Whether you develop software, work at the help desk, or are simply assisting a friend or relative, creating a step-by-step tutorial can be a huge help--but corralling all those screenshots and notes can be a chore. Clarify aims to clean up the process, letting you easily create tutorials--complete with screenshots, instructions, and annotation. The software also includes tools to share your documents, although the limited options might present a few problems.
If you’ve worked with Keynote, Clarify will feel familiar. You start by entering each step in an outline format, including a title, descriptive text, and screenshots. You can use Clarify in conjunction with existing screenshot tools, including OS X’s built-in functions, or go with Clarify’s own screenshot tools, which are easily accessible via a menu bar icon. For tricky shots involving menus, Clarify also offers a delay function (in two-, four-, six-, and eight-second increments) to give you time to set up your scene.
Clarify’s simple-to-use outline style should be familiar to anyone who has experience with Keynote.
In addition to screen capture, Clarify features a variety of built-in editing tools for annotating your screenshots. Options include simple geometric shapes and arrows, plus the ability to highlight particular areas of the screenshot, blur confidential information, and add text. If some steps need a series of shots to complete, there’s a sequence function that lets you tag the images with ordinal numbers. You also have control over font size, style, and alignment, and you can include live hyperlinks to external sites and bulleted or numbered lists. You can also crop images, resize them, and do a variety of other tasks without having to switch out to another application. It would have been nice for Clarify to sport some built-in themes to quickly help people get started on great looking how-tos, but overall the application offers a fair degree of control over your results. Thankfully, there are enough customization options tokeep your documents from all looking exactly the same.
Clarify’s web- publishing options let you upload to your Dropbox, Clarify-it.com, and...that’s it.
Once you’ve finished with your tutorial, Clarify gives you a few options for exporting. Saving to a PDF is the easiest and most universal way to share, but you can also use the built-in support for Dropbox to share your creations online. Blue Mango has also set up its own Clarify document publishing service at clarify-it.com. It’s free to sign up for a basic account, though Blue Mango offers customers an upsell: a Pro account that lets you add your own logo and customize your background color. Though Dropbox is a welcome addition,the software’s dependence on a clarify-it.com account for sharing makes it less useful than it could be. Companies, universities, and other organizations likely to use Clarify would benefit from simple web-publishing tools that would allow them to publish documentation on their own servers.
The bottom line. Clarify is a powerful, easy-to-use, and relatively inexpensive tool for creating step-by- step tutorials, complete with screenshots. If you need to create some documentation for your Mac, it’s a lot easier than trying to learn more complicated design software.
Mac OS 10.6.6 or later
Simple-to-use outliner makes it easy to add and edit content; built- in screen-capture tools augment Mac OS X’s built-in abilities.
Dependency on proprietary publishing service lessens usefulness to corporate and university buyers. No built-in themes.
