Let me show you how... with a Wink!

During a recent workshop with QTL, Barry Cochran was demonstrating Camtasia Studio. While the presentation was very interesting and Camtasia does a great job of making really cool demo videos the $299 price tag hit me hard.

Yes, I know... Barry was giving away free copies thanks to the fine people at TechSmith. And yes, they do offer free trial versions. But, hey I'm all about the free stuff and I wasn't lucky enough to get a free copy. :-(

Well, a little investigation at I want a Freeware Utility to ... 450+ common problems solved helped me to find Wink. Now, Wink may not have all of the functions that Camtasia has. (To be honest, I'm not sure... I never got around to downloading the trial.)  I have to say, that once I played with Wink, I didn't want to bother with Camtasia.

After a day of playing around with it and reading the included documentation (A video tutorial, sample tutorial, and a PDF file to search through) I was able to produce a pretty cool little tutorial. The tutorial I created isn't really useful except for those who are involved in Moodle at QTL, but, it came out really well anyway.

So, rather than linking to a useless tutorial that I created... I'm linking to the great little tutorial at Wink itself.

From the Wink website....
"Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. Here is a sample Flash tutorial created by Wink. Click the green arrow button to start viewing it. (More tutorials created by Wink users and companies can be found at the User Forums.)

This is a good example of how you can create tutorials in Wink, by capturing screenshots, mouse movements and specifying your own explanations with them. And all this in a standard Windows-based UI with drag-and-drop editing makes it very easy to create high quality tutorials/documentation.

It is estimated that Macromedia Flash Player is installed in more than 90% of the PCs. Using Wink you can create content viewable across the web in all these users' desktops. Similar applications sell for hundreds of dollars, while Wink is free with unrivaled features. So spread the word about Wink to your friends."

Sample: Click the green button to play