The library would process system events, check whether or not the target of the event was an image annotator and then perform an action if it was. Prior to behaviors in LiveCode I used libraries to share code among multiple instances of the image annotator. An instance of an image annotator is highlighted in red in the screenshot below. This is the object that displays an image and allows the user to draw arrows, rectangles, ovals, etc. One custom object that I made that is common to both ScreenSteps and Clarify is the image annotator object. When I started writing ScreenSteps the concept of behaviors didn't exist. Based on previous work we had seen we turned to the team at SoftFacade and this is what they came up with:īy going out and finding specialists in the areas where we had no expertise, Clarify became a much better product. It has to look great on your website, the OS X dock, the Mac App Store and on Windows. When it comes to cross-platform desktop application icons, these days you need one that scales from 512x512 all the way down to 16x16. The team a pleasure to work with and the resulting UI is better than anything we imagined. They would come back with gorgeous graphics and we could focus on what we do best. Greg and I would mockup ideas on paper and certain features working in LiveCode and then hand it off to Worry Free Labs. It ended up being a waste of time with an unsatisfying result.įor the Clarify UI design we brought in the team at Worry Free Labs. Furthermore, when we would try to do the graphic work ourselves we would spend an enormous amount of time trying to come up with a design that was acceptable. We are NOT designers and we knew from experience that we could not come up with a design that we would be proud of. In this article I want to look at a few things that were done differently in Clarify given the perspective gained from ScreenSteps.įrom the very beginning Greg and I decided we would outsource of all the UI and icon work. With Clarify I could start with a clean slate, pulling in the ideas that had worked, improve the ideas that would benefit from new features in LiveCode and find better solutions for the ideas that flopped. I would have designed a number of components in ScreenSteps very differently if behaviors had been available. Also, LiveCode as a development tool has evolved considerably over the last 4 years which meant I would have lots of new features available as I designed the foundation that Clarify would be built on.įor example, since I started ScreenSteps object behaviors were introduced to LiveCode. Some were good, some were bad and some made me cringe. From a programming perspective I had been able to see the long term effects of design decisions I had made in ScreenSteps. Starting work on Clarify was very refreshing. So we got to work and on Octowe released Clarify. A new application would allow us to design with a single focus in mind and it would allow us to focus the stories we would tell when marketing. In addition, we found that the marketing message became muddled when trying to tell people that ScreenSteps is a documentation tool as well as a tool for daily communications.Īfter weighing our options Greg and I decided that we needed to create a separate application designed specifically for creating these quick communications that we have on a daily basis. It is optimized for creating documentation. While ScreenSteps certainly enables you to capture images, add text and send off the resulting document, the UI and workflow are not optimized for this type of use. The problem was that the underlying concept of capturing images and quickly creating a document out of them was also very handy for the daily communications people have with customers, co-workers and others. ScreenSteps is essentially a screen capture tool with a built-in document editor but over the years it has evolved into an application that focuses primarily on visual documentation. We released ScreenSteps 2 back in January of 2008 and have been working on it ever since. For the last 3 1/2 years our company, Blue Mango Learning Systems, has focused primarily on one desktop application. How to learn from previous successes, to make an even better app!Ī number of months ago my brother Greg and I (Greg is my business partner) realized that we faced a dilemma.
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