If you have been following our blog you may have seen a few of our announcements regarding Clarify Clarify is a new product we have been working on for several months designed to help you communicate more clearly online.
As people have been introduced to Clarify several questions have come up. Here are some answers to the most common ones.
At first glance Clarify may seem very similar to ScreenSteps but it has some important differences. The idea for Clarify was born when we introduced our ScreenSteps.me service for sharing ScreenSteps documents online. Prior to that, ScreenSteps had always been a software documentation tool. But with the simplicity of ScreenSteps.me we began to use ScreenSteps to create one-off communications with our customers. This wasn't really software documentation. It was just communication. But it worked really well - except for one thing.
ScreenSteps seemed like too heavy of a tool for these communications. ScreenSteps has a lot of features designed for creating software documentation. This extra functionality added too much baggage for creating these quick communications.
We realized that we were trying to hire ScreenSteps to do two very different jobs and it wasn't really working. That was when we decided to create Clarify. Clarify would be our communications tool. ScreenSteps would be our software documentation tool.
The Clarify interface is streamlined for communication and working with images. It is much more of a general purpose screen capture tool and image editor as opposed to ScreenSteps. It is designed to appeal to a much broader user base than those who just deal with software documentation.
Several months ago I was listening to an interview of Jason Fried by Andrew Warner of Mixergy. At one point in the interview Jason says:
And that is another tip that I think everyone should be thinking about. How can you reduce the number of round trip emails you have to make to get something done?
That is what I use Clarify for - reducing round trip emails. I use Clarify to communicate with:
Clarify means I never have to re-explain myself. The recipients understand what I am saying the first time I send them a communication. This means no round trips and no wasted time.
Clarify is currently available as a free public beta for Mac. A Windows public beta should be available within the next few weeks.
Here is a quick video intro that will give you an introduction to Clarify. Please download the public beta and let us know what you think.
