Articles by Kirk McElhearn

Kirk McElhearn is a freelance writer, specializing in Macs, the iPod, iTunes, digital music and more. In addition to having written or co-written a dozen books, he is a regular contributor to Macworld magazine, TidBITS, and other web sites and magazines. He is also a translator from French to English. He lives in a village in the French Alps, where, when he’s not writing, he watches the mountains grow.

Taking Great Screenshots in Mac OS X

  January 28, 2007

 Tip: This article was originally submitted to coach tutorial contest contestants. We liked it so much that we’ve left it online – hopefully it will help other writers. While most people, when they think about writing tutorials, focus on the actual writing—the words, sentences, paragraphs and overall structure—the graphics and screenshots you use in tutorials are just as important. While the old saw which says that, “a picture is worth a thousand words” may be an exaggeration, screenshots in technical documentation can not only give users more information than words may provide, but they may also be much more efficient.