How To Easily Create A Screencast With Wink

Screencast is often a good tool to demonstrate the functionality of an application. However most people find it difficult or complicated to create your own screencast and add custom text/annotation to it. If you are one of those, Wink will be the application you need to turn screencasting into an easy task.

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. Wink is also available in several languages including English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.

Here’s how we use Wink to create screencast easily.

Download and install Wink on your Windows platform [currently Wink supports only Windows 98, 2000 and XP].

1. Open Wink software and create new Wink project (File -> New). The project wizard window will show up.

2. Check the box “Start by capturing screenshots“, “Hide Wink Window“. In the dropdown bar, select “Screen“. Enter the region (screen size) that you want to capture and the timeframe of the screencast. Click OK.

3. The next screen will show you the hotkey to start the screen capturing. Shortcut keys that you have to remember are Alt + Pause, and Shift + Pause (key near scroll lock button on your keyboard). Click on the “Minimize To Tray” button to minimize the Wink window to the system tray.

4. Press ALT + PAUSE to start recording. Once the screencasting is started, you will be able to see changes in the Wink icon in the system tray.

5. Do all your demo on your screen. Once you are done, click ALT + PAUSE again to stop.

6. Right click the Wink icon and select Finish Capture to complete the project.

7. You should now see the entire frames of your screencast as thumbnail images at bottom of  the Wink window .

8. Select the frame in which you want to add the text, images, preset shapes from the properties bar .

9. Preview the frame in which you have added text and preset shape to it.

10. Once you have completed all your editing, we will now configure it to be saved as .swf format. Go to Property -> Settings. Select Macromedia Flash (*.swf) in the Output File Type.

11. Select Project -> Render to save the file.

12. You should now see the output file as swf format. You can also save the project as PDF or PostScript format

Wink is a freeware and you can download, install and use it for free. Don’t forget to see the tutorial that comes with it for more usage detail.

Tags: computer software, screen capture, windows