Free-to-use e-learning development 15: Wink Screen Capture Tool
The Microsoft tools (Producer, Media Encoder, LCDS) we looked at over the last three blog posts are pretty good at integrating pre-created media (that is, already-created content like PowerPoint presentations, rendered video and audio etc), but what if you need to create your content from scratch?
Enter Wink.
Wink is a screen capture and presentation creation program that enables you to create screen-based demos and tutorials. In this regard, Wink is similar to commercially available applications like Techsmith Camtasia and Adobe Captivate: you can capture on-screen interactions, add on-screen text, buttons, and title text to render content for your learners.
The tools uses a standard Windows-based UI with a drag-and-drop editing metaphor, making it very straight-forward to create high quality demos, tutorials, and documentation.
According to the Wink development team (DebugMode), the application is:
- 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 flavors of Windows and various versions of Linux (x86 only).
- Audio: Record voice-over narration as you create the tutorial.
- 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 (from a few kilobytes to hundreds of kilobytes, apparently much smaller than competing commercial products).
Wink includes the following features and functions:
- Navigation buttons to move to next/previous/random frames in the presentation. Supports custom bitmaps and full transparency/alpha channel.
- Callouts and shapes for displaying text explanations (see Figure 1). The Callout Editor can be used to create custom callouts.
- Frame-based editing. Enables precise frame editing, drag-and-drop, callouts, cursors, navigation buttons, and page & screen title generation.
- Templates, cursor editing, custom and automated color palettes, background image support, control bars & pre-loaders for Flash output.
- Exports to PDF, HTML, SWF and EXE formats.
- Innovative compression techniques applied to reduce file size of Flash outputs, which play in Flash Player 3 and better.
- Uncompressed output to allow you import the rendered content into other Flash editors.
Figure 1. The Wink authoring UI in Windows XP
[Click to Enlarge]
As you can see from Figure 1, the UI is not as slick as that of commercially-produced rapid e-learning authoring tools like the afore-mentioned Camtasia – in fact it looks like an unrefined VB-based user interface, nevertheless, it does what it says on the tin. For example, one really nice feature in Wink is the ability to edit the properties of multiple frames simultaneously. If you select more than one frame or thumbnail in the sequence the options changed in the properties bar apply to all frames. This allows you to modify the textbox font used in all marked frames, for example, and (when using the advanced properties bar) to align the position of navigation button across all selected frames.
The development team strongly recommend that you read the Wink User Guide (in the Wink program directory, and available under Windows >> Start >> Programs >> Wink) to fully leverage the capabilities of the application. They have also created two tutorial projects, available via the Help > View tutorial menu in Wink.
Wink is available for Windows (version 2.0) and for Linux (version 1.5) – click on the links to navigate to the relevant download pages.
Note for Linux users – Wink requires GTK 2.4 or higher.
–
November 23 2009 03:00 pm | e-learning
E Learning on 01 Dec 2009 at 3:12 am #
Thanks for classifying and for the photo. Keep it up.
Zee on 05 Dec 2009 at 6:56 am #
A very useful information for building a roburpt elearning materials. Thanx.
A Toolkit to Develop E-Learning in an Open (XML) Environment | E-Learning Curve Blog on 07 Dec 2009 at 4:51 pm #
[...] Wink [...]
E-Learning Development Toolkit Complete: A Toolkit of OSS and FTU Applications | E-Learning Curve Blog on 18 Dec 2009 at 12:05 pm #
[...] Wink [...]