag. And all flows should have a collection and/or one or more tags associated with it. For example, the flow at https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-write-canned-response-in-gm... doesn't seem to be officially part of the "Google and Gmail" collection.
7. Do you have a privacy page? Do you have a page that describes how you will deal with GDPR or CCPA requests? How are you going to use our data? If we decide we want to leave your service, how do we export our data so that we can save it somewhere else, and then make sure that you properly purge it from everywhere in your systems?
That's about all I can think of from off the top of my head. More later.
also, once you're already annotating, would it be possible to zoom in on a specific area a bit?
