Deane has blogged before on screencasts. We’ve even done a short cast on ez Publish using Camtasia Studio, which is a great product. But I needed to do a short screencast on how to hook up a VPN with Windows yesterday, and didn’t have Camtasia handy, so I went hunting for a quick alternative.
What I found was Wink, a freeware screencast generator. Wink takes a somewhat different approach than Camtasia. Rather than recording video and compressing it into a flash movie, it takes screenshots (either timed or driven by mouse clicks and keyboard input), watches mouse movements, and then makes a flash movie that displays the screenshots and animates the mouse movements between them. This actually makes for a pretty compact flash movie.
There’s an easy interface provided to edit your screencasts (you can take out your typo corrections, for example) and add pauses, instructions, and back/next buttons. The one feature that might be missed is the lack of audio recording, but I found a couple of ways around that on the Wink Forums.
There’s a Linux version too, and I put together a quick screencast of one of my favorite features of the latest KDE version to try it out.
If any of you have been dying to hear my voice, you finally have a chance. I recently did a screencast for Packt Publishing on eZ publish, the snazzy open-source content management system. It's a five-minute Flash movie that demonstrates how good eZ publish is at modeling Web content. You can…
Movies of Software: On the heels of Jon Udell's Wikipedia screencast, I got to wondering how to make my own. I found this O'Reilly article by...Jon Udell, where he talks about the concept of screencasts, and links to several examples. In the software world, we spend a lot of time…