HolonSteps
Document a process by doing it.
Share your screen once and get back to work. Holon Steps watches for the moment each screen settles, captures it as a numbered step, frames the shot on the spot you clicked, and reads the button label off the pixels. You write nothing until you are finished.
Free · Runs in any Chromium browser · Nothing to install · Canvas LTI version in progress
How it works
- Start recording and choose Entire Screen. The tool sits behind whatever you are documenting.
- Do the process. Each time the screen changes and settles, a step is captured — using the frame from just before the change, so the shot shows what you were about to click rather than the aftermath.
- Stop. Steps arrive already numbered, timestamped, marked with a target ring, and captioned with the label under your cursor.
- Frame each shot. Full screen, full screen with a magnified inset, cropped to the click, or spotlit with everything else dimmed. Add arrows, boxes, labels or black-box redactions.
- Export. A designed guide with a cover, contents and running footer — as HTML, PDF, Markdown or re-editable JSON.
What it does that a screenshot folder does not
Finds the click for you
Tracks pointer movement between changes to work out where the action was, then rings it and reads the label sitting under it.
Callouts that survive edits
Framing, zoom, focus point and annotations are settings on top of the original image, so nothing is baked in until you export.
Four document styles
Slate, Editorial, Bold and Minimal, with your accent colour and logo on the cover.
Reads text on your machine
The recogniser runs in your browser. No screenshot is ever uploaded anywhere.
Where it falls short
Worth knowing before you rely on it
- A browser cannot see clicks in other applications, so steps are inferred from the screen changing. A click that changes nothing visible is missed, and an animation can trigger a spare step.
- The label is read from pixels, not from the page, so it names what it sees — it cannot tell a link from a button, and icon-only controls give it nothing.
- Recordings are stored in the browser on the machine that made them. Export to JSON to move one elsewhere.
- Screen capture needs a Chromium browser. Share the whole screen, not a single tab.