Creating screenshots manually for every click can be tedious. And although I have my favourite tools like Shutter or Flameshot, I sometimes wish to automate the constant print-screen-button hassle. 

Scribe developers entered the arena in 2019 with a rather confident motto: Let your documentation do all the work for you. 

Let’s test this bold statement and see how much Scribe AI actually offloads from the job of a technical writer. Hopefully not everything, otherwise Red Knot is out of business.

Just a little clarification – we test here a capturing tool. And in order to describe how Scribe works, I had to take screenshots with a different screenshot tool. So most of the following pictures are screenshots of a screenshot tool. Inception-level mind f*** someone?

First Steps with Scribe

Let’s start by registering a new account at https://scribehow.com and accessing the main dashboard.

We used the free version, which only allows using Chrome extension. To use Scribe with desktop apps, you have to buy the pro version.

Click on Capture a Scribe:

And you will be prompted to install the relevant Chrome extension:

You will see a pop-up window containing your open Google Chrome cards. From this point on, Scribe will record every step you do. You can either start from a new Chrome card, or you can jump to an active card:

Try to click on the “New tab” button just to understand what happens:

Scribe starts immediately capturing every click you do and creating automatic screenshots accordingly. The sidebar on the right serves for you to check the correct sequence of your work.

I found this system to be a tad impractical, because I usually want to arrange neatly everything before I start capturing screenshots. That sometimes led to confusion because I had to differentiate between screenshots before and after the “real” capturing began. 

For that reason, I recommend arranging everything in your app before creating your guide with Scribe.

Creating Your First Scribe

Scribe is the name of this neat capturing tool, but it is also used as a term for a slideshow-style guide. One scribe is one guide on your dashboard.

For illustration purposes, I decided to capture the process of creating a new EC2 instance in AWS. This is a straightforward process and most readers of this blog will be familiar with the steps. 

First, open a new card and log in to whatever app you want to capture. Again, in this case, it is AWS console. 

In a separate window, log into your Scribe account, click on “Create a Scribe” button and  choose the correct  tab from a list:

Automatic recording started. Now continue step-by-step with your demonstration and watch the side bar fill in with screenshots:

Notice the numbers 1,2,3… on the right bar. Those are pages of your new guide. 

When you finish with your demonstration, finish the first draft of your tutorial by clicking on the purple button:

After completing the recording, you will be automatically redirected back to Scribe.

At this phase, you can review all the screens and fine-tune your new guide. Notice that the logo and name of the guide was created automatically, which I really appreciated:

Also notice that every screen has four little grey buttons. Those are for Alternative text, Advance editing, Zooming in and Zooming out.

Alt text feature servers to improve accessibility:

More crucial are the zoom buttons, which make you decide what portion of the screen will be displayed. Watch the difference:

In case you forgot to record some click or action, you can also add a new card to the guide now.

Notice the plus button in-between each screen:

Let’s assume as an example that I forgot to assign a security group during my recording. So I click on the plus before the last step and to open a dialogue window:

And now I click on capture to return me to a previous screen and continue to capture.

When I add what I need, I just finish the draft by clicking on the purple button:

The new screens are automatically added, in this case as steps 7 and 8:

When you’re happy with your new guide, click on the done editing in your upper right corner:

Congrats, you have created your first guide in Scribe! Your guide is automatically saved on the dashboard:

Sharing Your First Guide

Now, what exactly can you do with the guide? Click on the share button in the upper right corner to see all options:

Three categories are available:

Share – to share your guide via email 

Embed – to use as embedded html snippet

Export – to variety of formats. Notice the GitHub integration

Since you’re reading this article on a WordPress server, I decided to go with the second option.

Without further ado, this is the embedded guide from our tutorial:

My Impression

Scribe is a rather practical tool for simple products with a visual interface. I can imagine that it will save a ton of work to early-stage SaaS companies. What I did miss was to customize more what exactly and how is going to be captured. Boiled down, the guides are still just a slideshow.

Scribe blog boasts some pretty advanced AI features that I’ve never encountered in my short testing session. The AI, at least in the free version, seems to be more of a possibility than an integral part. The essence of this tool is a sequence of automatic screenshots. And that is not enough if you need to involve some coding, commands, APIs and such.

Mastering tools like Scribe will make your life easier. But you still need skilled technical writers to organize and fill-in your docs. Our team of writers with devs and ops backgrounds will help you out: