Wink & CamStudio

Source 
(More tutorials created by Wink users and companies can be found

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.

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.

 Features

Freeware: Distributed as freeware for business or personal use. However if you want to redistribute Wink, you need to get permission from the author. Cross-Platform: Available for all flavours of Windows and various versions of Linux (x86 only). Audio: Record voice as you create the tutorial for explaining better. Input formats: Capture screenshots from your PC, or use images in BMP/JPG/PNG/TIFF/GIF formats. Output formats: Macromedia Flash, Standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML or any of the above image formats. Use Flash/html for the web, EXE for distributing to PC users and PDF for printable manuals. Multilingual support: Works in English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese. Smart Capture Tools: Capture screenshots automatically as you use your PC, based on mouse and keyboard input (great time saver and generates professional captures). Performance/Quality: Creates highly compressed Flash presentations (few kbs to few hundreds of kbs, much smaller than competing commercial products) ideal for using on the web.

Tools: Navigation buttons to move to next/previous/random frames in the presentation, you can use custom bitmaps for these buttons (full transparency/alpha channel support). Callouts and shapes for displaying text explanations. The inbuilt Callout Editor is used to create custom shaped callouts as you want. Intuitive drag-n-drop editing of the frame, callout, cursor, navigation buttons and the title elements. Advanced features like templates, cursor editing, palettes, background images, control bars & preloaders for the flash output etc. Completely PC and Web ready with exports to PDF, HTML, SWF and EXE formats. Innovative compression techniques applied to reduce filesize of output Flash file. Generated flash file plays in Flash players from version 3 and above, giving you widest array of target audience. Uncompressed output to allow you import the output of Wink into other Flash editors.

As the first step after installation, please read the Wink UserGuide (present in the wink docs directory, also a link available in the windows start menu program group of Wink). Also, there are two tutorial projects created in Wink which you can view. Use the Help > View tutorial menu options to render and view them before you start using Wink. This will help you understand the basics easily.

Please post your queries/comments/reports at the Wink UserForum. The Wink UserForum is over here, please make use of it for posting your words about Wink so that fellow testers/users can benefit from what you have seen.

For Windows (version 2.0 build 1060)
• Download direct from SnapFiles.com
• Download from FreewareFiles.com
• Download direct from toolshape.com (thanks to Jocker for the bandwidth)
• Download direct from digital2b.com (thanks to Digital 2B s.n.c. for the bandwidth)
For Linux (version 1.5 build 1060)
• Download direct from linux-nerd.com (thanks to Olivier Garcia for the bandwidth)
• Download from Freeware4U.com
• Download direct from digital2b.com (thanks to Digital 2B s.n.c. for the bandwidth)
Notes for Wink on Linux (Read at source)

CamStudio

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

Here are just a few ways you can use this software:

• You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
• Or how about creating a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions?
• You can create video tutorials for school or college class
• You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
• You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell
• You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favourite software program, before you forget them

 Download Links

CamStudio: CamStudio20.exe

New CamStudio 2.6beta (experts only)
CamStudio_2.6b_r264_build_14july2010.exe

Lossless Codec:
New CamStudioCodec1.4.zip
CamStudioCodec14.exe

Support Forum:
http://camstudio.org/forum

FAQ:
camstudio.org/faq.htm

To manually install the codec, download the zipfile version, extract the contents to a folder, right click the camcodec.inf file and select Install.
If you don't have a lot of experience or just plain can't be bothered with all that mucking around [grin], download the EXE version and double click it to begin the install process.

Here is the project page on SourceForge where you can download the files if the above links don't work:

CamStudio on SourceForge:  

sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/

News

AudioFlash is free audio recording software that will record you speaking via your computer and put it on your website with some nifty SWF control buttons.
Just wanted to let you know, I've released another tool called Podcast Autocue, which you can download as well from here: Podcast Software
There's now a "proper" blog for CamStudio where I'll post all the latest information, including updates on CamStudio V2.5. Click here to go to the blog

Issues
Trouble viewing SWF videos generated by CamStudio: It turns out there's a bug which means you can't see anything if you try watching them with Netscape or Firefox (Internet Explorer works fine) ...
Here's a temporary workaround:

Open the related HTML to the SWF you've just generated and look for the line starting with the "EMBED SRC" command ...

Change the Width and Height values in this line to match values in the line starting with "OBJECT CLASSID".

Save the file and you should be good to go ...

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If your computer's memory or virtual memory usage starts climbing rapidly when viewing a SWF authored by CamStudio to the point when your PC locks up so you have to reboot it, recreate the SWF from your source AVI file and in SWF Producer, make sure you select the Advanced tab and check the Memory Management tickbox (Manage Flash player internal memory). That should sort the problem out. Thanks to Ben Ward for the fix.