Wink 2.0 (http://www.debugmode.com/wink/) is a full-featured tool for creating screencasts (demos from captured screens). What's so special about Wink is that it's freeware for personal and business use -- which is extremely rare! This means that everyone in the organization, and outside of it, can create screencasts for each other and for public/commercial distribution without worrying about licensing and registration. Learning Wink is a great way to master screencasting basics on your own. Even if you later switch to commercial tools (such as Camtasia or Captivate), the knowledge you've gained will transfer to the new tool.
But you may not switch. Wink has features that other screencasting tools can't match.
- Smart Capture: Wink can capture based not on time (screenshots per second, which is how the other tools work) but on screen events/input only, such as keyboard strikes, mouse movements, dialogs opening and closing. In this mode, Wink captures only these discrete events and then animates them together into a movie. This strategy is tremendously efficient.
- Compression: Wink movies from smart captures are rendered as highly compressed Flash files (much smaller than competing products), ideal for web distribution. Having movies that are only the size of large graphics means that you can avoid the headaches of arranging for hosting and streaming.
- Audio: As with other tools, you can record voice-over while you create the tutorial, and these audio segments are easy to trim. However, with its titling and captioning features, you can create demos without the anxiety of narrating them, which also results in much smaller demos.
- Many inputs: You can blend screenshots from your screencast with standalone graphics (BMP/JPG/PNG/TIFF/GIF), mix frames from different captures (called "projects"), even edit your captured screenshots in your favorite graphics program and replace them (such as to fix the data in entry-fields).
- Many outputs: Wink projects generate Flash (SWF), EXE (self-running Flash), PDF, PostScript, HTML, images. Use Flash for the web, EXE for CD distribution, PDF for printables, and HTML to get a document of your "flattened" captures, which you can then edit, annotate, and distribute (think: "instant training/brownbag handouts").
An example is worth a thousand words. Here are links to actual outputs to show you the variety of uses to which Wink is being put:
- Wink forum: User links -- source of shared examples (archive)
Wink group: currently debating features for Wink 3.0
- ADONIS:Community Edition -- example of how to use a complex, graphical UI
- Linux demos -- example of short tutorials
