Phil Shapiro's explanation of 'Wink' w/example

as quoted by Phil Shapiro on the Digital Divide Listserve:

"hi everyone -
last month i mentioned to you about the neat free software named Wink for creating screencasts on Windows and GNU/Linux computers.

a screencast is a narrated explanatory movie with accompanying mouse movements on the screen. although Wink doesn't have audio capabilities yet, that shouldn't stop folks from creating compelling screencasts with a separate mp3 audio file. such audio files can be played concurrently in a separate tab within firefox or safari.

check out this short screencast i created explaining about the freeInkscape vector drawingprogram. http://www.writersforliteracy.org/canyoumakethis.htm

the accompanying audio for this is athttp://www.writersforliteracy.org/inkscapeaudio1.mp3

note -- the appropriate time to start the audio playing is when my mouse chooses the rectangular drawing tool -- about 20 seconds into the screencast. (i'm still learning how to do this kind of stuff.)

Wink is available at http://www.debugmode.com/wink/if you'd like to give it a try.

use shift-pause to start and stop your screen capture. onwindows computers you'll see a small animated box with 4 squaresin it in your system tray (bottom right of screen) when you arerecording your screen capture. right click on that box to finishyour screen capture.

you could fit several hours of home-made computer tutorials on acd-rom in this way.although created on Windows computers, these tutorials are in Flash format, and play fine on Mac and GNU/Linux computers. (there is also aversion of Wink for creating tutorials on GNU/Linux computers.)

surprise us with what you make. there's a lot of stuff out therethat needs explaining.

- philbtw, if you'd like to download all the files associated with the abovescreencast, i've zipped them into an archive athttp://www.writersforliteracy.org/inkscapetutorial.zip the 3 fileswithin this archive are: a very small html file, a shockwave format file showing the screen activity and an mp3 audio file containing thenarration.

click on the html file to start the shockwave file playing.the mp3 audio file can play in any of several different programs alreadyon your computer -- itunes, quicktime, and other mp3 playing software.thanks for telling others you know about Wink."