DeBugMode Wink
As the saying goes: a picture is worth a thousand words. When time is short and you need to get to grips with a new software package, there’s nothing like a nice video-based tutorial to walk you through the key elements of the user interface. Although many tools exist for creating your own video presentation or tutorial, some of them can be expensive. The strangely named Wink 1.5 is free. You can even create Wink-authored presentations for use with any commercial software you sell. The only real restriction on what you can do with your creations is that you can’t charge money for Wink itself, which would be a serious misdemeanour.
The program is downloadable from the DebugMode website as a 2MB ZIP file containing a single executable that installs the application. Once done, you’ll end up with the Wink development environment itself, together with a number of sample projects to get you started. As you might expect from this kind of utility, Wink uses Wink presentations to tell you about its most pertinent features. You can easily select a window to capture and with the system in capture mode, you can hit Pause on your keyboard every time you want to take a screenshot. Mouse movement is also recorded and perhaps the only major drawback to Wink 1.5 is that there’s no obvious way of recording sound as part of the presentation.
We say obvious because – with some work – it’s possible to integrate sound into a presentation. This is discussed more fully by a Wink customer in the user forums that are accessible via the website. The program’s author, Satish Kumar, has indicated that sound will be supported in forthcoming versions.
Many different callout shapes (the yellow box in the screenshot) are available, and you can change things such as size, position and colour. Each frame can have a title and you can create buttons to step forwards and backwards through a presentation. Wink will automatically generate the HTML files needed to embed a presentation into your website and there are also options to export as HTML, PDF or Postscript. Being able to export as a PDF is handy for situations where Flash might not be installed. Comprehensive help for Wink is included in the package and also in PDF format.