2 Great Apps to Help you Show and Tell

Working in a small business you have to get involved in all sorts of areas that might be outside your core skill set. In my case that includes producing training material to help our clients understand our products better. In order to make that as painless as possible here are a couple of great apps that I use.

Clarify

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Producing documentation with screen grabs can be a real chore and while it is possible to use something like Microsoft Word it is much, much easier to do with Clarify.

The beauty of the app is the way that it lets you collect screen shots and then annotate them adding call-outs, arrows, highlighted and blurred areas and more. You can then add the text that you want associated with that picture and decide where you want it to appear.

You can then add as many screen grabs and accompanying text as you need until you have cover the whole process. It really is very quick. Once done you can either save the file as a PDF, with options to create your own templates to suit any branding you might need, or to the web.

More on Clarify

Camtasia

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Camtasia does for video what Clarify does for screenshots. It allows you to quickly and easily stitch together video along with other media, such as pictures and audio to create great looking videos. I really like the way that you can zoom into an area of the screen to direct the viewers attention to something important. The tools for call-outs, arrows, highlighting and blurring areas are great too.

As with Clarify, Camtasia is really easy to use and there are a series of tutorials (made with Camtasia of course) here which really helped me.

More on Camtasia

I use both Clarify and Camtasia on a Mac but, unusually, both apps are available for Windows too so there can be no excuses for producing great materials… well apart from your script of course!

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